5 days of lethal preventing between neighbours Thailand and Cambodia unleashed a flood of misrepresented visuals together with unrelated explosion clips. Two broadly shared movies supposedly from the Southeast Asian battle predate the bloody border clashes and have appeared in posts about strikes in Ukraine.
“Cambodia shoots down Thai F-16 fighter jet,” reads a Burmese-language Fb put up on July 24, 2025.
It shares footage capturing the second an plane loses altitude and crashes into the bottom, with the affect leading to an enormous fireball. Related posts had been shared on YouTube.
One other clip, exhibiting a number of air strikes, surfaced on Fb and X posts in Sri Lanka and India.
“Thailand-Cambodia conflict is intensifying. Cambodian military base to be attacked and demolished,” says a Tamil-language put up on July 24.
Screenshots of false posts taken August 5, 2025, with purple X added by AFP
Thailand and Cambodia agreed a truce beginning July 29, following 5 days of intense clashes that left greater than 40 individuals lifeless (archived hyperlink).
The most recent eruption of a long-standing dispute over contested border temples on their frontier additionally drove greater than 300,000 from their houses.
However the two clips circulating on-line predate the battle.
Ukraine information stories
A reverse picture and key phrase search on Google discovered an uncropped model of the primary video shared by Russia’s Pravda newspaper on April 30, 2025 (archived hyperlink).
“Strike of the Geranium UAV on a goal in Kharkov,” reads the headline, utilizing one other spelling for the northeast Ukraine metropolis Kharkiv.
Screenshot comparability of the false put up (left) and the Pravda information report
Additional key phrase searches discovered the video in an Telegram channel named “voenacher”, which additionally shared the location of the assault in one other put up dated April 26, 2025 (archived hyperlink).
A chimney seen within the video — positioned in a inexperienced patch subsequent to a car parking zone in Kharkiv — may also be seen on Google Maps satellite tv for pc imagery (archived hyperlink).
Screenshot comparability of the video (left, centre) with Google Maps satellite tv for pc imagery
A separate reverse video search discovered the second clip posted on Fb June 6, 2025, greater than a month earlier than armed clashes erupted between Thailand and Cambodia (archived hyperlink).
“That is Lutsk — metropolis the place my spouse was born,” reads a part of the put up.
Video information company Newsflare distributed the footage with a caption that claims partially, “On June 6, 2025, in Lutsk, Ukraine, a video captured a sequence of explosions attributable to 4 missile strikes within the metropolis’s industrial zone” (archived hyperlink).
Screenshot comparability between the falsely shared clip (left) and the Fb put up from June 2025
AFP has debunked extra misinformation associated to Thailand-Cambodia border battle right here.
