Social media users, including those in the Philippines, are sharing a video of a U.S. military exercise in North Carolina to claim that American soldiers have landed on Ukrainian soil amid the country’s conflict with Russia.
VERA Files Fact Check, in response to a reader request to look into the viral clip, found that the paratrooping military exercise shown in the video took place at Fort Bragg in the United States almost six years ago.
Eleven-day-old Facebook (FB) page Current News Update, which brands itself as a “media/news company,” uploaded the seven minute-long video on March 7. It featured uniformed personnel conducting a parachute drop from a military aircraft. Current News Update captioned it with: “American soldiers in ukraine (sic)”.
The clip has now been viewed over 7.6 million times by social media users from around the world, including the Philippines, based on their account profiles. A lot of Filipino netizens left praises, prayers, and well wishes for the soldiers in the video.
Running some of the clip’s keyframes through reverse image search revealed that the video had been on the Web as early as May 2016.
Its earliest traceable copy was published on May 27, 2016 by a verified but now inactive YouTube channel, AiirSource Military. It is an account that “brings contents and communications” about the U.S. Armed Forces but is not affiliated with the American government, as per its YouTube channel’s and website’s About pages.
The video’s description states that the paratroopers of the U.S. Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne Division were doing static line jumps over a drop zone at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in the southeastern region of the United States.
Photos of the paratrooping activity were posted on May 27, 2016 by the 82nd Airborne Division official FB page.
Current News Update’s false post came just two days after U.S. President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy discussed in a call “the ongoing actions undertaken by the United States […] to raise the costs on Russia for its aggression in Ukraine.”
That same day, Zelenskyy virtually met with members of the U.S. Congress to appeal for additional assistance, including military aircraft and drones, to protect his country from Russia.
In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte said the government is ready to offer the country’s facilities to the U.S. “without any restrictions” in case the “Ukrainian crisis spills over to the Asian region,” according to a March 10 statement of Philippine Ambassador to the U.S. Jose Manuel Romualdez.
Current News Update’s video already got over 207,000 reactions, 28,000 comments, and 52,000 shares from FB users.
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(Editor’s Note: VERA Files has partnered with Facebook to fight the spread of disinformation. Find out more about this partnership and our methodology.)
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