Hours after admitting to casualties in last year's violent border faceoff in eastern Ladakh's Galwan Valley, China released a video, claiming it to be the first video footage of the deadly incident. The footage tweeted by the country's state-owned media showed vivid details of the confrontation, comprising night time visuals of when most of the deaths happened.
The Chinese government had announced on Friday, February 19, that it was honouring four soldiers who died in the incident in June last year.
Sharing the video on its official Twitter handle, the state-run Global Times said, "an on-site video reveals in detail the four PLA martyrs and other brave Chinese soldiers at the scene of the Galwan Valley border clash with India in June 2020."
Meanwhile, the Indian Army is yet to react to the video of the video released by China.
This marks the first time that China has come on record about fatalities in the Galwan clash, although with grossly underestimated numbers in comparison to those recorded by the Indian army.
There has been outrage in India over why the Chinese government has been silent for so long on casualties.
The trigger behind China's acceptance of casualties is the clash and the release of the video footage is Russia, its ally. Russian state-run news agency TASS published a news report that China had lost 45 men in the incident, a figure previously unquoted anywhere else.
Sources told India Today that the Chinese had no choice but to accept the casualties in order to save face from global embarrassment of Russia's report on Chinese casualty figures, amplified days later by India's Northern Army Commander Lt Gen YK Joshi in an interview with journalists.
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