What was claimed
A video shows a fight taking place in Ukraine’s parliament.
Our verdict
While this video does show a fight in Ukraine’s parliament, it was filmed in 2010, not recently.
Old video of fight in Ukrainian parliament re-emerges on social media
13 September 2023
A video shared on X (formerly known as Twitter) showing a fight in the Ukrainian parliament, alongside a hashtag referencing Ukraine’s war with Russia, was actually filmed in 2010.
The footage was also posted on Facebook alongside a caption which says: “Ukrainian Parliament. That money is sure working. Protecting democracy one cheque at a time lol”.
While this appears to refer to financial aid sent to Ukraine by various countries following Russia’s invasion of the country in February 2022, the video was filmed more than a decade ago.
The footage actually shows a fight that broke out in Ukraine’s parliament on 27 April 2010, reportedly over a vote to allow Russia to continue using a naval port in Crimea.
The clip being shared on social media was posted on YouTube by BBC Monitoring in 2012 with the title “Fist fight in Ukrainian parliament - April 2010”.
We’ve fact-checked several claims about Ukraine since last year. 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—we have written a guide on how to do so here.
Image courtesy of Elke Wetzig
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 missing context because this video was filmed in 2010.