An explosion on Oct. 8 caused a partial collapse of the Crimean Bridge, also known as the Kerch Bridge, over the Kerch Strait that links the Crimean Peninsula with Russia.
Following the explosion, a video clip was posted multiple times across Twitter that claimed to show the moment a missile struck the bridge. The video appeared to come from a dashcam inside a vehicle that was traveling across the Crimean Bridge.
“BREAKING. The moment the #CrimeanBridge EXPLODED,” one tweet said.
THE SOURCES
- InVid, a video forensics tool
- RevEye, a reverse image search tool
- Google Maps
- Yandex, a Russia-based search engine
- Takvim, a Turkish daily newspaper
- Old video posted to Twitter and TikTok in May 2022
- Dashcam footage from March 2022
THE ANSWER
No, a viral dashcam video doesn’t show the Crimean Bridge explosion. The video was first posted months before the explosion took place and is a compilation of multiple videos.
WHAT WE FOUND
The video in its entirety, which was made using components from different videos, was published to Twitter, TikTok and Russian social media in May, months before the Crimean Bridge explosion took place.
The viral footage that claims to show the “moment” the bridge exploded also shows the alleged impact happening during the day. Security footage taken from the actual explosion on Oct. 8 shows the bridge blowing up while still dark.
Using InVid, VERIFY split the video into individual keyframes and conducted a reverse image search of each keyframe.
A portion of the video does show the Crimean Bridge, which can be confirmed by comparing scenes from the video and images that have been posted to Google Maps. The same tall arches on each side of the bridge can be seen on those images and also in the video. But it wasn’t taken the day of the explosion, because this exact clip was posted in May 2022.
Not only does the video pre-date the October explosion, we can also confirm a portion of the 12-second video was edited to include a flash from an entirely different explosion.
At the 6-second mark of the video, a large flash of white can be seen before it cuts distorted images, as though the camera was on during an explosion. VERIFY focused on this keyframe from the video, showing a flash from the explosion:
The flashes from the explosion were actually lifted from dashcam footage that was taken in March from a missile strike in the northern Ukraine city of Kharkiv.
VERIFY was able to track this down using image search results from Yandex, a Russian search engine, which led to an article published by Turkish daily newspaper Takvim in June 2022, which published images and videos from different missile strikes across Ukraine since the start of the war.
One of the images in the article was the exact photo of the explosion (seen above) VERIFY traced using reverse image searching. The article said the photo was a screenshot from dashcam footage taken during the explosion in the northern Ukraine city of Kharkiv.
Using the information published in the Takvim article about the photo from the explosion in Kharkiv, we found the full video showing the explosion in Kharkiv.
So, not only can we confirm the video was not taken from the Crimean Bridge explosion, but the entire video was edited to combine old footage of the Crimean bridge and footage from a missile strike in Kharkiv, posted online months before the Oct. 8 bridge explosion.
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