🧵/ link in the last tweet. It’s not only Russian tourists who reveal positions of the Ru army by posting photos on social media with geolocation turned on. Soldiers themselves do that too. Here are some recent examples from the Kherson region, area of the UA counter offensive.
On August 27th, a user called "Sergey Shturman" posted 2 photos of himself near BM-21 "Grad"(archive.ph/GnfWc). He didn’t switch off geo, so here it is: water pump station near Berislav. No other buildings are in the vicinity, which proves it's correct (46.8621, 33.3627)
Russian forces and its proxies from the L/DNR often use such civic infrastructure objects to set up their bases. Another set of photos from VK (archive.ph/ImV0r) reveals the base in Berislav itself, in the office of a local water supply company (46.836054, 33.394393).
Russia is not only is stealing Ukrainian grain, but seizing its agro-industrial enterprises. This photo, as enabled geolocation proves (archive.ph/RCB9N), was taken on Aug. 27th in the office of an Agrofusion company tomato paste factory (46.4961, 32.5200).
The owner of the company, Sergey Sypko (on the photo), lives in Mykolaiv and is one of the richest people of Ukraine (91th in the Forbes Ukraine list). Another Ukrainian agro-industry businessman from Mykolaiv, Alexey Vadatursky was killed in the shelling on July 31 in this city.
Something really interesting. This guy, Pavel Frolin, posted his photos with a bunch of grapes and a raspberry (archive.ph/7u2mE) on Aug. 9th. Geotag of this and several other photos postet by him brings us to the field north of Kherson, near Stepanivka (46.7143, 32.5828).
He has several recent photos taken allegedly at their positions, but with geolocation turned off. By searching through dozens of photos of the area, we with @pustota were able to confirm that they were taken near the nearby quarry (46.7177, 32.5876) and UA police training grounds
Now this: on Aug 25th he posted the photo (archive.ph/khprs) of a HARM missile, erroneously calling it "HIMARS". Only 5 days later Ukraine confirmed the use of HARM missiles by posting a video of them being fired from a MiG-29 (h/t @Rebel44CZ for the quick missile ID).
No geotag again, but now as we’ve learned their approximate location from the "grape photo" we were able to find it – a parking lot of a nearby private winery and hotel called "Курiнь" (46.7197, 32.5810). Thanks again to @pustota for nailing it down.
There are several other photos in Frolin’s account, proving that they at least visited the winery, thanks to details matching Google users' photos – clean restaurant dishes, freshly baked pizza, metal corrugated panels, etc.
I tried to figure out what happened to the owner of the winery and hotel, Mykola Khalupenko, head of the local branch of Agrarian Party of Ukraine, but was not lucky. He didn’t read my message on Facebook, all social media accounts of the business are deleted for some reason.
The problem of soldiers using smartphones and even not turning off geolocation is well known to Russian authorities. They even passed the law forbidding smartphones in the army, but its effect was very limited. Also, Tik-Tok became popular, making control even more difficult.
It even took me like 20 minutes to figure out how to exclude geo from my photos (while keeping it for other apps) when I bought a new phone last year! (Yes, I know it can be done faster, but I'm sure this thread will not change the overall situation).
Still, worth mentioning that nearly all examples from this thread are photos posted by L/DNR soldiers, not Russian military personnel (photo from Frolin's VK account, taken in 2016).
For more geolocation gems click this link. Use Google for translation into your language. svoboda.org/a/selfi-dlya-v…
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