The amount of recycled footage pushed on television and social media as current events in Ukraine has made figuring out the truth nearly impossible.
Honestly, I don’t think one individual in the United States or its Western allies knows half of the reality on the ground in Ukraine.
And purporting years-old clips as current footage doesn’t make reporting on the Russia-Ukraine conflict any easier.
One example is a video showing a massive explosion at a military depot in Ukraine in 2017.
However, the video is being shared and reported as recent footage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
BOOM explains:
The video is being shared in the backdrop of full-scale invasion of Ukraine launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the early hours of February 24, 2022. Social media has been inundated with unrelated images and videos passed off as the ongoing war.
The caption with one such video reads as, “Massive explosion at Ukraine #RussiaUkraineConflict”.
*Source*
cont. from BOOM:
BOOM did a reverse image search on one of the key frames of the video using Yandex – a Russian search engine. We found the same image in an article by the Irish Times, published on September 27, 2017. The caption with the video says, “Explosions at a military ammunition depot in central Ukraine were seen in the early hours of Wednesday, September 27th, 240 km from the capital. Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said ‘external factors’ were behind the incident.”
Taking a cue from this, we performed a related keyword search on the internet and found several news articles about the incident.
Reuters reported on the 2017 explosion:
The destruction of two ammunition depots this year have dealt the biggest blow to Ukraine’s combat capability since the start of its separatist conflict, security and military officials said on Thursday.
Massive explosions at a military depot in the Vynnytsya region, 270 km (170 miles) west of Kiev, forced the authorities to evacuate 24,000 people on Wednesday. Another large depot was destroyed in March.
It is not clear if the explosions were accidents or sabotage, either of which would underscore poor security at the bases, but officials traded blame for the resulting losses.
“The country has suffered the biggest blow to our fighting capacity since the start of the war,” the secretary of the Ukrainian Security and Defence Council, Oleksandr Turchynov, told journalists.
The Guardian also uploaded the video on its official YouTube channel on September 27th, 2017.
The same clip purported as recent explosions in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Watch below:
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