Has Russia destroyed NATO bases along the Danube River, in Ukraine, bringing the war close to Bulgaria? No, that's not true: There is no evidence or credible reports of such an attack. The same footage used to corroborate the claim circulating on social media has been posted by multiple Russian sources, describing it as an attack carried out by Russian forces against the positions of the Ukrainian military forces in the region of Kherson on the Dnieper River, not the Danube, hundreds of kilometers away from the Bulgarian border.
The claim appeared in a video on TikTok (archived here) published by @andonaleksandarov on October 3, 2023.
The Bulgarian text at the top of the video reads:
War is coming to us
The text under the photo, also in Bulgarian, adds:
The Russian army destroyed NATO bases along the Danube in Ukraine!
(All translations from Bulgarian to English by Lead Stories staff).
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Thu Oct 5 09:08:00 2023 UTC)
The TikTok shows a screenshot with the headline of a piece of content published by Novinite72.eu, a website that has published misinformation in the past and is currently suspended. It used a video as a source for its claim. The video, showing the attack over the Kherson region, was published on October 2, 2023, on a Bulgarian YouTube channel, and repeated the claim of the alleged attack on NATO bases on the Danube.
No evidence or media reports from reliable news sites support the claim that Russia destroyed NATO bases located on the Danube in Ukraine. A search of phrases used in the claim in English and Bulgarian, performed by Lead Stories on October 5, 2023, using Google News' index of thousands of credible news sites, did not return any results.
In addition, none of the Russian sources that released the footage of the attack featured in the TikTok video mentioned the Danube River or NATO bases. All the posts in Telegram channels, VKontakte, and media publications describe a Russian strike with an X-38 missile against positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Kherson region, which destroyed a railway infrastructure.
There is no information available to confirm the specific geolocation of the Russian attack. However, the topographic characteristic of the terrain, as well as the architectural features of the two visible bridges in the footage, correspond to the architectural details found at the Kherson Antonivka Road Bridge and the Antonivskyi railway bridge, specifically, whose distinctive design can be recognized in the video footage of the bridge in the foreground. The explosion in the video is in the area of the railway bridge visible in the footage, which supports the information shared by Russian sources, according to which the target of the attack was railway infrastructure.
However, there are multiple reports of Russian strikes in the area of the city of Kherson, but no Ukrainian footage documenting the railway infrastructure attacked, as Ukraine does not typically share information regarding its military positions. A search performed by Lead Stories on October 5, 2023, using Google Advanced Search, for the period September 29 - October 5, 2023, found no footage documenting that.
The source of the TikTok video claim is easily traceable, as the website's name is visible in the screenshot displayed. Notably, in the article's title, a spelling error was made in the word "Russian," which was then copied by users sharing the claim. The site in question has been proven to be linked to the spread of fake news. Lead Stories has already debunked false claims shared by the website.
