In mid-August 2025, a video went viral on the Internet in which US Air Force pilots allegedly paid tribute to the Russian president. We have verified the correctness of such statements.
In the 11-second video, the condensation trail from five aircraft forms a pentagram, that is, a five-pointed star. It was alleged that in this way on August 15, 2025, American F-22 fighter jets greeted Vladimir Putin in the skies over the Elmendorf-Richardson military base in Alaska, where the Russian president met with his counterpart Donald Trump. “What the American media did not show yesterday,” wrote the authors of the publications. How stated in an interview with “Arguments and Facts”, Aviation Major General Vladimir Popov, drawing such a star was not easy and the pilots probably spent a long time preparing for Putin’s arrival.
The video received the greatest distribution on Telegram, where the channels “Putin on Telegram"(223,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Uncle Slava"(190,000), "Russian Kolobok and green stick"(121,000), Voblya (123,000) and "First People's"(101,000).
On August 15, Vladimir Putin’s Il-96 aircraft flew landing at the Elmendorf-Richardson military base in the largest city in Alaska, Anchorage. On the way, the Russian president was accompanied by an escort of four American fighter jets, and while he walked along the red carpet, talking with Trump, in the sky flew by American strategic bomber B-2, accompanied by four F-35 fighters. Western media regarded it's like a show of strength.
It’s easy to see that not a single more or less authoritative American media outlet wrote about the star in the sky over Alaska. Moreover, authoritative Russian media did not report this, with the exception of a publication in “Rossiyskaya newspaper”, which at the time of writing the analysis had already been deleted.
Let's take a closer look at the viral video. It is assumed that it was taken on the runway of the airfield at the base in Anchorage at the moment when the plane of the Russian President was either approaching or had already landed. However, on real video recordingsThose who captured these minutes show a completely different weather: there was heavy cloudiness over Anchorage that day.
In addition, the terrain does not match: Alaska has rich vegetation, and not sparse trees against the backdrop of mountains.
Earliest publication The viral video, which was discovered by Verified, appeared on August 9, 2025, six days before the meeting between Putin and Trump. It was taken by Chilean photographer Christian Felipe Stein on his account in Instagram. Stein films air shows quite often in flying club city of Rancagua. The next series of such photographs and videos was published in early August.
Stein captioned the viral video: “May our star [apparently referring to the symbol from the Chilean flag] never disappear from the sky. And let our tricolor not disappear from republican events. May we never lack them." The photographer also noted the demonstration squadron Halcones (“Falcons” - Spanish), whose pilots perform aerobatic maneuvers in many of Stein’s photographs. Previously appeared on the Internet video with a five-pointed star in their design. The new footage received almost 20,000 likes.
The fact that the video was filmed at the airfield in Rancagua is confirmed by a frame from the service Google Street View.
Thus, real footage taken in Chile in August 2025 was passed off by Russian propaganda as video from Alaska. The earliest publication with an incorrect description, found by “Verified”, appeared in the Telegram channel AviaNews August 16 at 09:03 Moscow time.
Cover photo: social networks
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