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Howling sirens and a dramatic warning alarmed the citizens of Moscow on Thursday. TV stations suddenly broadcast a nuclear alarm.
A nuclear alert was broadcast on Russian television on March 9.© Screenshot Twitter / novostiua; censor.net
"A nuclear strike has been carried out, please go to the shelter, take your potassium iodide tablets" - this shocking warning was broadcast by TV channels and radio stations in central Moscow on Thursday.
A warning of a nuclear attack was issued under a bright yellow radiation warning sign and a map of Russia slowly turning red from west to east. In a video recording circulating on Twitter, sirens can also be heard wailing in the background:
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The residents of the capital were able to breathe again after the initial shock. It was a false alarm triggered by hackers, according to the Russian Ministry of Civil Protection.
"On the territory of Moscow, as a result of hacking the servers of radio stations and TV channels, information about the announcement of an air strike was broadcast. This information is false and does not correspond to reality," the agency was quoted as saying by the Russian agency Interfax.
In addition to Moscow, the hackers are said to have triggered an air alarm in the Sverdlovsk Oblast beyond the Urals with its capital Yekaterinburg.
It's not the first time that Russian civil protection agencies have been the target of such an attack. On February 28, regional radio and television stations broadcast an air alert, a week earlier, on February 22, a rocket attack was also announced in ten cities in the country by a hoax. The Russian authorities also said that hackers should be responsible for this.
