Is it true that Poland exports black soil from the territory of Ukraine?

In March 2023, a video circulated in the Russian media and social networks in which black soil was allegedly exported from the territory of Ukraine to Poland. Russian officials also spoke about this. We decided to check if this information is true.

At the beginning of March 2023, a video with captions in Polish appeared on social networks, in which allegedly in the Kherson region the body of a truck is filled with earth, and then the truck crosses the Polish border. This video was widely circulated on social networks. For example, his posted in his Telegram channel, TV presenter Ruslan Ostashko with the comment “Polish guest workers were driven into the Kherson region to export Ukrainian black soil.” The post received 127,000 views. The video also spread on other social networks - for example, in “VKontakte" The Russian media also wrote about this: a report on the TV channel “Russia 24", the website of the TV channel wrote about this.Constantinople" Finally, the video did not escape the attention of the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova. “Video footage has appeared on the Internet in which Polish “allies” of Kyiv are transporting Ukrainian black soil in trucks. Doesn't remind you of anything? Only then Poland was on the other side of history. During the Great Patriotic War, the black soil was exported by the Nazis. In the form of such looting on a national scale, the events of those years are repeated,” Zakharova wrote in her Telegram channel.

The duration of the video is 25 seconds. It consists of two parts under the general title “How was my day.” First 15 sec. an excavator loads earth into a truck. This part is indicated by the subtitle “Kherson region”. The place where the action of the second takes place is indicated as Myslowice - a small town in the Silesian Voivodeship of Poland, closer to the border with the Czech Republic. In the second part, the truck is simply driving along the road. On the blogs where the video was distributed, it was assumed that this was the same truck that transported fertile Ukrainian soil to Poland.

AFP fact-checking service spent analysis of this publication. The earliest appearance of the video dates back to March 3. His first published Russian Telegram user under the name Sheikh Tamir. But the original source of this video could not be found. AFP first tried to establish what kind of truck it was. Cabin details are visible in the second part of the video:

You can see the emblem on the steering wheel at the bottom of the frame. Upon closer inspection it becomes obvious that this is a symbol Scania, a Swedish truck manufacturer. For comparison, here is a frame from the official twitter companies:

Other details are visible in the first part of the video, namely the body and chassis.

AFP compared the truck in the video with existing models and concluded that it is a Chinese-made Shacman dump truck, popular in both Russia and Ukraine. Presumably, we are talking about F3000 modifications. Fact checkers also paid attention to the air filter (in the red circle below). AFP contacted a representative of the Ukrainian transport company, and he confirmed that this part is not typical for Scania, but for Shacman. Scania also said that the air filter looks different in their trucks.

Thus, the video shows two completely different trucks. It remains to determine why they are loading into the ground in the first of them. Even if we assume that this is happening in Ukraine (there are no details to prove this in the video), then the process of extracting black soil appears doubtful. Construction professionals interviewed AFP, suggested that we could be talking about removing the top layer of soil, the first stage of almost any construction work, from building a house to laying a road.

In addition, the export of black soil is legally impossible either under Ukrainian or European laws. Article 240 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine prohibits illegal mining of minerals and soils. And the EU regulation doesn't allow import of any soil into the territory of the countries of the union.

It was not possible to find any other videos from the Ukrainian or Polish side that would confirm the export of black soil from Ukraine. And the video, which went viral on social networks and became the reason for Maria Zakharova’s statement, is made of two parts that are in no way connected with each other.

Cover photo: social networks

Not true

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