Russian state television airs shooter game footage to depict military action in Syria

On Sunday, a Russian TV channel ran a programme to commemorate the country's soldiers and military forces but aired a video game clip in it to depict war footage.

As the country celebrated Defender of Fatherland Day last week, state-owned Channel One decided to honour Russian soldiers fighting in Syria by sharing footage from the war-torn country in the latest episode of weekly show Voskresnoye Vremya.

The hour-long program included a sequence highlighting the work of Su-25 pilots in the war, including one who had lost his life earlier this month, the BBC reported.

The segment featured the ground attack jets, but one of the scenes showed a truck being attacked from a sniper's eye-view. This particular scene is actually a clip from tactical shooter game Arma 3.

Though the video game footage appears merely for a second and changes quickly to another 'real' scene from the Syrian war, social media users in Russia were quick to spot the error.

The story went viral on Pikabu, Russia's equivalent of Reddit, with many debating the exact reason behind its inclusion.

Arma 3 shows a futuristic war between Nato forces and fictional armies and has more than 500,000 worldwide users at present.

While some users suggested that the clip from the five-year-old video game was included as an intentional challenge for game-savvy users in the country, Channel One told BBC that the footage was for a previous story and used mistakenly by the video editing director of the channel.

The incident comes just a few months after Russia's Defence Ministry shared images from the AC-130 Gunship Simulator: Special Ops Squadron smartphone game as "irrefutable proof" of the US military's efforts towards aiding Isis operatives in Syria.