Russian media awash with seemingly faked videos, matching warnings of 'false flag' campaign to justify invading Ukraine
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Joshua Zitser,Kieran Corcoran
Feb 20, 2022, 23:33 IST
Annotated images taken from videos shared in Russian media which have had their authenticity questioned.Donetsk People's Republic/Luhank People's Republic/Insider
Russian media is circulating claims of car bombings and chemical attacks blamed on Ukraine.
The US, UK, and others have warned that Russia would seek to create a fake pretext for war.
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As Russia continued to mass troops around Ukraine, Western leaders repeatedly said that its officials would manufacture media meant to create a pretext for invasion.
As of Sunday, numerous videos which could fit that description were circulating in Russian media.
They purport to expose Ukrainian attacks on the separatist regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, prompting a mass evacuation of the civilians who live there.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said Sunday that such activity could draw "irreparable consequences," seemingly a euphemism for war.
Here are some of the examples.
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Manipulated video alleging chemical attack
Separatist leaders in Donetsk on Friday published a video claiming to show an attempt from Ukraine to blow up a chlorine storage facility in Horlivka.
But, Higgins noted, metadata from the video showed a creation date of February 8, and a project folder dated February 4, long before the attack that supposedly took place on February 18.
The sounds at the 16-second mark of the first video match those around 1 minute, 50 seconds in to the second clip.
Ukrainian intelligence officials warned last month chemicals stored in Horlivka coul feature in a false-flag operation, according to The Daily Beast.
"Emergency" evacuation call seemingly recorded in advance
Metadata also cast doubts on two other clips posted by Russia-backed separatists.
Two separate videos released on February 18, showing the leaders of Luhansk and Donetsk ordering seemingly spontaneous evacuations, were tagged as having been created on February 16, two days before, as noted by CNN.
"Announcements like these are further attempts to obscure through lies and disinformation that Russia is the aggressor in this conflict," a US State Department spokesperson told reporters, according to ABC News reporter Conor Finnegan.
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Images comparing the bombed vehicle with an old image of a UAZ Patriot purported to belong to Sinenkov emerged online.
Though the license plate was the same, the body of the destroyed car appeared to be that of an older, less valuable vehicle.
An image of Sinenkov's actual car, shared by Belarusian journalist Tadeusz Giczan, appeared newer and bigger.
"Not only did the separatists prerecord the evacuation videos, but they also didn't want to blow up the DNR militia head's expensive UAZ Patriot so badly, they put its number plates on a different old UAZ worth a thousand bucks," Giczan said on Twitter.
They said they had found a car in the village of Samsonovka, parked with high explosives equivalent to 200kg of TNT and a remote detonation device.
Video accompanying the news release showed a car being towed from under a railway bridge.
Luhansk officials said the road was being used for evacuations, and that a train full of evacuees was due to pass over the bridge just before the car was noticed.
The previous night, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson also warned that Russia was creating "a web of falsehoods designed to present any Russian attack as a response to provocation."
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