Senate candidate Kari Lake of Arizona's latest campaign advertisement featured a promise to "secure our borders" — a standard policy for a Republican running in a border states — but her ad had the unusual distinction of featuring Russian soldiers.
The Trump-backed GOP nominee's video includes stock footage of Russian soldiers marching in a victory parade, HuffPost reports.
In the video, a narrator promises that Ms Lake will "deploy the National Guard to secure our border," while showing images of Russian soldiers marching in formation.
The footage is still available from the stock image site Shutterstock. The footage caption says the video is from "Novosibirsk, Russia, 24 June, 2020: Victory parade."
Ms Lake's Democratic rival, Katie Hobbs, took the opportunity to blast the Republican.
“If Kari Lake can’t identify a uniformed member of the Arizona National Guard from a Russian soldier, she has no business leading our brave men and women as governor,” she told The Heartland Signal.
Republicans have been caught using stock footage from different countries in ads in the past. In September, the House GOP's "Commitment to America" video contained imagery from both Russia and Ukraine.
In that video, a narrator says the GOP is celebrating the "rich heritage of the American story and the vibrancy of the American dream" over footage of an oil drilling rig. The rig was located in the Volograd region, according to the man who shot the footage. He told HuffPost that another one of his scenes, which depicts a boy running through a field with a toy airplane, was also shot in Russia. Clips of a grocery store and a farmer were also filmed elsewhere in Europe.
Even the former president, Donald Trump, is not immune from stock footage snafus. In 2016, one of his campaign ads discussed illegal immigration and showed scenes filmed in Morocco.
