Old photo misrepresented as coffins of ‘British soldiers killed in Ukraine war’

Misinformation about Western countries’ involvement in the war in Ukraine has continued to spread online almost three years after Putin’s full-scale invasion. In a recent case, a photo ricocheted across social media posts that falsely claimed it shows coffins of British soldiers killed in the conflict. However, the picture predates the war by more than a decade and was taken after 14 British servicemen died in a 2006 plane crash in Afghanistan.

“Recently, 18 members of the British special forces successfully infiltrated Russia from Kyiv, but they all returned to their country in wooden boxes,” read a post on Chinese platform Weibo from November 3, 2024.

Text on the picture reads: “18 British Special Forces were killed in Ukraine. They were liquidated in the Odessa Region.”

Britain is one of several Western countries to have supplied Ukraine with weapons in its war with Russia, but there has been no announcement that British troops were deployed to the war-torn country.

At the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky invited foreigners to join an “international legion” that would fight side-by-side with Ukrainians against Russian troops.

The Russian military said it had killed 5,962 foreign fighters in Ukraine since the start of the war, Russian state news agency TASS reported in March 2024 (archived link).

Despite British government advice warning citizens against travel to Ukraine “to fight, or to assist others engaged in the war”, several Britons have reportedly been captured or killed in the conflict (archived links here and here).

The photo spread in social media posts in various languages that falsely claimed it showed Britons killed in Ukraine, including in English, French, Czech, Polish, Slovak, Spanish and Russian.

However, the image was taken in 2006 and is unrelated to the war.

Plane crash

A reverse image search and keyword searches on Google and Russian search engine Yandex found the image published on news agency PA Media‘s website (archived link).

According to the photo caption, it was taken by British Royal Air Force (RAF) photographer Ross Tilly on September 13, 2006 and shows the coffins of 14 British soldiers who were repatriated after they were killed in an air crash in Afghanistan.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the image in false posts (left) and on PA Media’s database (right):

In the original picture, two British flags and the Royal Air Force’s logo are visible in the aircraft’s hull. One of the flags was replaced with the Ukrainian flag in the false image.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the falsely shared image (left) and the original image (right), with the alteration highlighted by AFP:

The soldiers were reportedly killed after their 37-year-old Nimroad MR2 reconnaissance plane exploded mid-air when leaking fuel spilt onto a hot air pipe moments after mid-air refuelling (archived link).

The picture was also used in a BBC report published on September 12, 2006 (archived link).

AFP has debunked a wave of misinformation about the war in Ukraine.