Photo of Russian jet has been online for nearly eight years

A photo of a Russian jet that has been liked thousands of times on Facebook depicts an incomplete Tu-160 plane from 2016 or earlier, not an aircraft that is currently due to be upgraded, as the post suggests. 

In the foreground of the picture is a white aircraft in a hangar, with another two seemingly similar aircraft in the background. The caption accompanying the image on Facebook, posted on 28 January, reads: “Kazan aircraft factory is getting ready to begin upgrading RuAF [Russian Air Force] Tu-160 strategic bombers…”.

However, this image has been on the internet since at least May 2016, when it was posted by Stepanov Slava, a Russian photographer with the agency Gelio. The photo was posted on his Instagram account on 30 May 2016.

A couple of days later, on 1 June 2016, it was included in a post on X (formerly Twitter) by the Russian Embassy to South Africa, which said it showed a “Behind-the-scenes peak [sic] on how the #Tu160M2, the ‘White Swans’, are assembled and brought to life”. 

We’ve also seen the same image included in an article in January 2023, with a caption attributing the image to 2014, though we’ve not yet found examples of the photo online as far back as then.

We’ve fact-checked several claims about Ukraine since the war began in 2022.  Misleading images and videos are some of the most common kinds of misinformation we see online, but they can sometimes be hard to spot. It’s always worth checking if social media images and videos show what the post says they do before you share them. You can find information on how to do this in our guides on spotting misleading images and videos.

Image courtesy of cyrogenic666.