Propagandists began disseminating information in the media and social networks that a Ukrainian military man was allegedly injured during a training session to drop ammunition from a UAV. As “evidence”, they add a video of a man in military uniform dropping a grenade from a drone, which allegedly explodes near him. However, this is fake.

Analyzing the distributed video, StopFake specialists noticed that the “explosion” looked unnatural. The moment of detonation is not visible on the recording. The image of an explosion suddenly appears and immediately blocks out what is happening on the screen. In the video editing program Adobe Premiere Pro, one can see that the “explosion” overlaps the original video in one hundredth of a second.

Such a sudden change in frames suggests that the video has been edited. StopFake analysts began looking for similar “explosions” on the Internet. It turned out that this is a very popular effect that can be applied to any video. For example, on Instagram it is called Explosion. Fact-checkers created a similar video of the explosion and also divided it into frames in Adobe Premiere Pro. The frozen footage taken overnight from this effect and the fake video indicates that this is one and the same “explosion”.

It seems that propagandists added an “explosion” to the video of the military man or passed off someone’s joke as reality to discredit the Ukrainian Armed Forces. This video fake began to spread not only in the Russian segment of the Internet, but also in different languages of the world. Detector Media has repeatedly refuted other fakes of Russian propaganda against the Ukrainian Armed Forces.