Old Video From 2016 Shared as 'Russians Paratroopers Landing in Ukraine'

The video could be traced back to 2016, making it clear that it is not a recent one.

Several news organisations, including English newspaper DNA, shared a video that shows paratroopers with a claim that Russian military paratroopers have landed in Ukraine near Kharkiv, the country's second-largest city.

The claim comes as Russian invaded Ukraine on Thursday, 24 February, and explosions were reported across the nation. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that 137 have died in the first day of fighting.

However, we found that these visuals are not recent and could be traced back to 2016.

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CLAIM

In a story headlined 'Russia-Ukraine war: Russian paratroopers enters Ukraine; scary visuals caught on cam', DNA aired the visuals. (An archived version can be seen here.)

The video was widely shared on social media and some of the archived versions can be seen here, here, here, and here.

WHAT WE FOUND

Taking a cue from the claim which mentioned that they were 'Russian paratroopers', we ran a keywords search in Russian with the same keywords (Российские десантники).

This led us to a website 'vvks.ru.net' which carried the video and the date mentioned was 20 March 2019. Clearly, before the invasion.

The video caption here read, "ХАХЛЫ, ЗАПОМНИТЕ, ИМЕННО ТАК ВЫГЛЯДЯТ РОССИЙСКИЕ ДЕСАНТНИКИ", which loosely translates to 'Khakhl, remember, this is what the Russian paratroopers look like'.

Taking this as a cue, we did another keyword search and came across a tweet from September 2016, which carried the same caption.

While we have not been able to independently verify the location or the context of these visuals, but the fact that the same was posted in 2016 makes it clear that it isn't linked to the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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