It is often said that truth is the first casualty in any war.
An avalanche of disinformation
produced by Russian state media groups.
An event occurs.
Russia denies it.
The video circulated by the Kyiv regime is a crude forgery.
Russian soldiers and officers are acting bravely like true heroes.
Our troops fight with persistence
and full understanding that their cause is right.
We've seen people killed innocently on the streets.
We’ve seen people dragged out of vehicles.
We’ve seen kids killed, places where children are bombed.
Every photo, every satellite image has little clues that we can look at.
If we slow down the footage,
we can see that there’s about eight different projectiles
that fall straight down from the sky and hit the road and explode.
We document this evidence so that justice one day can be served.
[SUPER_USERS]
[FIGHTING THE DISINFORMATION WAR]
My name is Benjamin Strick.
I'm a digital investigator,
and my work helps fight disinformation online.
Russia’s been using disinformation for a very long time,
as far as we can actually record it.
Before the internet, before computers,
before the advent of social media and things like that,
Russia was using it,
but with things like propaganda leaflets,
airdrops, radio.
But now we’re actually seeing
much more sophisticated efforts to do disinformation.
These images that Russian state TV claim as proof Flight MH17
was downed by a Ukrainian jet fighter.
The Kremlin is deploying a new weapon in the war on Ukraine:
deepfake videos.
So the people that are actually sharing this information vary.
So we have organizations, but also just individuals online.
Often, it’s just there to muddy the waters
and to create confusion,
and then through that confusion, defend Russia.
We will strive for the demilitarization
and denazification of Ukraine.
So disinformation and influence narratives
essentially are a really good way
for a state to justify human rights abuses
and to justify a war.
We’re fighting amongst the details,
but what Russia doesn’t realize is that the devil is in the detail.
We have a database of verified stored information
that has more than 5,000 entries.
And these entries relate to attacks on hospitals,
medical facilities, schools.
More than 50 innocent people trying to flee the fighting
killed in a Russian missile attack on a crowded train station.
Pregnant women were among those who were helped out of the building.
But even more deeper things, such as executions
and extrajudicial killings of civilians,
and how Russia has attempted to cover that up
and to pretend that they actually never happened.
I will stress: read what Putin said.
No strikes on civilian infrastructure.
There are no strikes on the personnel.
Once a vibrant city of 300,000 people,
now parts of it a wasteland.
So this is a dashcam video that we first identified on Telegram.
We can see the signs.
We can also see shop signs from Chernihiv,
so we know what street this is being filmed on.
This store on the right is something we often use.
The store is called Gorenje in Chernihiv.
So we’re able to see that on Google Street View quite easily.
Chernihiv in March, more than 40 people were killed in this--
It was a bombing, actually,
an aerial bombing of an apartment building
where there were hospitals, a kindergarten area,
a pharmacy, a bread store as well.
This was an area where many civilians had been gathering to pick up things,
such as medicines, as well as food
because the area had been cut off as well
through surrounding Russian forces.
This is all the geolocated footage from that specific incident.
One of the other videos that we identified
shows the after-effect of this explosion.
So what we can see is this large building
with a big hole in the top side of it.
We can match that up with the other footage
to see that that hole was caused by this explosion right here.
This is important to look at
because it starts to show us exactly where was hit.
We’re able to match up that specific building
with Google Maps or Google Earth
and actually identify the exact building that was struck on here.
If we have a look at specific satellite imagery on Google Earth,
we can scroll to a time when that is available,
and we can see that that is the exact same building right there.
It’s not a very military-looking area, is it?
Footage that we obtained two days later
was actually footage of an aeroplane that was shot down from the sky.
This footage is quite important because it actually goes to tell us
what sort of aerial equipment was operating in the area.
So this is a plane called a Su-30.
It was shot down by Ukrainian forces over Chernihiv
just a few hundred meters away from where this bombing actually happened.
We have a recording of the pilot who survived from that plane.
We have footage of him actually being interviewed
and admitting on camera
that he’s given a set list of coordinates by the Russian military
and they dropped unguided bombs on those locations.
And how many bombs did you drop before the peaceful city of Chernihiv?
Chernihiv was first. Before that, we were flying on the border.
So this map is essentially all of the information
that we go through and verify.
We started the map back in late December, early January
when we noticed a lot of videos of Russian military vehicles
moving towards the western border of Russia
and that border with Ukraine.
Now we’re getting to the point
where we’re identifying Russian firing positions, for example.
So in the city of Kharkiv, if we zoom in on that location,
we can see a high volume of red,
which is where a lot of civilian casualties have happened,
is where a lot of homes have been bombed.
But we can also see some areas of gray over here from within Russia.
These areas of gray are where Russian firing positions
have been identified on satellite imagery,
on TikTok videos filmed by farmers
watching rockets being launched out of Russia and towards Kharkiv.
We're able to identify not just where rounds were landing,
where homes were bombed,
but also where they were fired from,
which starts to answer who is responsible for firing them.
An unintended group that’s been using our map
is also local Ukrainians,
for safe passage, to drive to specific locations.
Should they leave? Is the war coming closer to their town?
And that’s kind of something we didn’t intend.
But for us, that's probably the most important people,
is the Ukrainians on the ground.
Then there are the streets of Bucha.
Individuals who clearly were in custody with their hands tied,
shot execution-style,
left in basements, left in fields.
These are war crimes, he says,
and they will be recognized by the world as genocide.
Russia was in occupation of the area.
We didn’t get any information from Bucha during that period.
We were able to locate some videos and photos
that civilians were uploading
and that citizens were sending us as well.
They withdrew their forces from there.
And when Russia started to leave the area,
is when we started to see some pretty horrible signs.
Ukrainian authorities in Bucha
lead us into a basement they call a Russian execution chamber.
There was rape, that there were mass graves,
that there were some horrible incidents,
but also footage of bodies laying on the streets.
And this is footage of bodies with hands tied behind their backs.
They were shot.
When Russia left this area,
we started to see satellite images actually come out of the area
showing the streets on the ground.
But what was really interesting
is that as soon as that footage started to come out from Bucha,
we noticed that Russia started to deny the events
that actually took place there.
There were clips of Ukrainian propagandists from Bucha, and there
were no corpses on the street.
But also that the satellite imagery that backed that evidence up was fake,
that it was not available,
that it was not taken on the day that it was claimed to be taken on.
We got the satellite imagery.
We showed that the shadows matched up with time.
And shadows are quite an important aspect.
They’re called sundials.
They tell the time.
And a useful tool for that is like the street lamp
that we could see on satellite imagery in Bucha.
That also cast a shadow
and showed the exact time that that satellite imagery was taken.
So there’s two arguments that Russia used
that they tried to stick with as “facts” or “details”
that really didn’t work in their favor.
So this really showed that there were signs
that Russia was actually the cause of these bodies on the ground
and that Russia was claiming to deny
or claimed that it was actually fake and staged footage.
Practically around every corner,
we heard appalling stories of casual brutality and murder.
Russian soldiers didn’t respect age or sex.
Watching this footage is definitely not for everyone.
We are essentially professional doomscrollers.
I often like to think about it as in holding radioactive material.
You hold it at an arm’s length
so that you can try and protect yourself,
but you still have to hold it to give some level of justice
and accountability for the future.
What we’re up against is essentially a giant,
and there is proof that that giant does throw punches.