After Iran accidentally shot down Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 (PS752) during a time of high tension with the United States, Russian fringe media outlets picked up a conspiracy theory that the United States had brought down the plane with a drone strike.

This would not be the first time that Russian media explicitly ignored widely known facts about a plane being shot down. It is internationally acknowledged, thanks in part to extensive reporting by open-source research outlet Bellingcat, that Russia was responsible for the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) in eastern Ukraine in July 2014, yet Russia continues to deny any involvement in the crash. Indeed, it still actively blames Ukraine for the shootdown of MH17. Putting an argument forward that anybody other than Iran was responsible for the recent PS752 shootdown allows Russia to maintain its narrative of innocence around the earlier MH17 shootdown.

According to Flight Radar, on January 8, 2020, PS752 had just departed en route to Kyiv from Tehran when it lost contact two minutes after takeoff and crashed near the city of Parand, southwest of Tehran. Initially, Iran and its affiliated media incorrectly claimed the crash was the result of a mechanical failure of some kind. On January 11, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani admitted that the plane had been shot down by the country’s military “due to human error” after several world leaders and experts suggested Iran was at fault.

After Rouhani’s admission, Russian fringe media outlets nevertheless doubled down on the drone strike theory, which first appeared on South African clickbait outlet Live Report but failed to gain significant attention until it was picked up by pro-Kremlin media.

A South African origin

The unfounded theory originated on South African clickbait website Live Report. Most of the articles in Russian in the DFRLab’s analysis did not directly link to the Live Report article but referred to the outlet in the text. The article in question cited an “Iranian military source” as saying that Flight 752 may have been shot down by an MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a drone “now in service only in the U.S. military.” The article did not receive wide traction on Facebook or Twitter, and none of the major media outlets corroborated the account provided by Live Report’s Iranian military source.