After Iran's Revolutionary Guards said they had struck US military targets in Bahrain in July 2026, social media posts recirculated an old video falsely claiming it showed a massive fire at a US base in Bahrain. The footage actually depicts a fire at a market in St. Petersburg, Russia, in December 2025.
Misleading: The video is old and does not depict a recent U.S. attack on facilities or sites belonging to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Misbar's team found that the original video was posted on social media in April 2025, claiming to show an ammunition depot explosion in Kirzhach, Russia's Vladimir Oblast.
Claim: A video is claimed to show Iran attacking secret American facilities in response to a US attack in Bandar Abbas.
Fact: The video actually shows a massive fire at Pravoberezhnny Market in St Petersburg, Russia on 10 December 2025
Did a real report from Euronews state that Volodymyr Zelenskyy's parents were detained for laundering $11 million? No, that's not true: At the time of writing, Euronews had not published a story matching the claim. A Ukrainian governmental body dedicated to stopping the spread of disinformation has said the claim is false.
Finland's Foreign Minister made no such statement and did not call for the war in Ukraine to "continue." On the contrary, Elina Valtonen stressed that allies should maintain pressure on Russia and must not abandon the fight to defend Ukraine's freedom.
This is false. The video circulating online merely imitates Le Point's visual branding and is being used to push a longstanding Russian narrative about an alleged mass deployment of French nationals in the war against Russia.
A video of a large fire is circulating on social media with false claims it depicts recent disorder in Belfast. But the video actually shows the aftermath of a gas pipeline explosion in Russia that happened on 9 June. The footage does not show Belfast or the ongoing unrest there. It actually shows the aftermath of gas pipeline explosions in Russia.
The EU imposed sanctions on Russian organizations and officials implicated in the abduction of Ukrainian children and their forced "re-education."
The post is fake. Reviews of Truth Social and Trump's Truth, a website that archives the president's Truth Social feed every few minutes, found no trace of the post on or around May 12, 2026. For example, a search for "SLEEPY JOE was a RUSSIAN AGENT!" on Trump's Truth returned no such post.
Fake: Podolyak Says Ukraine Is Ready to Defend Taiwan Instead of the U.S. The quote attributed to Podolyak is a fabrication. It originated on a satirical Telegram channel that explicitly identifies itself as a publisher of "fakes," and the image accompanying the posts was lifted from an earlier interview on an unrelated topic.