Fact check: Image shows Ukrainian flag taken down in 2015, not 2022 Russian invasion

Sudiksha Kochi, USA TODAY

April 28, 2022 at 7:59 PM·3 min read

A woman wrapped in a Ukrainian flag stands in front of Russian troops during a rally against Russian occupation in Kherson, Ukraine, on March 19.

The claim: A collage shows a Ukrainian flag taken down in Mariupol

As Russian bombardments intensify in Ukraine, some social media users are sharing a photo that implies Russian forces have succeeded in the key city of Mariupol.

An Instagram post shared April 18 shows a collage of a man atop a building replacing a Ukrainian flag, which has a blue and yellow stripe, with a Soviet flag, which has a red banner and a golden hammer and sickle.

"Illich, steel factory, Mariupol. Victory is Red. For the motherland," reads the caption of the post.

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The post generated over 2,000 likes in less than two weeks. Similar posts in this vein have spread widely on Facebook and Twitter.

But these images are years old.

The pictures in the collage have surfaced online for seven years and show a building in the city of Debaltseve, as independent fact-checking organizations have reported.

USA TODAY reached out to the social media users who shared the claim for comment.

Collage dates back to 2015

The images seen in the social media post date back to at least 2015.

The scene appears near the end of a 1-minute YouTube video Voxkomm International, which identifies itself as a media project, shared seven years ago.

The Voxkomm video was captioned, "Prizrak Brigade, Communist militiaman raises the Soviet flag on freed Debaltsevo." The same scene is described similarly in a tweet Visegrad24, a group that aggregates news from European countries, shared April 18 with the caption, "This is what the occupying forces did in Debaltseve in 2015 after taking control of the city."

Fact check: Baseless claims that Russian attack on Mariupol hospital was 'staged'

USA TODAY could not independently verify the location of the video. But the description lines up with events in that region at the time.

The Prizrak Brigade, a separatist group, participated in "some of the heaviest battles in Ukraine’s pro-Russian east" since 2014, according to AFP.

In 2014, Russian-backed rebels in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions "proclaimed the creation of 'people's republics'" and declared independence from Ukraine, according to ABC News. This sparked a series of conflicts such as the one in Debaltseve, which pro-Russian forces conquered in 2015.

Our rating: Missing context

Based on our research, we rate MISSING CONTEXT the claim that a collage shows a Ukrainian flag taken down in Mariupol amid the Russian invasion. The images have surfaced on social media since at least 2015 and are unrelated to the 2022 invasion. USA TODAY couldn't verify the location of the building in the collage, but online posts indicate it is in Debaltseve.