A video of a crowd watching a military exercise in progress has gone viral with a false claim that Iranians were watching the Azerbaijan-Armenian conflict play out from their border.
The video is actually from 2019, of a military exercise in Russia’s Luzhki military range, as part of the ‘Day of the Missile Army and Artillery’ celebrations.
CLAIM
The video was shared with the claim, “The Iranians stood on the top of the mountain in Iran and watched the ongoing war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and both countries have borders with Iran.”
The video, uploaded by a Twitter user with the same claim in Persian, had amassed over 38,400 views at the time of writing this article.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
The video is from a 2019 military exercise in Russia and not related to the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict.
A reverse image search on Yandex led us to a site carrying the video, with a Serbian caption, “Један уобичајени викенд у Русији.”
(Translation: “One common weekend in Russia”)
In the same search results, we also found a tweet dated 18 November 2019, uploaded with the caption, “Military exercises in the Leningrad area,” which is similar to the details given by the site mentioned above.
A keyword search of the video’s caption led us to a news report by a Serbian tabloid, Pravada, carrying the video.
The report states that viewers can see the effect of multi-barrel rocket launchers “GRAD” and “Hurricane” in the video.
Another search with the keywords from this article, led us to a report by state-owned Russian publication, Russia Beyond.
It states that the video was shot on the “occasion of the Day of the Missile Army and Artillery,” when Russian military showed off its large number of artillery and missile systems to the citizens.
The event took place at the “Luzhki” military range and was visited by thousands of people from the Leningrad, Pskov and Novogorsk regions.
Evidently, an old video from Russia’s military exercise has been revived as Iranians watching the Azerbaijan-Armenian conflict.
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