Since June 5, pro-Russian accounts have been sharing images on social networks purporting to show the destruction of military equipment belonging to NATO and deployed in Ukraine. According to them, these helicopters, tanks and weapons warehouses were destroyed by the Russian army. In reality, these images have nothing to do with NATO.
Verification in a nutshell
Several Facebook accounts have shared a video supposedly showing NATO helicopters and tanks destroyed by the Russian army in Ukraine. But these images are false: it is in fact an extract from the Arma 3 video game, published on YouTube on April 7, 2022.
Other accounts are posting photos of a burning warehouse on Twitter and Facebook. They say it was a NATO arms depot destroyed in Ukraine by the Russian army. We found the building in question. There is nothing military about it and is actually a grain depot in the civilian port of Mykolaiv.
video game images
Since June 5, several Facebook accounts have been sharing a video purporting to show Russian missiles destroying NATO helicopters and tanks on Ukrainian territory. These pro-Russian accounts are also surprised that no “Western media has reported these facts”. And for good reason: these images, which have nearly 90,000 views, are fake and actually come from… a video game.
Several elements raise doubts about the authenticity of these images. These include, for example, music, sound effects, or even characters who are perfectly still.
To verify the origin of this video, we performed a reverse image search (see here how to proceed). This search leads to many videos from the game Arma 3. And, by searching on YouTube for the words “Arma 3 helicopter missile”, we finally found the original video.
The extract was published on April 7, 2022 by an account that makes combat simulations from video games, such as Arma 3. The title of the video in question clearly indicates that it is a simulation from Arma 3. These images therefore do not show NATO military equipment destroyed by Russia.
On Facebook, other pro-Russian accounts have been sharing the image of a burning warehouse since June 6, 2022. They claim that it is a NATO arms depot, located in the port of Mykolaiv, which was destroyed by a Russian army strike.
To verify these claims, we performed a reverse image search of this post (see here how to proceed). But this research leads to many tweets sharing the same image but accompanied by a different caption. According to these tweets, this building would rather be a grain warehouse in the port of Mykolaiv, a city in southern Ukraine.
Is it a weapons or grain storage warehouse? To find out, we searched on Google for images of the city of Mykolaiv, and, more specifically, of the Nika-Tera port. But this research leads to multiple items detailing the activity of this port. According to Alim Agakishievport manager since 2017in 2020 cereals accounted for 76% of the goods transiting there.
Above all, some of these items mentioned, in May 2020, the construction of a new warehouse dedicated to the storage of cereals. We find in these articles several photographs of this new warehouse. But these images correspond to photography of the fire shared on Facebook and Twitter since June 5, 2022.
The building in flames that we see in these images is therefore not a NATO arms depot but this new grain warehouse in the port of Mykolaiv, the construction of which Ukrainian media announced in May 2020. D Other images of this burning warehouse, taken from other angles, have also been published June 5, 2022 on Twitter.
