The video is a fabrication designed to mimic the visual language of a mainstream news outlet. While Spain has experienced a series of railway accidents in recent months, none has been designated a terrorist attack by authorities. The misleading clip repurposes footage from a genuine tragedy — the collision of two high-speed trains in southern Spain — stripping it of context and grafting on false claims. Ukrainian refugees have no connection to that incident or to any of the subsequent rail disruptions cited by the video’s authors.
Social media posts circulating in recent days assert that a train collision in Spain has been “officially recognized as a terrorist attack” and that five Ukrainian refugees are under suspicion.
The viral clip alleging a terrorist attack on Spain’s rail network and the search for “five Ukrainian refugees” is fabricated. While the video mimics the visual style and branding of Euronews, the outlet has aired no such report and has published nothing resembling these claims on its website or social media channels. Euronews has previously documented similar forgeries circulating under its logo, in which Ukrainian refugees were falsely blamed for arson, criminal activity, or economic disruptions across Europe.
This technique — appropriating the logos, visual language, and even cloned websites of well-known media outlets — has become a recurring feature of Russia’s information operations, designed to launder disinformation through the appearance of credible Western journalism and to push its preferred narratives into the public sphere.
A major rail disaster did occur in Spain: a collision between two high-speed trains in the country’s south left more than 40 people dead and hundreds injured. Investigators later determined that the crash was the result of technical failures, pointing in particular to a damaged welded rail joint that created a gap between track sections — one of the central factors identified in the catastrophe.
Spanish authorities and rail operators have attributed the incident to an infrastructure failure and have not classified it as a terrorist attack. They have issued no statements about suspects and have certainly not reported that “five Ukrainian refugees” are being sought in connection with the crash.
StopFake has previously documented a series of comparable disinformation cases built around fabricated Euronews-style videos, including false claims that a Ukrainian refugee in Poland profited from “staged car accidents” and that Ukrainians allegedly celebrated on social media a deadly bar fire in Switzerland.
