The footage circulated in 2019 in reports about spectators at a military performance in Russia
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on October 16, 2020 at 07:09
- 2 min read
- By AFP Hong Kong
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The video was published on Twitter here on October 12, 2020. It has been viewed more than 23,000 times since.
The post’s simplified Chinese caption translates to English as: “Armenian and Azerbaijani exchanged fire again / Civilians are spectators / Watching artillery fire as fireworks”.
The post circulated as Armenian and Azerbaijani forces continue to clash over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, as reported by AFP here.
The footage was also shared alongside similar claims on Twitter here, here and here; on Facebook here, here and here; on Weibo here, here and here; and on YouTube here.
The claim, however, is false.
A reverse image search of keyframes extracted from the video found that the same footage was published on YouTube here on November 17, 2019, almost a year before the hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan began in 2020.
The video’s Serbian headline states the video was filmed in Russia.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the misleading Twitter video (L) and the YouTube video (R):
The same YouTube video was also embedded in this article by Russia Beyond, a Russian government-owned multilingual publication, on November 17, 2019.
The article’s Serbian headline translates to English as: “Russia: Children and their parents attended the platoon strike from VBR ‘Grad’ and ‘Uragan’”.
The first paragraph of the article reads: “On the occasion of the Day of Missile Forces and Artillery (RViA), the crews of a large number of artillery and missile systems presented their combat capabilities to the citizens.”
The footage was also published here in November 2019 on the Arabic YouTube channel of the CCTV, a Chinese government-run media outlet.
The same false claim was also fact-checked by Weibo and Chinese state media site fjsen.com. AFP fact-checked the video in Arabic here.
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