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| - Fact Check: 2018 and 2020 videos shared as recent wildfire near Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine
Amid reports of Russian troops leaving the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and heading towards Ukraine's border with Belarus, a video is being circulated on social media with claims that it shows a forest fire near the plant. The India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found the video to be misleading.
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India Today Fact Check
These clips are from forest fire incidents in Chernobyl in 2018 and 2020. However, in March 2022, wildfires erupted in the vicinity of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
As per the news reports, Ukrainian nuclear operator company Energoatom said that the Russian military dug trenches in the Red Forest, the ten-square-kilometre area surrounding the Chernobyl plant — the site of the notorious nuclear accident that occurred in 1986 — and received “significant doses of radiation.”
Following that, amid reports of Russian troops leaving the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and heading towards Ukraine’s border with Belarus, a video circulated on social media with claims that it showed a forest fire near the plant.
The India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found that the video going viral was misleading. The clips in the video were years old and not recent.
AFWA probe
We reverse-searched keyframes from the video in question and found the same footage shared by multiple media outlets and YouTube channels in 2018 and 2020.
For instance, we found around four clippings from the viral video in a news report published by Hospodáské Noviny, a Czech daily, on April 14, 2020.
Per the report, the footage was from a forest fire near the Chernobyl power plant in 2020. The video was credited to Radio Free Europe.
Similarly, some aerial shots from the viral video were shared by multiple news outlets, including Agence France-Presse, in April 2020 as from a forest fire in Chernobyl.
A series of wildfires occurred in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in April 2020. Fires also broke out near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant at the time.
We can trace back one of the shots in the viral video to 2018, when several YouTube channels had shared it as from a forest fire in Chernobyl.
Recently, wildfires erupted in the vicinity of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and Ukraine claimed that Russian control hampered its effort to control the flames.
It is, however, clear that the viral video is old and does not show recent clips of any forest fire in Chernobyl.
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