A video showing fighter jets covering the presidential aircraft of Russian President Vladimir Putin is being shared online with a false claim that it shows Indian Air Force (IAF) jets escorting him in Indian airspace during his recent visit.
BOOM found that the video is from 2017 when Putin visited Syria accompanied by fighter jets of the Russian Aerospace Forces.
Putin arrived in India on December 4, 2025, for his two-day state visit for the 23rd India Russia Annual Summit.
The Claim
An X user @RealBababanaras shared the video with the caption, "IAF fighter jets escorting President Putin's airplane while entering Indian Airspace. Long live India-Russia Friendship." BOOM has fact checked the handle multiple times in the past for peddling misinformation.
Click here to view the post and here for the archive.
What We Found: Video Is From Putin's Visit To Syria
1. Video Is From 2017: We first broke the video into keyframes and ran a reverse image search on them using Google Lens. The search led us to multiple posts from 2017 carrying the same visuals. One such post was uploaded on December 12, 2017, stating that the footage shows Russian President Vladimir Putin watching fighter jets escort him to Syria.
Another YouTube channel also uploaded the video with the logo of the Russian state controlled news network RT, stating that the footage shows Su-30SM jets escorting the presidential plane ahead of Putin's unannounced visit to Syria.
2. Video Reports By Russian News Outlets: Taking a cue, we ran a related keyword search and found news reports by Russia based outlets Sputnik News and RIA Novosti from 2017 with similar visuals. The reports stated that the footage shows Putin's jet accompanied by fighters of the Russian Aerospace Forces during his visit to the Khmeimim airbase in Syria in December 2017.
We also compared the visuals in the 2017 reports with the viral video and found a match between them.
3. Interview of Su-30 Pilot Who Covered Putin’s Plane in Syria: On December 16, 2017, RT published an article carrying an interview with one of the Su-30SM pilots who covered Vladimir Putin’s plane on his trip to Syria at that time. The pilot said that the Su-30SM jets were heat traps for missiles that could have been fired at Putin’s plane.
The pilot named Yury told a Rossiya 1 correspondent, "We were flying at maximum capacity because our planes have different speeds and we were protecting the presidential plane from both sides." Putin later also thanked the airmen for showing their courage, the report said.
