Fact Check: Edited Image Suggesting Ukrainian Farmer Stole A Russian Soyuz Rocket Goes Viral

An image of a tractor carrying a Soyuz rocket is being shared on social media with a claim that an Ukrainian farmer stole a Russian Soyuz rocket.

Facebook users shared the image with the caption, “Just saw this breaking news item about a Ukrainian farmer stealing a Russian Soyuz rocket. They ain’t ever gettin’ it back. Love those guys!”

Here’s the link to the above post.

FACT CHECK 

NewsMobile fact-checked the image and found it to be edited.

While examining the image, we noticed that the colour grading of the tractor was different from the rest of the picture.

Taking a cue from this, we then cropped that picture into two parts and ran them through Reverse Image Search separately.

We found the image of the rocket on a site called space.com. The article was published on October 12, 2018, with the headline, “In Photos: Space Station Crew’s Harrowing Abort Landing After Soyuz Launch Failure.”

In the article, the image was shared with the caption, “The Soyuz rocket rolls out to the launchpad on Oct. 9, 2018.” However, no tractor can be seen in the original image.

The same image was also shared on Flickr and Getty Images in 2018.

Meanwhile, searching for the original image of the tractor we found that similar pictures of the green tractor were shared by multiple websites.