Putin showed Oliver Stone a video where Russia's Air Force supposedly attacked terrorists in Syria. It was actually footage of Americans fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan
In Oliver Stone’s Showtime special “The Putin Interviews,” there is a scene where the Russian president shows Stone a video on an iPhone supposedly depicting “our aviation at work” in Syria, Putin says.
You can catch a snippet of the video in the teaser trailer for the show’s third installment. The moment occurs at 49 minutes, 10 seconds, into the third episode.
It turns out that Putin actually showed Stone footage of an American Apache helicopter attacking Taliban forces in Afghanistan. The original video first appeared on the website Military.com in 2013.
Further complicating things, the video Putin showed Stone also contains an added audio track where the pilots are speaking Russian. Strangely, it seems this may actually chatter be recorded between Ukrainian pilots conducting military operations over Donetsk.
On YouTube, there is a copy of the American video with pilot chatter in Russian. It’s possible that this was the video Putin showed to Oliver Stone.
Researchers from the Conflict Intelligence Team compared the video played for Stone to frames from the footage of the U.S. Apache helicopter in Afghanistan, and found that they’re a perfect match.
The Russian state television network Pervyi Kanal will air the third episode of “The Putin Interviews” on Wednesday, June 21.
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