No, this video doesn’t show the Wagner Group arriving in Belarus

Issued on: 13/07/2023 – 15:58

4 min

If you only have a minute:

• Many social media accounts have been sharing a video of a military convoy, claiming that it shows the Wagner Group entering Belarus.

• Our team compared it to another video filmed during the Wagner Group’s armed uprising on June 23 and 24. We also identified where the video was filmed, leading us to conclude that the viral video was actually filmed during the rebellion in Russia. 

• After identifying the coordinates where the video was filmed, we determined that the vehicles are moving eastward, towards Russia, not to the west and Belarus.

The fact-check, in detail:

The day after Yevgeny Prigozhin led a short-lived rebellion against the Russian Ministry of Defence, calling for a change in military leadership, he came to a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Under the deal, the Wagner Group mercenaries would have to either demobilise, join the regular Russian army or follow their leader to exile in Belarus. 

On July 8 – against this backdrop of growing tension – Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian minister of the interior, posted a video showing a column of tanks and military vehicles moving along a road. He claimed the footage showed the Wagner Group mercenaries arriving in Belarus. 

The video, which has since garnered more than 450,000 views on Twitter, was also shared on Facebook— with captions in both French and English.

A video of the armed rebellion

A number of videos showing similar convoys were posted online during the Wagner Group’s rebellion in Russia.

Our colleagues at British fact-checking outlet Logically Facts tracked down another video, this one shared by the Twitter account @OSINTtechnical on June 24, that shows the same convoy, in the same place, filmed by a vehicle traveling in the opposite direction. The order of the vehicles, the vegetation and the markings on the road are all similar. 

During the uprising, the Wagner troops left the town of Rostov-on-Don in northern Russia and travelled along the M4 highway. The Twitter account @neonhandrail, which specialises in geolocation, was able to identify the exact location where this video was filmed by searching for a partially wooded two-lane road near the M4 highway near a building with a pointed roof. 

The video was filmed on a road near the town of Voronej, in Russia’s Voronej oblast. 

You can also see a large building with a pointed roof on the side of the road.

After identifying the coordinates where this video was filmed, we were able to determine that the convoy was going east and not towards the west, towards Belarus, as people claimed.

The video shows the Wagner forces during the uprising, likely filmed on June 24. It definitely isn’t proof that the mercenaries are in Belarus. 

After the rebellion against Moscow, Prigozhin was supposed to be exiled to Belarus, a Russian ally. However, the Belarusian president has insisted that the Wagner group is not present in his territory. On July 7, he even allowed journalists to visit the camp destined for Wagner fighters, which is, for the time being, entirely empty.

An anonymous Pentagon official told the New York Times that the leader of the Wagner group “was believed to be in Moscow, with no apparent restrictions on his movements.”