Latest fact checks & sources

Two videos have been viewed over a million times in social media posts that claim they show an Indonesian flag flown during a concert by German rock band Scorpions after Indonesian President Joko Widodo visited Ukraine and Russia to urge peace talks in late June 2022. The claim is false; the videos were taken during a Scorpions concert in Poland on May 28, 2022. News reports say the Polish and Ukrainian flags had been flown at the concert, not the Indonesian flag.

The German tabloid newspaper Bild has not reported that Russian forces captured a German PzH 2000 Howitzer, transferred to Ukraine as part of German military assistance. Journalists from the German daily newspaper Welt were unable to find any confirmation of this claim. Russian media have not provided any evidence to support these allegations.

Verdict: False This photo is miscaptioned. It was taken in 2005 and shows a prisoner from Belarus, not a soldier from Ukraine.

What’s being described as footage of the war in Ukraine is seen through a scope, with faint chatter in the background and the blast of weapons obliterating tanks on the ground. “In Saturday Russian artillery tanks was completely destroyed by Bayraktar TB2 drones,” reads a grammatically problematic July 3 Facebook post sharing the video. But if you watch long enough, the clip is clearly glitchy and the aesthetics might seem familiar ‘ we’ve previously fact-checked videos like it that mischaracterize video game footage to make it seem like it’s a recording of live combat in Eastern Europe. Searching for the video’s description online, we found a YouTube post that gives more context, informing the reader that this isn’t real war footage. We rate claims that this is real war footage False.

The primary source of the claim that Lithuania dismantled the Kaliningrad railway is the Panorama satirical, fictional news site. The publication does alert its readers that all texts on the site are satire and not real news.

During the second half of April 2022, when Bocquet claimed to be in Ukraine, military operations were no longer taking place in Bucha, nor were any Russian soldiers being taken prisoner. The town was occupied by Russian troops from the end of February to April 1. That evening saw the first reports with videos showing dead bodies on its streets. That is, Adrien Bocquet could not have been in Bucha to observe “neo-Nazis committing war crimes.”

After Ukraine struck an oil drilling platform in the Black Sea that it said was being used by Russian troops, footage was viewed thousands of times in Chinese-language social media posts that claimed it showed the attack. However, the footage has circulated online since at least 2004, although AFP was unable to confirm where it was filmed.

RIA Novosti has taken anonymous comments regarding a British edition Daily Mail story and presented them as the view of all of Britain. Several comments do not make a majority view, much less an official government position. Furthermore, RIA Novosti’s claims completely contradict existing poll data, in which 74% of Britons support sending military aid to Ukraine.

Russian propagandist media distorted the meaning of Ukrainian Defense Minister’s point. He did not declare WWIII, he said that it had already begun on February 24, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. […] Minister Reznikov, of course, did not declare WWIII. In a tried-and-true fashion, Russian media took a phrase out of context, and distorted its meaning to make a mendacious claim.

The video does not show a missile attack against the city of Moscow. Footage used in a social media video claiming to be from the attack was taken from unrelated incidents. Our ruling A Facebook video shared images claiming to be from a missile strike on Moscow, implying Ukraine launched the attack against the Russian capital. There appears to be no basis to the claim as there has been no reporting or corroborating evidence that missiles were launched at the city. The video misrepresented footage from a separate incident several years ago as being from the attack and falsely claimed a fire at a Russian facility was part of a Ukrainian military strike. We rate this claim Pants on Fire!

Verdict: False There is no evidence to suggest the organization is planning to remove any members. Representatives for the Pentagon and NATO confirmed the claim is false.

Several pro-Russian accounts have been circulating photos that they say show how Ukrainians put anti-Russian stickers in different places in Auschwitz, the former death camp run by the Nazis. The stickers say: “Russia & Russians – The only gas you and your country deserve is Zyklon B”, a reference to the toxic gas used by Nazis to kill prisoners in the on-site gas chambers.

Ukrainian citizens cannot be deported as they entered the European Union legally, forced into the move because of Russia’s invasion.

Several videos did appear to show a Russian missile landing short of where other missiles had been launched in the minutes prior, likely due to a malfunction of some sort. However, there’s no evidence that it flew back directly into the area from which it was launched, nor was there any data that showed it injured or killed Russian troops. An alternate angle of what appeared to be the same missile being fired showed that it did not land on its own launch site.

Verdict: Misleading While Russian warships did enter Denmark’s territorial waters, no such exchange took place. A spokesperson for Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied the claim.

Orthodox Church of Ukraine representatives told StopFake that Stepan Bandera is not being canonized by their church and the document used to substantiate these claims in Russian media is a fake.

During a surprise Kyiv visit, British Prime Minister Boris Johson said the UK will not yield to ‘Ukraine fatigue’ and reaffirmed Britain’s support for Ukraine. “When Ukraine fatigue is setting in, it is very important to show that we are with them for the long haul and we are giving them the strategic resilience that they need,” Johnson said.

Verdict: False There is no record of Orban making such a statement. A spokesperson for the Hungarian government denied the claim.

A viral image appearing to show Arnold Schwarzenegger wearing a pro-Ukraine shirt that says “I’ll be back” is fake.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, over 7 million people have fled the country. Multiple reports have outlined the specific difficulties that African refugees faced as they attempted to cross the Polish border and enter the European Union. Georgina Robertson and Sophie Samaille take a look at a Facebook post falsely claiming that refugees from Africa were shot at by Polish police.