Claim: Photos shared by a Twitter user shows nuclear weapons deployed by Russia against Ukraine to start World War 3.
The photos shared are old and have been in circulation before 2022.
Full Text
The ongoing crisis between Russia and Ukraine is unarguably the most trending issue in the world today, dominating news headlines and generating massive reactions from across the globe. As the crisis persists, people have continued to keep up with real time updates on the internet, especially on social media, where lots of misinformation and disinformation are proliferating to distort reality.
One of such are photos shared by a Twitter user, @AdvoBarryRoux, showing nuclear weapons purportedly deployed by the Russian military in its ongoing campaign against Ukraine depicting the start of World War 3.
The post was widely shared, generating 178 retweets, 19 quote tweets and 1,045 likes, at the time DUBAWA sighted it. Social media users are prone to believe information when it is from a source that they trust, and reactions from the comment section showed that a good number of the user’s 1.4 million followers took the information some weight.
“These are weapons of mass destruction, and it’s definitely heading to a world war. We definitely don’t need that at all. Fuel prices will skyrocket. It will cause immense suffering everywhere,” one of his followers wrote.
Another referring to a region in South Africa replied: “Apparently those have warheads of between 100 & 300 MT. What that means is 1 can turn Gauteng Province into a Desert.”
While the Russian-Ukraine crisis is ongoing in Eastern Europe, posts like this have the tendency of heightening tensions and spreading fear in other countries, like South Africa where the user and possibly a large chunk of his followers, are from.
Verification
A Yandex reverse image search by DUBAWA revealed the origin of the two photos. One of the photos is from the Russian Victory Day held on June 24, 2020. In the photo are Russian RS-24 Yars ballistic missiles on display at the Red Square during the military parade to mark the 75th anniversary of the Nazi defeat in Moscow, Russia.
The second photo was found to be from a 2015 Victory Day parade in Moscow. It has also been used several times to illustrate other reports like this 2015 BBC report.
Conclusion
The photos, shared by a Twitter user to depict Russia’s deployment of nuclear weapons in the ongoing crisis with Ukraine as marking the start of World 3, is FALSE. The photos, as research have shown, are from Russia’s Victory Day Parades in 2015 and 2020, respectively.
