Washington Post writer Phil Bump noted that Russia has really fallen down on its job with propaganda and false flags in the run-up to the Ukraine invasion.
President Joe Biden made it clear last week that he expected a number of false flags to come out of Russia over the course of the weekend. Indeed, there were, but it didn't have much of an impact over how the impending invasion was covered.
Bump cited open-source investigators Bellingcat, aka Eliot Higgins, who tracked reports, and then dispelled any false claims.
"Over the weekend, for example, contributors using a wide range of tools were quickly able to determine that a video purportedly showing Ukrainian saboteurs entering Russia was actually filmed in Ukraine, near the location of a previous claim about an attack on a Russian outpost. The vehicle purportedly used to transport the 'saboteurs' was one used not by the Ukrainian military but by the Russians," Bump wrote.
But according to Higgins, it's like Russia isn't even trying anymore.
“These are genuinely some of the most idiotic efforts at disinformation I’ve seen,” he said on Twitter. “I expected to be lied to, but I didn’t expect all those lies to be so blatantly dumb. I’m actually offended at the poor quality of this propaganda and feel bad for Russia for having produced it.”
Another example he and the crew destroyed was claims of a video from the Donetsk region claiming they were being targeted with "chlorine tanks." The problem was that the creators of the videos didn't think to check the meta-data about when it was created.
They claimed that Polish speaking saboteurs "planned to blow up a tank with chlorine on the territory of a sewage treatment plant near the city of Gorlovka\u201d and the video was recovered from the saboteurs' bodies. \nhttps://t.me/nm_dnr/6191\u00a0pic.twitter.com/CnVdKPcEEY— Eliot Higgins (@Eliot Higgins) 1645355544
Also in the metadata was a filename, "M72A5 LAW and AIPLAS live fire.mp4" under the \u201cPantry\u201d section of the metadata. This part of the metadata contains details of other files that make up the published file, such as other sources of audio and video.pic.twitter.com/I6EcM51xWi— Eliot Higgins (@Eliot Higgins) 1645355819
A quick search on YouTube reveals just one video with exactly the same name as the file in the metadata of the \u201cPolish saboteur\u201d video, from a military firing range in Finland, featuring a number of bangs and explosions.\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T3Oc3iuSO8\u00a0\u2026pic.twitter.com/rTDo2x5TyQ— Eliot Higgins (@Eliot Higgins) 1645356019
Sound from the second explosion does not fade out in the "chlorine" vid. Instead it seems to abruptly cut. When played alongside YouTube vid from 2010 it shows that's when soldiers watching explosions started making "oooo" noises in the 2010 vid (complete with my annoying cursor)pic.twitter.com/Im1OvrP3Ts— August Graham (@August Graham) 1645287272
"One of the more embarrassing revelations was made by Bellingcat’s Aric Toler," wrote Bump. "The Russian-allied leaders of separatist groups in each of the regions Russia has since formally entered published videos on Friday recommending that citizens evacuate in the face of acts of violence that had unfolded over the preceding several hours. But, looking at the metadata for the uploaded videos — information about how and when the videos were created — Toler and others found that the videos appeared to have been created two days prior.
He closed by explaining that we've finally reached the point that Russia can be easily debunked by the everyday person with commonly used software. The propaganda machine, although shoddy, might have stopped online victories for Russia. Sadly, however, it hasn't changed Russia's invasion.
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