Putin spokesman downplays Russia using video game footage as evidence of U.S. of aiding ISIS

The Kremlin on Wednesday downplayed the seriousness of Russia’s Ministry of Defense being caught sharing a video-game screenshot and calling it “irrefutable evidence” of the United States aiding Islamic State terrorists.

Russia’s defense ministry shared several images on its Facebook and Twitter accounts Tuesday morning allegedly showing U.S. forces providing aerial cover for an Islamic State, or ISIS, convoy, but the posts were deleted within hours after one of the images was revealed to have been taken from a 2015 video game, “AC-130 Gunship Simulator: Special Ops Squadron.”

“Mistakes happen, and, let’s say, there is nothing terrible if they are timely adjusted, which was done in the Ministry of Defense,” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Wednesday

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“I would not exaggerate the significance of this error,” Mr. Peskov said, The Moscow Times reported.

Russia’s defense ministry said it launched an internal investigation and is investigating a civilian employee believed to be responsible for the slip-up, state-owned media reported.

In its since-deleted social media posts, Russia’s Ministry of Defense labeled the video-game screenshot and three other images “irrefutable evidence that there is no struggle against terrorism as the whole global community believes.”

“The U.S. are actually covering the ISIS combat units to recover their combat capabilities, redeploy and use them to promote the American interests in the Middle East,” the defense ministry said.

The posts were removed within hours after the Bellingcat investigative group showed that one of the images was identical to a still from “Special Ops Squadron.”

The Conflict Intelligence Team, a separate investigative group that analyzes Russian military activities, subsequently demonstrated that the other images touted by Moscow as “irrefutable evidence” were actually lifted from bombing footage released by the Iraqi Ministry of Defense in 2016.

The images “represent just one more episode of a recurrent pattern of defamation, distortion, distraction that seeks to discredit the U.S. and our successful coalition fight against ISIS in Syria,” Marine Corps Maj. Adrian Rankine-Galloway, a Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday.