amateur professional and military analysts are tracking
Russian troop movements on Ukraine's border through
videos and that includes video that the Kremlin has
officially released and video about to tell you about
from a more unlikely source. Newsy national
correspondent Jason Bellini is here now to talk about
how Belarus's citizens have been uploading video to
social media and one platform in particular. He's no
here with more about it. Jason Hello, hi there, Natalie.
Well, here's a preview. It's a platform that you may be
more familiar with in context of dancing videos. I'll
get to that in just a moment, but just a little bit o
context here, experts are saying that Russia has built
up so many troops along the border of Ukraine that the
time is running out. Putin is gonna have to decide
pretty soon whether to pull back or to invade. And now
there's all these researchers out there who are trying
to figure out what his intentions are using Tiktok
it's Russia's largest movement of tanks and other heavy
armor since the end of the Cold War. And while the
country's leadership has shared some of the action in
videos, they themselves release much more of it is
being captured without official permission, primarily
on of all places. Tiktok, each conflict has its own
social media platform that you know propels the story
to the world. Now it's Tiktok professional milita
analysts like Conrad Musica are using videos posted to
Tiktok by Russian and Belarusian civilians as clues.
also relying to a large extent of satellite images and
combination of Tiktok videos. Everything combines, I
think gives us a slightly better picture of what is
actually going on. While politicians parse Russian
leader Vladimir Putin's words for signs of whether or
not he is planning to invade. Ukraine experts are
studying his actions by way of video forensics, trying
to figure out which units are coming, where they're
being based at what kind of equipment they are bringing.
And that may indicate whether Putin is preparing for a
full scale or a limited invasion or not at all. The
research involves not just professional experts but
also open source amateurs. It is absolutely a
collaborative effort because yo a lot of time, I
don't know what I'm looking at, especially when it
comes to a lot more of the niche weapons systems. K
Glenn's day job in the U.K. Is in medical sales. But he
and others have been tracking tanks, armored personn
carriers and missile systems making their way west from
Siberia to Belarus. Now they're on the lookout for that
equipment being moved closer to Ukraine's border. As a
further sign, he says that an invasion is being planned.
When you say that appears, they're moving closer to the
border with Ukraine. How can you tell that from Tiktok
videos I literally, I asked, I asked the video upload
er and nine times out of 10 they're more than happy to
To to give that answer. There were videos yesterday of
trains being unloaded at a train station, you know, 15,
20 km away from the Ukrainian border. The assumptio
that there's a another base very close to the Ukrainian
border that no one's found. Yet, analysts are always
suspicious of Russian disinformation. It's always ver
very important to take a look on actually who made this
video. So go onto the profile and see how many
followers this person has, How many people this person
follows. Musica says accounts with just a small number
of video posts are a red flag. I would always suspec
that these videos does not necessarily have to portray
the truth portrayals of the truth. Truth. That's hard
to come by right now. But one thing you might be
wondering is, what about videos from soldiers
themselves Aren't those helpful to researchers Well, it
turns out the Russians are banning soldiers from
posting videos to services like tiktok Natalie