Video shows game footage, not a plane being shot at in Ukraine
What was claimed
A video of a plane being shot at shows the fighting in Ukraine.
Our verdict
This is footage from a video game, as confirmed by the game’s developers.
A video appearing to show a plane being shot at with the caption “Plane being shot in sky #war #russia #usa #ukraine” has been viewed over 26,000 times on Facebook.
But the short clip is not genuine footage of the fighting in Ukraine.
The video’s sound and the neon shooting effect looks a lot like a video game called Arma 3.
Full Fact contacted the games’ developer, Bohemia Interactive, and asked whether they recognised the clip as being from one of their games.
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A spokesperson responded: “I can confirm the video originates from heavily modded [modified] Arma game falsely tagged as a footage depicting the current conflict in Ukraine [sic].”
This isn’t the first time footage from this game has appeared online alongside claims it shows Ukraine—other fact checkers have identified a different clip of shots being fired at military jets as being from Arma 3. And we have also checked videos featuring a clip from a teaser of another game.
If you’re interested in finding out more about how we verify false videos, especially those around the war in Ukraine, you can read our blog post on the topic here.
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 fighting in Ukraine, it’s from a video game.
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