Clip shared by Ukrainian diplomat who claimed it showed Russian bridge collapse is old
The video is over 5 years old
CLAIM
A video clip shared by a senior Ukrainian diplomat was described as showing a bridge collapsing near the Russian city of Smolensk on Monday, April 8, 2024.
BACKGROUND
Olexander Scherba, a Ukrainian diplomat who served as Ukraine’s ambassador to Russia for several years, shared a video clip on X on the evening of April 8 purporting to show a bridge collapsing near the Russian city of Smolensk on the same day.
Scherba shared the video to his 264,000 followers on X and wrote: “In #russia, a bridge near Smolensk falls on a strategically important railway. Sad. #StandWithUkraine #RussiaIsCollapsing”
He now describes himself as an ambassador-at-large for Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The footage appears to have originally been filmed by a static camera that looks onto a railway track, but this version was filmed by someone watching it on a screen. The footage shows the land bridge collapsing, bringing a truck with it, and crashing onto the railway tracks below.
Earlier this week, multiple news outlets reported on the road bridge that collapsed in the town of Vyazma in Smolensk, killing one woman and injuring several others.
BBC News reported that all train traffic in the area was halted and thousands of households were left without gas due to damage in the pipelines.
METHOD
Reverse image searches on stills from the video brought us to some examples of the video or stills from it being used in news reporting after Monday’s bridge collapse.
Express.co.uk — the digital version of U.K. newspaper the Daily Express — used a still from the video as its main image, with the caption: “The bridge is located in the Russian region of Smolensk bordering Belarus (Image: TELEGRAM)”
The article also makes reference to videos circulating on Telegram and X that, it said, “show the Paninsky Bridge crumbling down as a lorry was crossing it”.
We also found that the article in the Kyiv Post about Monday’s bridge collapse had been earlier published with a still from the same video. The outlet is now using an updated image, which was released by the Moscow Interregional Transport Prosecutor’s Office.
The video was widely shared by content aggregator accounts in the days after the April 8 bridge collapse, reflecting the flurry in claims that it showed the incident.
However, we were able to find a longer version of the same video on YouTube with an upload date of October 9, 2018. It was published by an account called ‘Prikol Prikolovich Prikolov’ and titled, in Russian: “Collapse of the bridge across the Trans-Siberian Railway”.
This AP article from October 9, 2018, on that incident, confirms that a motorway bridge over the Trans-Siberian Railway collapsed on that day. The image accompanying that story was provided by the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations, according to AP, which reported the incident as having taken place “in the city of Svobodny in Russia’s far-eastern Amur region, near the border with China”.
The red truck in the image appears to match the truck that is seen driving over the bridge in the footage. The freight cars in the background of the image, some of which are dark in colour and some of which are blue with white writing, also appear to match those seen to the right of the frame in the video.
From this analysis, we can conclude that the video has no connection to the bridge collapse in Smolensk on Monday, April 8, 2024, and actually shows a road bridge collapse in eastern Russia in October 2018.
RATING
The video has no connection to the bridge collapse in western Russia on Monday, April 8.
SOURCES
X (formerly Twitter). (2024). Available at: In #russia, a bridge near Smolensk falls on a strategically important railway. Sad. [Accessed 11 Apr. 2024].
BBC News. (2024). Russia: One dead as bridge collapses on railway tracks. [online] Bbc.com. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68766912 [Accessed 11 Apr. 2024].
Scarsi, A. (2024). Horrifying moment a Russian bridge crumbles on train tracks killing a woman. [online] Express.co.uk. Available at: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1886237/russia-Paninsky-bridge-collapse-victims [Accessed 11 Apr. 2024].
Kyiv Post. (2024). Bridge Collapses in Russia’s Smolensk Region, 1 Reported Dead. [online] Kyiv Post. Available at: https://www.kyivpost.com/post/30790 [Accessed 11 Apr. 2024].
Prikol Prikolovich Prikolov (2018). Available at: Обрушение моста через транссиб. YouTube. [Accessed 11 Apr. 2024].
AP News. (2018). Bridge collapse halts traffic on Trans-Siberia Railway. [online] Available at: https://apnews.com/article/e36b4c19905e4005a61c24604d67a429 [Accessed 11 Apr. 2024].