Is it true that a video popular on the Internet depicts the moment when Ukrainians killed residents of Chechnya?

In March 2022, a video circulated on social networks in which several armed men mocked a civilian and then shot him and his wife. The caption under the video claims that we are seeing Ukrainian fighters, and that this is happening in Chechnya. We checked how correct this attribution is.

This is what is said in the English-language caption to the actively circulated video with a duration of 01:53: “As a reminder... this is what the Ukrainian army did when it found itself on Chechen soil. They mercilessly executed an old man who was reading the [Quran] surah Al-Fatihah and his wife. Today everything has turned upside down, and the Chechens have entered [Ukraine] along with the Russian army to take revenge for what the Ukrainians did to them. Spread this so people can know the truth about Ukrainians.”

Footage of brutal executions has gained particular popularity on Facebook (for example, there are publications on 1400, 255, 165 And 119 reposts as of March 22, 2022).

The first thing that may catch your eye in the video is that the military speaks Russian without an accent. However, this in itself does not prove anything - as you know, in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, many residents speak Russian perfectly. A much stranger assumption is that Ukrainian fighters fought in Chechnya on the side of the Russian army. Known, that it was against the federal troops that from several dozen to several hundred (according to various estimates) Ukrainian soldiers took part in hostilities, and this happened during the First Chechen War (1994–1996), and the time stamp indicates 1999. However, there were also reverse cases, therefore, nothing can be stated unambiguously here either.

However, there is a much more compelling argument in favor of considering the description under the video to be fake. The fact is that in fact we have before us stills from the film "Search", directed by Michel Hazanavicius. In 2014, the Oscar-winning director made a drama about the fate of a Russian guy and a Chechen boy during the Second Chechen War. This film is not just a feature film and is not based on real events, but is a remake of the film of the same name. American film 1948 about World War II. The above episode occurs almost at the very beginning of the film:

Thus, the documentary video circulated on social networks is in fact a fragment of a feature film.

Fake

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