There’s a certain breed of conspiracy theorist online who tries to turn literally anything that’s happening in the news into their own pet cause. So it makes sense that some people who are obsessed with the war in Ukraine, and Russia’s invasion of the country in 2022, would see Ukraine in this latest bridge collapse.
The website ZeroHedge shared a screenshot that purports to show the captain of the Dali, the Singapore-flagged ship that caused the bridge collapse, was a man from Ukraine. ZeroHedge spread the idea in a blog post on Tuesday and Russian-linked accounts on X have run with the claim as well.
But as the BBC’s Shayan Sardarizadeh reports, the ship had a crew of 22 people, and all of them were from India. The Dali apparently had a Ukrainian captain for about five months in 2016, but that’s not the case anymore. It’s not clear whether the image that’s circulating purporting to show a Ukrainian captain is doctored, and unfortunately, the Wayback Machine doesn’t have a proper archive of that page.
Whatever the case, that’s not what the page looks like right now and no one has produced any evidence Ukraine was involved in any way with the collapse.