False: Video shows Russian soldiers using weapons from the Soviet era.

By: Nikita Kochhar
March 24 2022

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The video does not depict Russian force soldiers as the soldiers depicted are wearing Kenya's military uniform. A video of uniformed soldiers firing a rocket-propelled grenade has gone viral on Facebook. The video shows the soldiers firing the weapon and running for cover after it appears to malfunction. Text and audio captions claim that the soldiers are Russian forces using weapons from the "Soviet era." However, the claim is baseless. The text on the video reads, "Russian soldiers using weapons that have been in the cupboard since the Soviet times." The video has been shared on a Facebook group called 'Widnes Bouncy Castle Hire' and has received 7,700 reactions and 888 comments. Using a reverse image search, we found an extended version of the video on YouTube. The video was posted from an account called Kenyan Bytes on 23 February, 2022, with a caption stating, "KDF officers Escape death after their RPG failed to launch." Lead Stories also checked the video and spoke to Nick Reynolds, a research analyst for land warfare at the U.K.'s Royal United Services Institute. According to Reynolds, "The camouflage pattern and, in particular, the body armor design indicates that the personnel in question are from the Kenyan Defence Forces." We also checked the official Facebook page of the Kenya Defence Forces. We saw that the uniform in the video resembles the uniform worn by Kenyan soldiers in the video in question. Moreover, the uniform worn by the soldiers in the video doesn't resemble the uniform worn by Russian soldiers, nor are the soldiers in the video wearing armbands like those worn by Russian soldiers. The soldiers in the video are from Kenya and not serving the Russian army. Therefore we are marking this claim as false.