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| - Fact Check: No, this isn't Russian soldiers making merry while preparing to invade Ukraine
A video went viral on social media purportedly showing Russian soldiers dancing while preparing to invade Ukraine. India Today Anti-Fake news War Room found the video had nothing to do with the Russia-Ukraine standoff.
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India Today Fact Check
The video was shot at a metro station in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent in 2018. A military band dressed like the Soviet Red Army toured stations to commemorate the country's victory against the Nazis in World War II.
Russia-Ukraine tensions have escalated after Russian-backed separatists shelled Ukraine on February 17. A nursery school was hit and three people were hurt, reports said. Vladimir Putin's Russia has reportedly nearly 150,000 soldiers in the border regions near Ukraine giving strong hints of an invasion.
Amid rising tensions between in Europe — and the world — a video went viral on social media with some questionable claims. The clip showed people in military attire singing and dancing at a metro station. Those sharing it claimed they were Russian troops preparing for the war with Ukraine. One such tweet has been archived here.
India Today Anti-Fake news War Room (AFWA) found that the video had nothing to do with the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The video was filmed at the Uzbek capital of Tashkent in 2018 during an event to commemorate the country's victory in World War II.
AFWA Probe
The military uniform donned by the dancing crowd in the video looked similar to the Soviet Red Army's than that of modern Russian forces. This gave us the first clue that the footage may be depicting memorial services or events. Using InVID, we obtained keyframes of the video and reverse searched them on the Russian search engine Yandex.
The search returned results in plenty. Among the top matches was a video from the verified Facebook page of Radio Liberty -- a US-funded media organisation in Europe.
Another Facebook page called ODO.uz had shared the video with a detailed description in English. "On the eve of Victory Day, the Central Song and Dance Ensemble of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Uzbekistan will hold a series of concerts and similar flash mobs dedicated to the great holiday. Today the city is buzzing literally - eyewitnesses tell, publish video," it read.
Uploaded on April 25, 2018, we identified the video to be the same as the one now in circulation. This proved the video is not of Russian troops set to leave for Ukraine recently.
Translating the Russian post that accompanied the video on Radio Liberty's page, we learnt that the venue of the programme was a metro station at Tashkent, the capital city of Uzbekistan. A military band conducted the programme touring from station to station in Tashkent, as advised by the Ministry of Defence. They sang and danced to the tune of "Katyusha", a Russian folksong that rose to popularity during the Second World War.
We failed to find any English news story on the event even after narrowing down the time range to 2018. However, a Google search of the Russian caption from Radio Liberty led us to a couple of news reports about the event.
Among them was the report by Gazeta.uz that mentioned the proposed date and time of the programme. The official press release said the programme would start at Dustlik at 16:30 hours.
We searched for Dustlik metro station on Google Maps. The results had images of the station with the roof, seats, and lights similar to that in the video.
In the video, a blue metro train can be seen approaching the station as the troop danced. A Google search confirmed that blue coloured trains are used in the Tashkent metro system.
Similarly, we copied the Russian caption of the video and searched it on YouTube. As expected we found longer versions of the video uploaded in April 2018. These can be watched here and here.
Thus, we concluded that the video shared as that of jovial Russian soldiers preparing for the Ukrainian battlefront is the footage of a World War memorial event conducted in Uzbekistan in 2018.
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