Were Azerbaijan's 2020 Artsakh War Videos and Missile Photo Fake?

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First published October 13, 2020.

During the 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh), Armenian social media users and several outside analysts argued that some of the footage and photos promoted by Azerbaijani officials had been staged. Two cases drew the most attention: a video in which one man appeared to play two different roles, and a photo of an "unexploded" rocket near the city of Mingachevir that a defence analyst called almost certainly fake. Neither case was settled by an independent forensic investigation, but both are useful lessons in how wartime images should be read.

Social Media Users Challenged Nagorno-Karabakh War Footage in 2020

Below we look at what each piece of footage showed, what the critics pointed out, what can and cannot be concluded, and how anyone can check dramatic war images before sharing them.

The short answer

Critics found real red flags in both items, and Azerbaijan never produced the kind of evidence (unedited originals, verified locations, independent inspection of the rocket) that would have answered them. At the same time, a look-alike in two clips or an odd-looking crater is a reason to doubt, not final proof of a coordinated fake. The fairest summary is that the material was seriously questioned and not convincingly defended.

What is beyond doubt is that the war was fought online as hard as on the ground. Official accounts on both sides posted a constant stream of combat videos, casualty claims and accusations, and researchers later described coordinated attempts to push misleading content across social networks.

The video: one man, two roles?

The first case came from video clips shared in early October 2020. Viewers noticed that a man shown in one clip as a reporter, crouching for cover as if under bombardment, looked very much like a man presented in another clip as a soldier. If it was the same person, at least one of the scenes had been set up for the camera.

The Armenian state news agency Armenpress circulated the comparison on its Facebook page, embedded here:

It is worth being precise about what this kind of comparison proves. Similar faces, clothing and builds are common, and low-resolution phone footage makes matches look stronger than they are. To confirm staging you would want the original uploads with their metadata, the dates and places of filming, and ideally the uncut footage. That evidence was never published, so the claim stayed in the "highly suspicious, unconfirmed" category, which is also how the original critics framed it.

The Mingachevir rocket photo

The second case is better documented because the photo came from a senior official. On 4 October 2020, Hikmet Hajiyev, an assistant to President Ilham Aliyev and head of the foreign policy department of the Presidential Administration, posted pictures of a rocket lodged in tarmac. He presented it as proof that Armenia had deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure near an energy facility in Mingachevir, a city on the Kura River that is home to Azerbaijan's biggest hydroelectric dam and a major power station.

Within hours, users began questioning the scene. One of the most widely shared critiques came from Mike Mihajlovic, an engineer and defence technology commentator who describes himself as a former US Army officer. Looking at the photos, he listed several problems:

  • The surface looked drilled, not smashed. A rocket hitting asphalt at high speed should crack and throw up the surface; the hole looked neat.
  • No debris. There was no scattered asphalt, soil or fragments around the entry point.
  • A clean motor. The visible rear of the rocket showed no obvious burn marks from its propellant.
  • A wooden prop. A piece of wood appeared to be holding the rocket in position.
  • The wrong angle. He estimated the impact angle at roughly 55 degrees and argued that this did not fit the path of a propelled, unguided rocket, noting that rocket flight "is different than for artillery shells because it is propelled flight."

Armenian users quickly tagged him and other analysts with the photos, which is how the critique spread so fast:

Not every point in such a critique has to be right for the photo to be doubtful, and an analysis made from a few social media pictures has limits too. But the questions were specific, and the simple way to answer them, an independent look at the site and the munition, was not offered.

Why war footage is so easy to fake and so hard to check

The 2020 war began on 27 September with an Azerbaijani offensive along the line of contact. From the first day, Azerbaijan restricted internet access in the name of preventing "provocations"; Twitter was reportedly the main platform left open, and many people turned to VPNs. That meant much of what the world saw came through official accounts and state media.

Azerbaijan's media environment made outside checking harder still. Reporters Without Borders placed the country 168th of 180 in its 2020 World Press Freedom Index and describes almost the entire media sector as being under official control, with independent outlets forced to work from abroad. Armenia was not a perfect information space either: martial law there restricted reporting that could harm the defence effort, and both governments overstated enemy losses while downplaying their own.

Several features make wartime images especially slippery:

  • Old footage from other conflicts is easy to recycle with a new caption.
  • Strikes on civilians are emotionally powerful, so they are the claims most likely to be staged or exaggerated, and also the ones most likely to be dismissed unfairly.
  • Journalists often cannot reach the scene, so the first version online becomes the version that sticks.

How to check a war photo or video yourself

You do not need special software to avoid being fooled. A few habits catch most problems:

  1. Find the first upload. A reverse image search (Google Lens, Bing, Yandex or TinEye) often reveals whether a picture existed before the event it is said to show.
  2. Check the place. Signs, buildings, road markings and terrain can be compared with satellite views and street-level imagery.
  3. Check the time. Shadows, weather and seasonal vegetation should match the claimed date.
  4. Look at the physics. Explosions leave debris, scorch marks and damage patterns. A scene that looks tidy deserves a second look.
  5. Ask who benefits. Official accounts of governments at war are parties to the conflict, not neutral reporters.
  6. Wait for independent confirmation. Open-source investigators and established news agencies often verify or debunk viral images within days.

How the war ended

Fighting did not stop when the first truce was announced. A humanitarian ceasefire agreed in Moscow on 10 October collapsed almost at once, as did a second attempt on 17 October and a US-brokered truce on 26 October. The war ended only with a Russian-brokered agreement signed on 9 November 2020, after Azerbaijani forces captured Shusha. Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey and by Syrian fighters recruited for the campaign, regained large areas, and thousands of soldiers died on both sides along with many civilians. Three years later, in September 2023, Azerbaijan took the rest of the region and almost the entire Armenian population of Artsakh fled to Armenia.

Seen from today, the arguments over a staged clip or a propped-up rocket may look small next to those losses. They matter because images shape how outsiders judge who is attacking whom. Learning to ask where a picture came from, and whether it could have been staged, is one of the few defences ordinary readers have against being recruited into someone else's war propaganda.

Sources: Wikipedia: 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war; Reporters Without Borders: Azerbaijan; Wikipedia: Hikmet Hajiyev; Wikipedia: Mingachevir; Hikmet Hajiyev on X/Twitter, 4 October 2020; video via Armenpress on Facebook.

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