It was a dramatic video, widely shared when it appeared last Friday on Telegram channels sympathetic to Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. The production shows a barrage of gunfire and shelling by Polish-speaking saboteurs trying to blow up a chlorine tank near the town of Horlivka a week earlier – on February 11. Horlivka is in territory controlled by the separatists of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic.
The DPR People’s Militia press service took it and claimed that the saboteurs were killed and the video was recovered from their bodies.
However, an analysis of CNN shows that the video file’s metadata reveals a creation date of February 8, ten days before it was shared on Telegram, and three days before the alleged attack date. The messaging platform preserves the metadata of the videos posted there and cannot be changed.
But that is not all. Another section of the metadata – called the “pantry maker tool” – revealed that Adobe Premiere Pro was used to edit the video using different assets – called “ingredients” – from a separate repository.
“It appears to be a composite video, which means it is a collection of multiple assets, for example when you add audio to a video or create a collection of clips, images, etc.” said Givi Gigitashvili, research associate at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Laboratory.
“The ingredient file path for this particular video contains the name ‘2021-02-04 ВИДЕО-ЗАПИСЬ ДРГ(+).mp4″, which may indicate that some ingredients are from 2021,” added the expert.
The location of this and other video assets also has “2021” and “February 2” as names for project folders, again suggesting that the original deadline dates back to last year.
Among these assets, also in the Pantry section of the metadata, is a filename “M72A5 LAW and AIPLAS live fire.mp4”. As first noted by Eliot Higgins, founder and creative director of Bellingcat, the filename matches a YouTube video of the same name, with explosions and gunshots at a location in Finland.
THE CNN asked Rob Maher, an audio forensics expert at Montana State University, to analyze the media assets. He compared the boom sequence audio from one of the scenes in the YouTube video to similar audio in the Telegram video.
“The sequence of booms is remarkably similar in terms of timing”concluded Maher. “For the specific boom I compared, the timing is not exactly identical, but it is inexplicably similar.”
According to Maher, in order for the bang sequences in both videos to be so similar, “the geometric relationship between the artillery piece, the target, and the microphone would have to be the same” — meaning they would have to be on the same page. exact same position in both videos.
If the geometry were different “the relative arrival time of the various boom sounds would be different” because the boom sound would propagate at different speeds to the microphone.
“It seems quite unexpected and coincidental that these acoustic arrival times are so similar in these two ‘unrelated’ videos,” Maher concluded.
Maher’s findings are corroborated by other sound designers and Twitter 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 is a lot of evidence indicating that audio was added to this YouTube video,” Gigitashvili said.
It’s not the first time separatists have been seen posting questionable videos on Telegram. An analysis of CNN of Friday’s video statements by the leaders of the DPR and the Luhansk People’s Republic revealed that the footage was recorded two days earlier.
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
