A viral video of two women sobbing as they embrace men dressed in military gear is being shared across social media platforms, claiming to show scenes of "anxiety, farwell, and love" from the capital of Ukraine amid escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine.
The claim comes against the backdrop of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Thursday, 24 February, following which explosions, attacks, and casualties were reported across the country.
However, we found that the video is from a 2017 Ukrainian documentary film titled 'The War of Chimeras,' which documents the story of a young couple during the Battle of Ilovaisk, which took place in 2014 near Donetsk, Ukraine.
Catch all the live updates on the Russia-Ukraine tensions here.
CLAIM
The video is being shared to claim that it shows scenes from Kyiv, Ukraine where soldiers are bidding adieu to their loved ones as they depart to fight the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
An archived version of this post can be seen here.
(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)
This post on Facebook was shared over 1,400 times at the time of writing this article and was viewed more than 81,000 times.
The same claim was also shared by one India News journalist, Tushar Kaushik.
Archived versions of more posts with the same claim on social media can be seen here, here, and here.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
Using InVID, a Google Chrome extension for video verification, we divided the video into keyframes and ran a reverse image search on them.
On Yandex, a Russian search engine, we found a video titled 'The War of Chimeras', uploaded to the channel on 7 July 2017.
The video was uploaded in 2017.
(Source: YouTube/Altered by The Quint)
We found similarities between visuals from this video and the clip in the claim.
In one frame, the visuals showed the same couple saying goodbye.
The logo on the soldier's arm matches in both photos.
(Source: Twitter/YouTube/Altered by The Quint)
In the trailer's background, we could also see the other couple in the background.
The same couple is seen in the background in the trailer.
(Source: Twitter/YouTube/Altered by The Quint)
Next, we looked up the film using its title as keywords and came across its Internet Movie Database (IMDb) page.
As per this page, the movie is a war documentary based on a real story of the co-director and her partner, who volunteered to fight at the Ukrainian battle of Ilovaisk in 2014, while she documented the gritty reality of war.
On YouTube, we came across an interview with the film's co-creator Anastasiya Starozhytska where she spoke about the message and the process behind the documentary.
The other creator of the film is Starozhytska's mother Maria, who is a noted Ukrainian journalist.
The interview also contains scenes from the trailer, which bear resemblance to the video in the claim.
Though visuals of families being separated have emerged from Ukraine amid the conflict, this video does not show those.
Clearly, the video doesn't show recent visuals of Ukrainian soldiers saying goodbye to their loved ones before departing to fight against Russia.
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