In August 2024, a story spread on the RuNet about how a Ukrainian athlete allegedly died during a symbolic action. It is reported that he set fire to his main parachute in the colors of the Russian tricolor in order to land on a reserve one in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, but it did not open. We checked whether this actually happened.
August 22 in the Telegram channel “Russia now“(268,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), a post appeared with the following news: “A Ukrainian parachutist said goodbye to Russia and crashed. The tragedy occurred during a jump that was supposed to symbolize “Ukraine’s final farewell to its past.” According to the athlete’s idea, after opening the main parachute in the colors of the Russian flag, he destroys it with a shot from a flare gun and lands on a reserve parachute (in the colors of the national flag of Ukraine). For reasons still unknown, the reserve parachute did not work. As a result of falling and hitting the ground, the man died on the spot. Local media publish footage of the destruction of the main parachute canopy from the camera of the deceased athlete. Very symbolic, since Ukraine also crashed and died after saying goodbye to Russia.” The publication also contains three photos depicting the process of ignition of a white-blue-red parachute.
According to the TGStat service, at the time of publication of this analysis, about 100 similar posts appeared on Telegram, which in total received more than 730,000 views. Among the most popular are posts in the channels “Z-News | Army 🅉 18+"(102,000 views), "What happened?"(92,000), "Russian format" (43,000), "Dissenting opinion" (39,000) and "Notes from Zhirinovsky"(30,000). Similar posts received tens of thousands of views in “VKontakte"(examples here, here, here And here) And social networks X. They also wrote about the supposedly deceased Ukrainian extreme sportsman in LiveJournal (here And here) and on the website Newsland.
The publications mentioned above report that the recording from the camera of the deceased parachutist was distributed by the Ukrainian media. However, “Verified” could not find similar news items in the press or the Ukrainian-language segment of social networks.
Moreover, if you conduct a reverse search on the screenshots given in the posts, you can find the video that was published on the Caters Clips YouTube channel back in September 2020. The excerpt, footage of which went viral on the RuNet in August 2024, begins at the mark 00:02. The full recording shows that the color of the parachute does not repeat the Russian tricolor; it has a different sequence of stripes: white, blue, red, blue, white. On the Newsflare website indicatedthat the video was filmed in July 2020.
In the video description it says, that the video captured a stunt performed by extreme sportsman Kyle Marquart, who, in order to increase the difficulty of the jump, set fire to his main parachute with a flare gun, falling from a height of 7,000 feet (more than 2.1 km). However, Marquart then deployed his orange reserve parachute and landed safely. He performed a dangerous stunt over the city of Austin in Texas.
The earliest publication about the deceased Ukrainian paratrooper “Verified” was found in the Telegram channel “and here is my Yandex wallet"(30,000 views). There the post appeared on August 22 at 10:39 Moscow time. Description of this channel reads, that the author publishes notes of a humorous nature: “Parody, satire on political reality. Only verified fakes.” Previously we have repeatedly sorted it out cases when other channels, public pages and media passed off fiction from “but my Yandex wallet” as real news. In addition, one of several more popular satirical Telegram channels called “Pussy"(189,000 views).
Thus, the Ukrainian did not crash to death after he set fire to the main parachute in the colors of the tricolor and was unable to open the reserve one in the colors of the Ukrainian flag. The owners of large Telegram channels and public pages on VKontakte once again spread satirical news under the guise of the real thing.
Cover photo: @CatersClips (YouTube)
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