Video clips mischaracterized as showing fake Ukraine war footage

A recent Instagram post sharing a TikTok video issues a "wake up call," purportedly pointing to several clips as evidence that scenes of war in Ukraine have been staged. 

One of the clips shows a man grabbing his head while on his knees. A narrator calls him a Ukrainian soldier "in agony" before saying, "and cut," implying that the emotion has been faked for war propaganda.

As another clip shows people filming a crowd running toward them, the narrator says: "Here we go, this is my favorite. And action. Okay, you’re all running, you’re all scared…Run, you’re terrified, you're terrified of incoming attacks from Russia."

A man then appears on camera and eventually says: "You’re watching a f------ movie." 

The Instagram post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

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“NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte says that ‘if Trump surrenders Ukraine to Putin, he will personally expel the United States from the alliance.’”

Using reverse image searches and InVid, a site that helps identify the origins of video clips, we found the ones featured in the Instagram post, and neither is meant to show real footage of the war in Ukraine. 

The first, of the man grabbing his head, is behind-the-scenes footage of a music video for the song "Lullaby" by Ukrainian singer Anna Khanina. 

The second clip wasn’t even filmed in Ukraine, or this year. It’s behind-the-scenes footage of filming in Birmingham, England, of the 2019 sci-fi movie "Invasion Planet Earth." Its director, Simon Cox, tweeted in March that he "was shocked" to see the footage being misused as misinformation about the war.

These aren’t the only clips being misused as war propaganda. We’ve previously debunked posts that said video games show actual Ukrainian victories in the war, and that footage from a short video by a German TV network shows a downed Russian aircraft in the invasion.  

Those claims were wrong, and so is this one. We rate the claim that these clips show fake war footage in Ukraine Pants on Fire.