Photo of Russian intercontinental ballistic missile falsely shared as belonging to Ethiopia
The post, published on March 12, 2025 reads: 'Ethiopia's Most Powerful Intercontinental Ballistic Missile in the World #Ethiopia'.
Image
Screenshot of the false post, taken on March 24, 2025
The post contains two images of a large missile being transported on a snowy road. Upon closer inspection, it appears to be the same photograph used twice, but one image is flipped and cropped more tightly.
Similar posts were also shared here and here on Facebook.
On March 5, 2025, during a visit to a local ammunition factory that recently underwent an expansion, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said that the country has improved its capacity to produce ammunition domestically and is now able to export its production (archived here).
Several days later, on March 8, 2025, Abiy inaugurated Sky Wing Industry, a company that manufactures unmanned drones for civilian and military purposes (archived here).
The developments came amid tensions in the conflict-ridden Horn of Africa due to landlocked Ethiopia's pursuit of access to the Red Sea, which has angered neighboring Eritrea. Abiy recently said that his country would not invade Eritrea to gain access to the sea (archived here).
However, the photos do not show an intercontinental ballistic system belonging to Ethiopia.
Russian Yars missile system
The first clue that the photo may not have been taken in Ethiopia is the snow-covered road, as snow is a rare occurrence in the country.
AFP Fact Check conducted reverse image searches on the image and found the original photo published more than four years ago.
The Russian defense ministry originally published the photo on February 25, 2021 (archived here).
The photo was captioned 'A column of Yars mobile ground-based missile systems marches from Ivanovo Oblast to Moscow Region to prepare for a military parade on Red Square'.
Ivanovo is a region in western Russia, northeast of Moscow.
Image
Screenshot of the original photo shared by the Russian defence ministry, taken on March 25, 2025
The photo, credited to the ministry (here and here), was also used in several reports about Russian ballistic missile systems (archived here and here).
Mark Cancian, senior defense and security advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, confirmed to AFP Fact Check that the photo shows a Russian missile system.
"This is a doctored photo of a Russian Topol (SS-27) in the snow," Mark said. 'There is no way Ethiopia has an ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile].'
In the false post, the original photo was edited to add the Ethiopian flag.
The RS-24 Yars, also referred to as SS-27 Mod 2, is a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 10,500 kilometres that has been in service since 2010 (archived here).
The Arms Control Association, a US-based research and advocacy group, lists countries that own ballistic missiles. Ethiopia is not among them (archived here).
Ethiopia's government has never mentioned owning any type of intercontinental ballistic missile.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
LeMonde
5 hours ago
- LeMonde
In Ukraine, the Dnipropetrovsk region faces threats of a Russian breakthrough toward Pokrovsk
For nearly three months, Anna's friends have been leaving the small town of Mejove, which had about 7,000 residents before the war. Now, only Anna – a 17-year-old who preferred not to give her last name – remains as of Thursday, June 12, serving drinks to her new clientele: soldiers either returning from the front for a brief respite or about to be deployed. The town's atmosphere mirrored that of the café − a mix of civilians and soldiers along streets crisscrossed by plain khaki vehicles. Russian armed forces were drawing closer. "Of course it's scary," Anna said, her face nonetheless calm, as she insisted on completing her service at this small café in the Dnipropetrovsk region, located roughly 15 kilometers west of the border with Donetsk − the epicenter of fighting in the Donbas. In recent days, after months of slowly gaining territory in the neighboring region at the cost of heavy losses in personnel and equipment, Moscow authorities declared having reached and crossed the border of the Dnipropetrovsk region – a claim Kyiv immediately contested. The announcements were accompanied by videos of Russian soldiers saying they had crossed the border area. As early as June 8, the Russian Ministry of Defense asserted that some of its units had reached the border and would continue their offensive further West. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the next day that the offensive aimed to create a "buffer zone" with the Donetsk region, which is partially occupied but over which the Kremlin claims full sovereignty.
France 24
5 hours ago
- France 24
US adversaries fuel disinformation about LA protests
The findings from researchers at the disinformation watchdog NewsGuard illustrate how foreign adversaries of the United States are exploiting deep divisions in American society as a tactic of information warfare. NewsGuard said Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state-affiliated sources have published around 10,000 posts and articles about the demonstrations that recently erupted in Los Angeles, advancing false claims framing the city as "ground zero in an American apocalypse." Seizing on the political rift between President Donald Trump and Governor Gavin Newsom, pro-China accounts on X and Chinese platforms such as Douyin and Weibo have peddled unfounded claims that California was ready to secede from the United States and declare independence. Meanwhile, Tehran-based newspapers have peddled the false claim that popular Iranian singer-songwriter Andranik Madadian had been detained by the National Guard in Los Angeles, in an apparent effort to portray the United States as an authoritarian state. NewsGuard quoted Madadian, better known by his stage name Andy, as denying the claim, stating: "I am fine. Please don't believe these rumors." Russian media and pro-Russian influencers, meanwhile, has embraced right-wing conspiracy theories, including the unfounded claim that the Mexican government was stoking the demonstrations against Trump's immigration policies. "The demonstrations are unfolding at the intersection of multiple vulnerabilities such as eroded trust in institutions, AI chatbots amplifying false claims about the unrest, political polarization, and a rollback of safety and moderation efforts by major platforms," McKenzie Sadeghi, a researcher with NewsGuard, told AFP. "As a result, foreign actors have a wide-open playing field to flood the zone with falsehoods at a faster rate and fewer barriers compared to previous moments of unrest," she added. The apparent alignment across the three countries was noteworthy, Sadeghi said. "While Russia, China, and Iran regularly push their own unique forms of disinformation, it's less common to see them move in such a coordinated fashion like this," she said. "This time, state media outlets have escalated their messaging to advance their geopolitical interests and deflect attention from their own domestic crises." The disinformation comes on top of false narratives promoted by US-based influencers. In recent days, conservative social media users have circulated two photographs of brick piles they claimed were strategically placed for the California protesters to hurl at police and inflame violence. The photos were cited as proof that the protests were fueled by nonprofit organizations supported by George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who has long been a bogeyman for the far right. But AFP's fact-checkers found that one photo was lifted from an online marketplace, where a Malaysian hardware dealer uploaded it years ago, while the other was snapped near a construction site in New Jersey. "Every time there's a popular protest, the old clickbaity 'pallets of bricks' hoax shows up right on cue," the Social Media Lab, a research center at the Toronto Metropolitan University, wrote on the platform Bluesky. © 2025 AFP
AFP
5 hours ago
- AFP
Land grab conspiracies spread alongside Canadian wildfires
"This isn't just wildfire policy -- it's a global land control strategy operating through 'sustainability' language," a June 1, 2025 Facebook post claims. The text claims the "Rio Law" is a global framework established to encourage sustainability that can be used to reclassify land in Canada for resource extraction and forbid residents from returning home after they are evacuated due to wildfires. The text spread across Facebook, Instagram and X partly echoing debunked theories about Agenda 21 and moves to push fire-displaced residents into "smart cities" where they will be subjected to strict technology surveillance or face restriction of movement. Simultaneously, users on Facebook and TikTok made additional claims about land grabs precipitated by wildfire evacuations invoking either controversy over Ontario province's Bill 5 or images of a possible pipeline route, which would supposedly cross Manitoba to reach Hudson's Bay. Image Collage of screenshots of Facebook posts taken June 13, 2025 Conditions are primed for another massive wildfire season in Canada, as the over 3.6 million hectares (13.8 thousand square miles) of area burned so far in 2025 has already surpassed the year-to-date average for the past decade (archived here). More than 30,000 people have evacuated their homes in western Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba provinces, including remote Indigenous communities fleeing south. f June 12, some 7,000 evacuees in Saskatchewan province began returning home. Media report people will also soon be allowed to go back to communities Manitoba, but many areas remain under evacuation orders there and in neighboring Ontario. res hit as trade tensions with the United States have triggered the new federal government to open discussions about access to Canadian natural gas and coveted minerals. But the potential projects, including pipelines, raise concerns of environmental impact and Indigenous consent. Nevertheless, experts told AFP it was highly improbable for a wildfire to be used to intentionally target specific areas for resource exploitation. Unforeseeable spread Mike Flannigan a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University (archived here) said a wildfire is defined by three factors: how it starts, what it can burn through, and the weather conditions around it. Many fires are started -- mostly unintentionally -- by humans, he said, but fuel and weather play too large of a role in where flames spread, making it nearly impossible to start a wildfire that could successfully target a premeditated location. Flannigan also pointed out that climate change creates conditions that suck up moisture from vegetation and generate stronger wind, a mix conducive to more unwieldy fires. "The drier the fuel, the easier it is for a fire to start," he told AFP on June 5. Wildland firefighters use burning techniques to impede the path of smaller and less intense fires and keep them away from populated areas (archived here), but Flannigan said once the blazes reach the tops of the trees -- also known as a crown fire (archived here) -- response becomes limited. "There's only two options then: one is evacuate, get out of the way until the weather changes or the fuels change, or do a burnout operation, which is where you get in front, where the wildfire is spreading, start a new fire that's fighting against it," he said. Hossein Bonakdari, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Ottawa (archived here), analyzed indicators such as leaf coverage and winter snow area to predict the probability of wildfire in certain parts of Canada. Even with these prediction tools, Bonakdari noted, a plethora of minute variables dictating a wildfire's spread exist, making it impossible to foresee whether it could reach a certain location. "I need a dataset of today to do the prediction for tomorrow," he said on June 6. Resource regulation While the claim that wildfires could be used to clear certain areas for resource extraction may be unsubstantiated, concerns about infringement on Indigenous treaty rights in relation to Ontario's Bill 5 exist (archived here). The legislation gives the province authority to declare "special economic zones" (archived here), overriding local laws for resource projects in a move that Indigenous leaders say will conflict with the government's treaty obligations. Ontario Premier Doug Ford plans, for example, on extracting minerals from the Ring of Fire deposit in the north of the province. Other Canadian premiers also recently floated the idea of a pipeline through Manitoba to end in Hudson's Bay, similar to what has been referenced in some land grab claims online. Using reverse image search, AFP traced the map in those posts to a 2023 blog proposing a path for pipelines (archived here). However, no formalized proposals for such a project could be found. The posts also the 1992 Rio Declaration (archived here). The document produced at the United Nations' Earth Summit does not mention removing people from land. Rather, it lays out principles of protecting environmental and developmental systems, to which it says states should agree. AFP previously debunked claims about resident displacement to extract resources following hurricane evacuations. Read more of AFP's reporting on wildfire misinformation here.
