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Aric Toler Profile picture
Aric Toler
@AricToler
@nytimes Visual Investigations, Previously @bellingcat Tips, questions, etc. - DMs are open, aric.toler@nytimes.com Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp: +1 913-209-0215
Sue Strong @strong_sue@mastodon.sdf.org 🇺🇦 Profile picture sally paddles Profile picture Random Thoughts Profile picture Mela Eckenfels Profile picture Irene Arnold Profile picture 12 subscribed
Jun 6, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
A bit of a wild story yesterday out of Belgorod.

The RDK claimed to have killed a pretty senior Russian officer during their operation in Belgorod (Novaya Tavolzhanka), and shared his ID card. His name is Andrei Stesyev.

t.me/russvolcorps/5… Image Soon after, the Svoboda Rossii Legion (Freedom to Russia) shared additional pages of his ID documents, along with a couple of drone shots showing a body lying in the grass, claiming it was Stesyev.

(Join together the t dot me for the link)

https://t [.] me/legionoffreedom/863
Jun 6, 2023 • 27 tweets • 10 min read
The tweets are pretty specific, saying that the explosion happened at 2:35am. However, nothing from local channels yet.
t.me/romanov_92/388… This was two hours ago, so the fact that it's news isolated to just some RU milbloggers makes it a bit tough to believe
Jun 5, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Was trying to figure out why the Polish Volunteer Corps pixelated out part of this BTR in a video recently published. Then I realized: oooh yeah of course.

(See next tweet for pixelation reveal) Image
Jun 5, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
🚨 Geraldo Rivera's boot has been found in the Baltic Sea 🚨 But really, the Grayzone doing an underwater expedition in the Baltic Sea and touting the discovery of an old boot as breathtaking truthtelling journalism feels like a fever dream.
May 25, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
An apparent RDK fighter (or proxy/friend?) is selling two 'souvenirs' he got in Belgorod oblast this week. He's also selling some other choice items.
Auctions go back quite a few years, and include a Russian "trophy" knife he claims to have taken in Peski (Donetsk oblast) in 2015 ImageImageImageImage The same KKK patch being sold by this user was worn by Aleksandr Skachkov in Belgorod, an RDK fighter. He was previously arrested by the SBU for selling translated copies of the Christchurch shooter's manifesto.
May 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Checking out some new 50cm imagery on Planet of Belgorod now. This was likely caused one way or the other from the mini-invasion, located at 50.457124, 35.609863 (google.com/maps/place/50%…) Image Nothing I can notice at the city administration building of Grayvoron, which was allegedly hit by a shell dropped by a Ukrainian drone.
google.com/maps/@50.48522… ImageImage
May 22, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
lol someone already made the Wikipedia update Image More from Baza: reports of a Russian Mi-8 helicopter crash near Prokhorovka (a ways north of Belgorod and the border, nowhere near the incursion)
t.me/bazabazon/17851
May 18, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
New court documents in the Teixeira case just dropped (courtlistener.com/docket/6718949…). Some interesting bits in here for sure. I wanted to do screenshots to highlight parts of this document, but basically the entire PDF is worth a screenshot highlight.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
May 10, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Is this a typical thing for Twitter to do? It's "sensitive" content in that it shows that a mass shooter had two Nazi tattoos? Image (I honestly don't know, maybe this is how it's always been, I've only seen the sensitive warning on things like violent videos/photos)
May 10, 2023 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
I've been playing around with this tool for a couple of months, and it's insanely cool once you get the hang of it. It lets you leverage OSM's data for geolocation, but without having to learn how to use Overpass-Turbo.

bellingcat.com/resources/how-… The tool lets you search for intersecting features within a certain radius of @openstreetmap's data. You can use this for geolocation.

For example: show me all parks in NYC within a 50m radius of a one-way street with a 25mph speed limit, Catholic church, and Italian restaurant.
May 9, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Wrote up a summary on @bellingcat that shows how the recently-unearthed Odnoklassniki account of the Allen, TX mall shooter is definitely, absolutely, certainly his.
bellingcat.com/news/2023/05/0… Also: lol
May 8, 2023 • 26 tweets • 12 min read
Took a while, but I found the Odnoklassniki profile of the Allen. TX shooter described in this NYT article:
ok.ru/profile/574887… Image His YouTube account: youtube.com/@dustyshacklef…
Apr 27, 2023 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
Government motion for pretrial detention of Jack Teixeira was just posted: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco… Why would he smash his Xbox? Image
Apr 27, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Since 2014, our YouTube channel has basically been a giant repository for us to dump videos that we embed into articles. Our new social media manager is cleaning it up and making it actually presentable, and maybe even worth following. There's some neat stuff in there! If you've see the Navalny documentary, you have to watch the full, 49-minute (!!!!) call between Navalny and one of his poisoners, Konstantin Kudryavtsev. The movie only shows ~2min of the call.
Apr 26, 2023 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
So, I think I figured out how these edited casualty counts came about.

The first public mention of them was through the pro-Russia Donbass Devushka Telegram channel. How did the channel get her?

A pro-Ukraine troll group on Telegram made them as a joke, and sent on to her. Donbass Devushka posted the documents on April 5th at 1:29pm (US/Central) and shortly after.

In the Devushka group chat, you can see someone say they have leaked documents about half an hour before then. ImageImageImage
Apr 21, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
We found posts on a public Discord server from Jack Teixeira going back to February 25, 2022 - the day after Russia's full invasion of Ukraine - with information from classified intelligence reports.
nytimes.com/2023/04/21/us/… Everyone had a good sense of humor about it. Unknowing is Jack's Discord handle. Image
Apr 20, 2023 • 17 tweets • 5 min read
ImageImage That's right ImageImage
Apr 13, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
My first byline with the NYT, detailing some of the new Discord/Pentagon leaks.

nytimes.com/2023/04/13/wor… (Freelance, Bellingcat can't get rid of me that easily)
Apr 7, 2023 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
(Also, everyone adding their watermarks to public Discord screenshots is a chump) This isn't the original-original source. The guy who posted them on this Minecraft server got them from some other Discord server (I don't know which one)
Apr 7, 2023 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
There are two versions of this same leak (or "leak"): the original had estimated Ukrainian losses throughout the war lower than Russian losses, & the apparently edited one had Ukrainians at a dramatically higher loss count.

Censorship is pretty silly, as it's everywhere now Original vs. edited versions of KIA counts ImageImage
Mar 14, 2023 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
The Grayzone published an article written in part by an AI tool, which generated fake links/references/PDFs cited in the article. An example is a Guardian "article" on the Navalny poisoning from 2014. The editors apparently never caught that the piece cited AI-imagined sources. If you click through the links on the article (web.archive.org/web/2023031413…), it goes to PDFs from the author's personal site.

Click this link, for example. Image