In the Twitter group chats where OSINT analysts share videos and help each other verify material, an informal code of conduct has emerged, according to Glen and van Linge. On Monday, researchers deduced that a video of Putin meeting with his security council to discuss Ukraine was not broadcast live, as Moscow had claimed, but several hours earlier-a fact given away by closeup analyses of the wristwatches of several participants. OSINT techniques have also allowed sleuths to pick holes in Kremlin rhetoric.
#Real war footage graphic crack#
If we start seeing more and more evidence of the Russian offensive not going so well, maybe we’ll start to see them crack down on the internet a little bit more.” They’re not going to be happy about stuff like that coming out. “On the other hand, in the Kharkiv region they are definitely not doing as well as they had hoped-and there are a lot of videos of dead Russian soldiers and destroyed Russian equipment. “There’s a definite possibility that Russia wants this information to come out,” Glen says. Early on Thursday, Glen shared a graphic video-apparently filmed near Kharkiv-depicting what he said were burning Russian tanks and a dead Russian soldier. Some footage indicates that the most fierce fighting so far has been around Kharkiv, in the north-east of Ukraine, according to Kyle Glen, the co-founder of Conflict News, a popular OSINT-focused online news platform. “They want to show their striking capabilities.”īut the news isn’t all good for Russia. “I guess the Russians might consider it beneficial as an intimidation tactic,” van Linge says.
The internet in Ukraine is currently still broadly accessible, indicating that the Kremlin does not necessarily want to suppress footage depicting their Blitzkrieg attack. OSINT analysts are acutely aware of the risks that their work may be playing into the Kremlin’s hands, and experts have raised concerns that Russian actors may try to seed false reports of military activities in order to encourage Ukrainian surrender. “Since, it has actually developed to footage of Russian forces on the move across parts of Ukraine-they’ve broken out of Crimea, they’ve broken through front-lines near Kharkiv, there’s also reports of fighting south of Belarus, around Donetsk.” “From around 5am local time until, the videos were mostly missile strikes, smoke clouds, the sounds of shelling and stuff,” van Linge says. The picture researchers are seeing, with the benefit of the birds-eye-view from OSINT, is of a fast-changing military situation in Ukraine. Read More: How Putin’s Denial of Ukraine’s Statehood Rewrites History “Everyone is doing their own part to get as much information out there as we can.” Van Linge says he was able to verify that the videos from Lutsk were likely genuine, because the airstrip and buildings were recognizable and could be compared against older footage. People share footage, geolocate it, try to identify the types of tanks, armed vehicles, that kind of stuff,” van Linge said in an interview on Thursday morning. “On Twitter, there’s a lot of cooperation. Online, in real time, they share these pieces of evidence with the world, rivaling established newsrooms and defense analysts in a parallel effort to reveal what is happening on the ground.
Together, via a loosely-organized community mostly based on Twitter, these researchers work together to verify the location of videos, piecing together the first public details of a rapidly-changing situation on the front line of Europe’s most volatile military conflict in nearly eight decades. The acronym is short for “open source intelligence,” a field of social media analysis that over the last decade has emerged from obscurity into a central feature of modern war reporting, as social media and smartphone access have allowed videos, photos, and other data from war-zones around the world to proliferate. Read more: Here’s What We Know So Far About Russia’s Military Operation in UkraineĪs the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfolded in the early hours of Thursday morning, van Linge and hundreds of other OSINT researchers pored over the thousands of videos emerging from the country. This time, the source of the footage was a public-facing CCTV camera trained on a road leading off the peninsula. Another video shared by van Linge on Thursday morning purportedly showed Russian military vehicles advancing north into Ukraine from Crimea.
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