2017 Video Of Explosion At Ukraine Military Depot Shared As Recent Attack by fake news.
BOOM found that the video shows explosions at a military ammunition depot in central Ukraine in 2017.
A video showing a massive explosion at a military depot in Ukraine in 2017, has been revived and is being shared as recent footage of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The video is being shared in the backdrop of full-scale invasion of Ukraine launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the early hours of February 24, 2022. Social media has been inundated with unrelated images and videos passed off as the ongoing war. The caption with one such video reads as, "Massive explosion at Ukraine #RussiaUkraineConflict".
BOOM did a reverse image search on one of the key frames of the video using Yandex – a Russian search engine. We found the same image in an article by the Irish Times, published on September 27, 2017. The caption with the video says, "Explosions at a military ammunition depot in central Ukraine were seen in the early hours of Wednesday, September 27th, 240 km from the capital. Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said 'external factors' were behind the incident." Taking a cue from this, we performed a related keyword search on the internet and found several news articles about the incident. According to a Reuters report published on September 28, 2017, "Massive explosions at a military depot in the Vynnytsya region, 270 km (170 miles) west of Kiev, forced the authorities to evacuate 24,000 people…" The report further stated, "It is not clear if the explosions were accidents or sabotage, either of which would underscore poor security at the bases, but officials traded blame for the resulting losses." The Guardian also uploaded the video on its official YouTube channel on September 28, 2017. The same clip has been used in the viral posts.