In what would have been a big scoop by those who want to accuse the United States of supplying weapons to Ukraine, LNR Today, the news site that supports the Russian-backed separatists, posted a video of the rebels discovering crates of FIM-92 Stinger MANPADS (Man Portable Air Defense System) at the Luhansk International Airport. But upon further scrutiny of the discovered Stingers, sharp eyes online found these to be fakes and copied from the Stinger designs used in the Battlefield 3 FPS video game.

A cache of weapons, including American MREs (Meals Ready To Eat) were found in the basement of a building. They also found wooden crates that when dusted off, had U.S. Army markings, and when opened revealed the Stinger Missiles. Probably the most popular shoulder fired Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM), the Stinger was used to shoot down Soviet aircraft by Mujahideens during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan In the 1980s.

But bloggers were quick to point out that the Stingers were fakes as the markings on the wooden cases which show the unhyphenated word "Re Usable" whilst the real the Stinger Missile cases are hyphenated. Furthermore, Stinger Missiles are transported in metal cases not wooden crates. Click here for more of the mistakes found on the "discovered" Stingers such as poor reproduction of the weapon and even more wrong markings/spellings.

Further in the video, where they opened the wooden crates, many were wondering about the markings on the Stingers which read "Tracking Rainer" (denoting it to be a training module) whilst on the real Stinger, it will read "Tracking Trainer." One Russian video game blog, Anton Logvinov, pointed out that the "Tracking Rainer" markings can be found on the 3D-rendered Stinger Missile for the Battlefield 3 video game. He believes that the Stingers in the LNR Today video are fake explaining that DICE, the game developer of EA's Battlefield 3, intentionally misspelled the "Trainer" as "Rainer" to avoid copyright issues as they did not have the license the use the weapon for the game. For airsoft players, that's a familiar story with regards to licensing of markings on airsoft guns.

This led to some sectors accusing the Russian-backed rebels of fabricating evidence that the U.S. supplies weapons to Ukraine. Comments at other websites such as Kotaku mention that Cosplayers can do a better reproduction than those who did these fake BF3 stingers.

The U.S. officially supplies Ukraine with non-lethal aid, and denying that they are supplying arms needed by the Ukrainian military. Meanwhile, Russia vehemently denies that they supply the separatists with weaponry and personnel.

While there is a ceasefire is in place under the Minsk agreement that was signed in February 2015 with the both sides agreeing to pull back weaponry, both sides accuse each other of violating the ceasefire. There are occasions of artillery exchanges that have been reported by the international media.