Russian officials and propagandists have recently posted a video that allegedly shows Ukrainian servicemen interrogating some Russian POWs, and then shooting them in the legs.
While the footage is shocking, this doesn’t mean that it’s true. Let’s take a closer look at this video. A French OSINT team DarthAlsaceFrançaise has posted the results of their investigation on Twitter. Let’s see what they’ve got.
The recent video posted by a Russian propagandist is “concerning”. There are issues with what is shown, mainly related with the alleged wounds. In the short vid, it’s obvious that there are NO marks of any shooting in the right leg and no blood on the ground.
In the 1st and longer vid, the legbands are very very clean despite the blood being under it. It seems the Russian soldiers just laid on the blood.
I believe the Russian Nazis have used a couple of real wounded soldiers to stage a fake video. The absence of any yellow/blue chevrons on the standing soldiers also indicates that the video is very very dubious
What is also very strange: you can see (and hear) a shot (the second), and the smoke is also visible in front on the trouser. Seems that the shooting was next to the leg. The guys goes on the ground without even groaning. Of course, there is no blood coming out of his leg later
If I am not mistaken (the vid quality is very poor), one of the serviceman standing with a gun seems to have white armband (possibly a legband too).
We found the Azeri guy in the video! Yacine Hammach (last visited the VK (Russian answer to FB) on 23 Dec.2016). He lived in Tambov, Russia
According to his VK profile it is possible/probable that the “Azeri” guy was in prison for the last 5 years.
ok, now there is a longer version here that shows more what happened later, with a better quality. Imo, it increases the probability of the shootings to be fakes.
Now you have “blood” on the 2nd guy, but the location, shape & direction of the blood on the ground is incoherent. More curious, no hole can be seen in his pants…
here you can see a significant amount of “blood” that appeared under the ass of the 2nd guy + a line of blood on the head with no apparent hit. Lots of blood gets out of his wrist from 3:08 to 3:31, it looks like a blood pocket that has been broken.
In pic 1, you see 5 soldiers in the background, none wearing armband… (or maybe 2 with white ones) In pic 2, there is a gard without armband too, or also maybe a white one. It makes no sense that so many soldiers have remove them, except if they wanted to hide their real side.
Tbn, the units’ badges have been removed from the “POWs”. I think it’s strange as Ukrainians usually show them
Anonymous group also leaked a Russian Ministry of Defense document which confirms that this video is a fake:
Leaked document from Russia with order to film propaganda videos in order to discredit the attitude of Ukrainian forces to POWs
Russia has a long history of producing fakes which are beyond common sense. For example, when Russian missile shot down a Malaysian Boeing MH17, Russian state channels launched a media campaign to blame Ukraine of this. Their propaganda manufactured not just one but several bizarre theories, which include a Ukrainian jet Su-25, a Ukrainian Buk missile system, a Spanish operator who allegedly posted about this on Twitter… They even said that all MH17 passengers were already dead for a few days before the crash, in order to set up a provocation against Russia!
And while all these “theories” clearly contradict each other, Russian media never had any issues with that. No refutations were ever published by the Russian media, and the Russian government never admitted its guilt in the MH17 crash – even when joint international team officially concluded that it was a Buk missile system from Russian 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade that shot down the Boeing.
So it’s not surprising at all that now, during a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian propaganda continues to produce fakes.
