Russians showed footage from test site in Russia, but said they were working "under fire from Armed Forces of Ukraine"

WEDNESDAY, 1 JUNE 2022, 18:41

Journalists have found out that, although the Russian Ministry of Defence have been showing a propaganda video about the work of their military units on the territory of Ukraine, the video was actually made at a training ground in the Belgorod region.

Source: Nastoyashcheye Vremya media project investigation

Details: In a video published by the Russian Defence Ministry, unnamed Russian soldiers in helmets and balaclavas claim to be pulling damaged tanks from the battlefield and towing them to the repair site.

The Russian military says that they have set up equipment repair points in the rear in Ukraine, where repair units "heroically" repair Russian armoured vehicles in the operational mode "under bullets."

The journalists checked the metadata of the hidden video file, which contains information about the exact geolocation of the shooting location. Going by these coordinates, the journalists were able to ascertain that the location of the video was actually the 357th Training Centre of the Russian Air Force - 25 kilometres west of Belgorod.

In addition, behind the tank on the horizon can be seen the premises of a military unit and a building belonging to the "Fazenda" garden society. Journalists compared footage from the video of the Russian Defenсe Ministry with satellite images of a landfill site.

The video’s metadata also contains the nickname of the maker of it, "dimk-6."

The investigators checked whether there was metadata in any more of the videos published on the social networks of the Russian Ministry of Defenсe. Such metadata has been removed from these files. 

However, in the video in question, which demonstrates the use of Grad MLRS, the geographical coordinates of the place of shooting indicate it as being filmed in Kharkiv Oblast. This file was found in a folder called "7_05_2022 phosphorus ammunition".

Background: This is not the first time the presence of metadata in videos of Russian propaganda has foiled the intentions of the Russian occupiers. Journalists from the international group of investigators Bellingcat have discovered that a video address made by the leaders of the so-called "DPR" [self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic] and "LPR" [self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic] about the evacuation of the population was recorded a few days before the official decision on the evacuation.