Lightning strike video doesn’t show war in Ukraine
What was claimed
A video shows recent Russian attacks on Ukraine.
Our verdict
The video appeared online in January 2022, so is not from the invasion of Ukraine which started on 24 February.
A video on Facebook with over 24,000 views has the caption “Russia attack multiple cities in Ukraine and declare War [sic]”.
But this video doesn’t show Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which began 24 February 2022.
The clip, which seems to show a lightning strike, appeared on TikTok at least as early as 29 January 2022.
The TikTok caption says (in Russian and translated by Google): “lightning strike at the power plant”. We were not able to verify what exactly the video shows, but it was definitely posted online before the recent invasion.
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We’ve written about this particular video before. It also appeared on Twitter on 24 February with false claims it showed “explosions now” in Mariupol in Ukraine.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the video doesn’t show Russia invading Ukraine as it first appeared online before that happened.
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