Russia’s maimed soldier video doesn’t stand up
Kremlin’s propaganda campaign, including false film of one-legged fighter, is ridiculed by the West
THE Kremlin’s information war on Ukraine has faced ridicule after footage from pro-russian separatists appeared to show a man pretending his leg had been blown off in a Ukrainian artillery strike.
The video, released by the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine, showed a man writhing on the ground in agony with his left leg missing below the knee.
But as comrades carried him away, the camera inadvertently showed that his left leg was already a prosthetic one, the lower half of which had been detached. The footage was later removed from social media, but not before it had been widely shared and mocked. “They need a bigger production budget,” said one Twitter user.
The Donetsk video was one of several pieces of front-line footage denounced as part of Russia’s “false flag” campaign, in which incidents are staged to give a pretext for war.
Also ridiculed online yesterday was a senior war correspondent from Rossiya 1, a Russian state TV station. He was filmed in Donetsk filing grim-faced dispatches from a city that he said was under heavy Ukrainian shelling and warning of an imminent Ukrainian invasion.
Britain and the United States have been warning for weeks of Kremlin false flag attacks to create a justification for the Russian troops massed over the border to invade.
However, web-savvy analysts have quickly identified many of them as unsophisticated fakes.
On Friday, for example, bomb squads were seen in the Donbas region in footage released by the Luhansk People’s Republic.
A video clip shows a military vehicle as it tows a car allegedly packed with explosives away from a bridge, where it was threatening to evacuate citizens along the Lugansk-izvarino highway.
However, the video’s metadata showed it had been recorded more than two years ago in June 2019. Similar data was used to disprove a video released by separatists on Feb 18 showing “Polish saboteurs” attacking a chemical storage area.
The People’s Militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic claimed the Polish insurgents “planned to blow up a tank with chlorine on the territory of a sewage treatment plant” and that they had retrieved the footage from one of the saboteurs’ bodies.
Eliot Higgins, the founder of investigative website Bellingcat, found that the video’s audio matched that of another uploaded to Youtube in 2010 of a military firing range in Finland, featuring a number of explosions.
Researchers at Bellingcat also used metadata to establish that footage of Donetsk’s separatist leader declaring the evacuation of citizens to Russia was actually recorded two days before the events that he claimed had necessitated the move. Anton Pustovalov, a journalist, examined photographs taken at the scene of the alleged explosion of a Donetsk People’s Republic’s military vehicle to uncover another false flag.
He said the licence plate on the car was taken from another vehicle – used by the head of Donetsk’s military police – to claim that a terrorist attack was being launched against him.
The volume of disinformation clips circulating on social media is growing.
Although analysts are able to quickly refute the majority, it is still having its desired impact, according to Christo Grozev, Bellingcat’s executive director.
“If you’re wondering if [the] Kremlin’s poorly executed war propaganda works on its domestic audience: sadly, it does,” he said on Twitter.
“Have been talking to young people from Russia’s countryside. They are convinced Ukraine is shelling.”