A video showing hundreds of graves is being shared on social media with a claim that Russia is digging up hundreds of graves across the country to bury bodies of her soldiers killed in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.
Facebook users are sharing the video with the caption, “Hundreds of graves have been dug in the cemeteries of Russia – they are waiting for the burial of Russian cargo 200, which is starting to come from Ukraine. The Russians are filming and posting on social networks, they are in shock. The losses of the Russian army in Ukraine exceeded 10 thousand soldiers. They are dying at the rate of a thousand a day. Let pray for war to stop”
Here’s the link to the above post.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile fact-checked the post and found the video to be old.
We extracted keyframes of the video and ran a search on the Russian search engine, Yandex. We found that the same video was sherd on VK, a Russian online social media and social networking service on October 8, 2021.
We then ran a keyword search based on the title of the above video and found a Russian news report carrying the same video. The report published on YouTube on October 12, 2021, was shared the title that can be related in English to: “Surgut cemetery prepared more than 600 graves for winter.”
The video description read (via Google translation), “At the Chernorechensky cemetery they explained why they dug up a large number of graves. The day before, residents of Surgut published a video from the churchyard on the network, where pits have already been prepared in several sectors – not even rows, but entire sectors are waiting for burials in the new part of the cemetery.”
The same was covered by another media outlet in October 2021. As per the report, ‘The administration of the Yugra city (Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug–Yugra) explained: There is nothing extraordinary. These works, which have caused various speculations on the internet, are carried out every year.
“The peculiarity of the soil is such that at consistently low temperatures it freezes two or more meters and it becomes extremely difficult to dig a grave,” Surgut authorities said in an official statement’.
While searching further, we also found that Andrey Filatov, mayor of Surgut rubbished the viral claim in an Instagram post dated March 7, 2022.
He shared the report with the caption, “Disinformation attacks also reached Surgut. For several days now, a fake video has been circulating on the internet that the Surgut cemetery is allegedly being prepared to receive the soldiers who died during the special operation. I declare unequivocally that this information is fake. The video is of our cemetery, only the footage is from last year. We already commented on them in September 2021. At that time the graves were being prepared for the winter. This is a standard procedure for earthworks in northern cities. Due to the fact that we have rather low temperatures in winter, all work of this specific nature is carried out in advance. This practice has been going on for at least 15 years.”
Hence, from the above information, it is clear that the video is old and is being shared with a misleading claim.
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