Russia TV aired video game footage as actual aerial combat footage from military action in Syria. The mistake on a program honoring a downed Su-25 fighter pilot was caught by social media users.
Viewers on Russia's social media website Pikabu, the country's equivalent to Reddit, spotted the gunsight footage of an attack on a truck as actually coming from the Arma-3 tactical computer game, the BBC News reported.
The military tribute was aired in February on the weekly Russian program Voskresnoye Vremya on state-owned Channel One television. The video clip was used during part of the program dedicated to Russian pilot Alexander Prokhorenko, who was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Russian Federation after being shot down in Syria and killed, CNN reported.
Prokhorenko was surrounded by Islamic militants fighting around the ancient city of Palmyra when he called in an airstrike on his own position, CNN said. As the program showed how Su-25s operated in Syria using archive footage, the gunsight clip from the video game was edited in.
Channel One admitted that the video game footage was inserted erroneously, saying "the use of this frame was a mistake by the video editing director, who took it from the archive," per the BBC.
The television channel's press office said, according to talk radio station Govorit Moskva, that the clip was from a previous story on computer games that was in the station's video archives.
In November, the Russian Defense Ministry charged that the U.S. military was supporting the Islamic State and used several aerial video shots to prove its claim, CNN said, but those videos turned out to be from a 2015 promotional video for a gunship simulator video game.
Last week, during his annual address to Russia's Parliament, President Vladimir Putin rolled out a video hyping the nation's military tech that featured multiple nuclear warheads streaking through space before raining down on what appears to be the outline of Florida.
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