The video shows a ghostly scene. A nighttime battle is taking place in a forest. There are flashes and mysterious bangs. An unidentified figure cries out in pain. The wounded man is wearing a helmet. Otherwise there are few clues as to where the footage was shot, or what exactly is going on.
A TV report by Russia’s state-run channel gave the answer. The man seen in eerie silhouette was a Ukrainian saboteur, it said.
He was part of a diversionary team sent across enemy lines into pro-Russian separatist territory. His mission? To blow up a local chlorine plant in the rebel-held town of Horlivka, the channel said.
During the firefight two infiltrators were killed, it added. By happy coincidence, representatives of the Donetsk People’s Republic — one of two pro-Moscow entities in the east of Ukraine — retrieved the video from the wounded man’s head camera. He had chucked it away, the channel told its viewers.
There was only one problem with the Kremlin’s dramatic account of the incident. It was entirely fake.
The soundtrack of shooting and explosions was actually more than a decade old. It had been recorded in April 2010, according to open source researchers, during a Finnish military exercise.
Ukraine’s intelligence service believes the video is the work of the GRU, Russia’s military spy agency, which has worked actively in Ukraine since the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. The film’s creators appear to have lifted the original Finnish video from the Internet.
They spliced its soundtrack on to new video content made two weeks ago — editing out a few excited “ooohs” from Finnish recruits.
“Russia has a long record of doing this. It isn’t surprising,” said Elliot Higgins, founder of the investigative Web site Bellingcat. “What’s surprising is they haven’t got any better at doing it. In some ways they have got worse. It’s really dumb and lazy.”
Higgins said international audiences were mostly impervious to Kremlin disinformation, but he said domestic Russian viewers tended to believe fake TV footage, which was “theatrically” created for state propaganda purposes.
This is especially true of the older generation, he said.
Russian TV has begun actively promoting information which suggests a vast humanitarian crisis is unfolding in eastern Ukraine. It has claimed residents have come under heavy Ukrainian shelling — something Kyiv says is not true.
The information has ranged from reports on increased bombardment to more outlandish “provocations,” such as attempted car bombing on Friday last week outside the separatist administration building in Donetsk.
The same day, the territory’s pro-Moscow leader, Denis Pushilin, released a video saying the situation had become so grave civilians had to be bussed out to safety.
Pushilin’s evacuation order was released on Friday last week, but Bellingcat discovered from the video’s metadata on Telegram that it had actually been filmed two days earlier.
“It’s incompetence,” Higgins said.
At the time the situation across the line of control between the Ukrainian military and the separatists was calm.
The video editing technology might be new, but the message is an old one.
Finnish media have pointed out that the Soviet Union in November 1939 used a similar excuse to start the winter war against Finland.
The day before the Soviet invasion Moscow claimed that Finnish troops had launched “an attack.”
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