What was claimed
A video shows a Russian aerial attack on Ukraine which killed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Our verdict
False. The video is actually from 2015 and depicts explosions at a hazardous goods warehouse in Tianjin, China. There is no evidence that President Zelenskyy has been killed.
A video of a violent explosion has been shared online alongside false claims it shows a Russian attack on Ukraine rumoured to have killed its president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But this is false—the video isn’t from Ukraine and there’s no evidence the president has been killed.
The clip, posted on Facebook and Instagram, includes footage of a series of huge explosions and a fireball filling the sky near some high-rise buildings.
It has been shared with the caption: “According to reports, a Russian aerial attack targeted a safe position in Ukraine, causing the de*th of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.”
The video is actually from August 2015, and shows explosions at a warehouse in Tianjin, China, that handled hazardous goods. It was filmed by an American man living nearby.
And we couldn’t find any media reports, or evidence from the Russian state, to substantiate the claim, which is presented as “rumors” in the posts, that President Zelenskyy has been killed in a Russian strike.
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President Zelenskyy’s official social media pages have also continued to post since 20 June, when this claim first appeared circulating online.
He also met with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Secretary General Mathias Cormann in Kyiv on Tuesday 23 June.
We previously saw this video miscaptioned and shared following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and again earlier this year when it was used to falsely depict explosions in Tel Aviv.
Miscaptioned footage is a common form of misinformation we see online. Before sharing content, it’s important to consider whether what you’re seeing is genuine—our Full Fact misinformation toolkit can help with this.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because this footage is actually from an incident in China in 2015, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has not been killed.
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