He was a dramatic videoIt was widely shared last Friday by Telegram channels sympathetic to Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
It is believed to have been shown by Polish-speaking saboteurs trying to blow up a chlorine tank near the town of Horlivka on February 11 – a week earlier – with gunfire and shelling. is in Horlivka separatist controlled area The self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic K.
The press service of the People’s Militia of the DPR picked it up and claimed that the saboteurs were killed and video was recovered from their bodies.
However, metadata from the video file reveals a creation date of February 8, ten days before it was shared on Telegram, shows a CNN analysis. and three days before the alleged date of the attack.
The messaging platform preserves metadata for videos posted there and cannot be changed.
But that is not all. Another section of metadata – called the “Pantry Creator Tool” – revealed that Adobe Premiere Pro was used to edit the video using different assets – called “contents” – in a different way. from repository.
“It appears to be a composed video, which means it is a collection of several assets, for example, when you add audio to a video or create a collection of short clips, images, etc.,” said Givi Gigitashvili, research associate. he said. The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
“The content file path for this particular video is named ‘2021-02-04 -ЗАПИСЬ (+.mp4,’), which may indicate that some of the content is from 2021,” he said.
The location of that and other video assets also has “2021” and “February 2” as the names of the project folders, suggesting again that the original deadline is last year.
In these assets, also in the pantry section of the metadata, there is a file name “M72A5 LAW & AIPLAS LIVE FIRE.mp4”.
As first noticed by Bellingcat founder and creative director Eliot Higgins, the filename matches a YouTube video of the same name, which shows explosions and gunfire at a location in Finland.
CNN asked Rob Maher, an audio forensics expert at Montana State University, to analyze the media assets. He compared the boom sequence audio from a shot in a YouTube video to the same audio from a Telegram video.
Maher concluded, “The order of buoyancy is remarkably similar in time.” “The timing isn’t exactly the same for the particular boom I compared, but it’s inexplicably similar.”
According to Maher, for the boom sequences in both videos to be identical, “the geometric relationship between the artillery piece, the target, and the microphone must be identical”—meaning they would have to be in the exact same position in both videos.
Had the geometry been different, “the relative timing of the arrival of different boom sounds would have been different” because the boom sound propagated through the microphone at different speeds.
Maher concluded, “It seems very unexpected and coincidental that these two ‘unrelated’ videos will have the same acoustic arrival time.” “If the claim is that the video of the separatists is sound edited, that could be an explanation.”
Maher’s findings are confirmed on Twitter by other sound designers and experts such as Ciaran Walsh, who compared the spectral analysis of the explosions in the two videos, and came to similar conclusions.
“I think (there’s) a lot of evidence that indicates the audio has been added from that YouTube video,” Gigitashvili said.
This is not the first time that separatists have been seen posting objectionable videos on Telegram. A CNN analysis of Friday’s video statements by the leaders of the DPR and the Luhansk People’s Republic showed that The footage was recorded 2 days ago.