Does a video on social media show soldiers from a Russian military division based in Siberia on their way in 2023 to the Ukrainian front? No, that's not true: The footage shows a group of soldiers from Russia's Tatarstan region in late 2022 marching along a snow-covered road.
The claim appeared in a video on TikTok (archived here) published by @nikolaynikolov257 on November 6, 2023, with a caption translated into English from Bulgarian by Lead Stories staff that reads:
The Siberian divisions are on their way to the front!
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Nov 14 08:49:32 2023 UTC)
The claim is misleading in both time and location. A search using reverse Google image search, archived (here), conducted on November 14, 2023, found that the same footage can be seen in different videos, seen here and here, published on TikTok in December 2022.
According to the captions and hashtags in the 2022 videos, the group of soldiers shown is from the Republic of Tatarstan, which is part of the Russian Federation and is located in the European part of central Russia, which is not the Siberian part of Russia.
The text of the TikTok videos published in 2022 does not contain information confirming that the footage of a moving military formation shows a whole military division unit. According to Britannica, the size of modern divisions is between 12,000 and 20,000, a number significantly larger than the soldiers shown in the video.
