Thread by @brechtcastel

🇺🇦 Ukrainian soldier: "We had orders to shoot to kill at any moving person, whether it was peaceful or not."

1.2M have seen this testimony on #YouTube.

May we take this interview as true? Investigate! 👇 1/...

#OSINT 🔎
#Verification 🎥
#GeoLocation 🌍
#HowToOSINT 🧐

The video of 2 minutes and 6 seconds shows 3 men in army uniforms.

🗣️The one on the right is talking. He is answering questions posed by an interviewer who does not appear on screen.

The English subtitles are a correct translation of what the man is saying in Russian. 2/...

The man says that he was ordered by their commanders to shoot at any moving person.

"At one point people were brought in, both women and men."

"They wanted to shoot them for what was done (allegedly) in #Bucha."

👀 We only see the three men and a table: no context. 3/...

⚠️ First thing you should always do when you come across a video with little context is find the source of the footage.

We see a logo in the top left corner 🟥.

We take a screenshot of the logo and load it into the Russian search engine Yandex. 4/...

So we find out that this is the logo of the army of the People's Republic of Lugansk.

That is the self-proclaimed republic in eastern Ukraine that declared independence in 2014 at the behest of pro-Russian rebels. 5/...

Does this mean that this source is telling lies anyway❓Not at all.

Does it mean that we should be suspicious and investigate further❓ Absolutely. 🔍👇 6/...

We find the video on the VKontakte page of the army of Lugansk.

This video was uploaded on 10 April at 18:16 and thus dates from that date or earlier. ⏲️

Remarkable: this video is 3 minutes 35 seconds long and is thus LONGER than the testimony on YouTube. 7/...

The testimony in itself is slightly longer, but the first fifteen seconds of the longer video are particularly striking.

In the next tweets I'll post screenshots of the footage in rapid succession at the beginning of this video. 👇👇 8/...

Three men are lying on the ground and one of them is gagged. 9/...

We see a man whose eyes are shielded with army clothes and tape. 10/...

We see someone bare-chested with striking tattoos. 11/...

We see four blindfolded men being transported. 12/...

The short fragments conclude with one of the blindfolded men being held by a soldier with a weapon 🟨. 13/...

This ☝️ gives the impression that the men are prisoners of war.

Because all the images together last less than 15 seconds in total, it is difficult to make any conclusive statements.

However, some images have a different quality than the testimony: different source? 14/...

We find other images of the same opening scene on the Russian chat app Telegram. 👇

In that video, we see a slightly longer clip of the men lying gagged on their stomachs on the ground. 15/...

We also see another new scene in a courtyard, in which a soldier with a red armband 🟥 and weapon 🟨 directs the four gagged and blindfolded soldiers. 16/...

Then the four were escorted inside by soldiers, presumably to the room where the "interview" was recorded. 17/...

The red armbands may indicate that they are Russian soldiers. 🇷🇺

We can also clearly see the insignia 'Z' 🟥 on one of the uniforms, which strengthens this suspicion. 18/...

In the Facebook video we see only three men, but actually there are four.

In the Telegram video we see that there is a fourth prisoner of war.

He is the man with the striking tattoos 🟦, who we saw earlier. 19/...

In yet another video on Telegram we can see that he had to identify himself in the same place, in bare torso (left).

His tattoos correspond to those in the video of the army of the People's Republic of Lugansk (bottom right). 20/...

The man has a third striking tattoo on his leg with the battle cry 'Glory to Ukraine' in Ukrainian. 🇺🇦 21/...

A second blindfolded and gagged person (left) can also be identified with certainty as one of the witnesses (right).

The camouflage 🟦, the clothing under his uniform 🟥 and his moustache and lips 🟨 match. 22/...

All these elements ☝️ point to four Ukrainian soldiers who were captured by Russian soldiers.

➡️So there is a chance that they were pressurised for their testimony.

All the above videos were uploaded on 10 April. The location of the images could not be determined yet. 23/...

Footage of the testimonies was also shown on TV newsreels on the 🇷🇺 Russian state broadcaster 'Russia 1'. 24/...

The story of these prisoners of war being used as #propaganda doesn’t stop here. 👇👇👇 25/...

A few days later, on 14 April, several images and photographs of these same prisoners of war surfaced on Telegram 🟥🟩🟦.

They are on their knees at a memorial. 26/...

They are interviewed by a reporter from Russia 1.

The man from the Facebook video 🟦 talks about "the negative image of Russians on Ukrainian television". 📺

"But you shouldn't believe the television. Honestly, they treat us well." 27/...

When the man kneels, he says: "We are ashamed".

Again, Russian soldiers with weapons 🟨 are clearly present.

On a monument, we read the Russian text 'We do not forget, we do not forgive' 🟥. 28/...

We search with that text on Yandex Maps 🟥. So we find a memorial site with that name south of Lugansk.

In that region, the war between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russian separatists has been raging since 2014. The monument refers to that. 29/...

When we compare satellite images of the place with visual elements in the background of the videos, we can see an industrial chimney 🟥 and a small chapel 🟨.

This allows us to determine the location of these recordings 🔵: 48.497001, 39.356132 @GeoConfirmed . 📍✅30/...

@GeoConfirmed A pro-Russian news site from Lugansk uses images of the Ukrainian soldiers at the memorial site in an article entitled 'Militants of the "Right Sector" wanted to avenge "#Bucha" by shooting the residents of Rubizhne'. 31/...

@GeoConfirmed That article casts again doubt on the authenticity of the abomination in #Bucha.

These claims were already extensively debunked by @nytimes and @bellingcat using public sources and satellite images. 32/...

bellingcat.com/news/2022/04/0…

@GeoConfirmed @nytimes @bellingcat Apart from the testimonies of these prisoners of war, we did not find any evidence of the "retaliation because of Bucha" in which these prisoners of war claimed not to have participated against the orders of their superiors. 33/...

@GeoConfirmed @nytimes @bellingcat None of the videos we watched or articles we read cited any evidence other than the testimonies of these POWs. 34/...

@GeoConfirmed @nytimes @bellingcat CONCLUSION: The video on YouTube allegedly proves that Ukrainian military commanders forced their soldiers to shoot Ukrainian civilians. This is what the Ukrainian soldier says in the video, BUT... (1/2) 35/...

@GeoConfirmed @nytimes @bellingcat ... other images cut from the shared video show the same soldiers being overpowered and held at gunpoint by the Russians. This may indicate that this is an enforced testimony.

➡️This does NOT prove that the Ukrainians are attacking their own people. (2/2) 36/...

@GeoConfirmed @nytimes @bellingcat What have we learned? 👩‍🏫

1) Be very careful with testimonies of prisoners of war (on both sides of the conflict). ⚠️
2) Text in an image can make #geolocation much easier. 📍
3) Every new video gives you new clues and a better understanding of a situation: keep digging. 📽️ 37/..

@GeoConfirmed @nytimes @bellingcat I thank @Knack colleagues @karineeckhout and @jeroenzuallaert for helping in this investigation. 🙏

You can read my full article with all sources used here (@Knack) for FREE. 👇38/...

knack.be/nieuws/factche…

@GeoConfirmed @nytimes @bellingcat @Knack @karineeckhout @jeroenzuallaert Did you learn something from this #OSINT for #FactChecking?

Follow me (@brechtcastel) and check out my channel on #YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCMBPt… 🙏

Older 🧵🧵underneath this tweet: 39/END