No, these videos do not show Russian military engaging with Wagner troops

Context

In the wake of the dramatic turn of events between the Russian military and the country’s private mercenary force Wagner Group, videos allegedly showing clashes between the two forces are doing the rounds on social media. 

Tension between the Russian military and Wagner began on June 23, when Wagner’s chief Yevgeny Prigozhin reportedly accused Russia’s military of attacking a Wagner camp and killing a “huge amount” of his men. He sent an armed convoy towards Moscow in an act of “armed rebellion.”

However, the revolt subsided in less than 24 hours when Prigozhin ordered his forces to turn back and agreed to leave Russia to “avoid bloodshed.”

We have found several users sharing these two videos claiming to show fights between the Russian military and the Wagner group. The text accompanying both the videos reads, “WAR IN RUSSIA Russian Air Force Engaging Wagner PMC Ground Troops.”

We found that these are video game simulations and not real war footage.

In Fact

We fragmented one of the videos using the InVid tool and performed a reverse image search on the keyframes. This led us to a YouTube short uploaded on March 31 titled “Russia's Elite Air Force vs Ukrainian SAM Missiles Combat | MilSim Arma 3." 

The video description stated that it is a virtual game simulation and added that the video is from Arma 3, a military tactical shooter video game developed and published by Bohemia Interactive. The YouTube channel where we found this video was called “Battle POPs”, with 255k subscribers, and describes it as a “Military Simulation Channel.” The channel has uploaded several similar military simulation videos. We also found a tweet, shared on June 20 that uses the same video. The caption of the tweet reads, “MilSim Arma 3, military simulation video game beta release.” 

In the comment section of the second video, we noticed several users claiming that it shows “Arma 3” visuals. Taking a cue from this, we ran a keyword search on YouTube and found the same video uploaded on February 24, 2022 by a channel called Compared Comparison. The title of the video reads, “Fighter Aircraft attack C-RAM - Phalanx CIWS - Military Simulation - ArmA 3.” 

A longer version of the video is linked in the description. According to the description in the longer version, it is an Arma 3 video game simulation. The text in the description reads, “I love to make these simulation videos for you and I am happy that you all like them a lot! The graphics of ArmA 3 are very good, it almost looks like real life. Rather simulations than real war!” 

'Compared Comparison' is a verified YouTube channel with 1.43 million subscribers that describes itself as creating “modern cinematic military films using ArmA 3 and DCS as the engine to create the stories and simulations.” The channel has uploaded multiple military simulation videos with similar graphics. The viral video has also been used earlier to falsely claim that it shows Russia-Ukraine conflict.

The Verdict

One of the viral videos has been available on YouTube since February 2022 and the other since March 2023. From the YouTube videos, it is clear that they are video game simulations and not actual clashes as claimed. Therefore, we have marked this as false.