It was a dramatic video, broadly shared when it appeared final Friday by Telegram channels sympathetic to Russian-backed separatists in japanese Ukraine.
It supposedly confirmed a barrage of gunfire and shelling by Polish-speaking saboteurs making an attempt to blow up a chlorine tank close to the town of Horlivka per week earlier — on February 11. Horlivka is in territory controlled by the separatists of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic.
The press service of the People’s Militia of the DPR picked it up and claimed that the saboteurs have been killed and the video was recovered from their our bodies.
However, metadata from the video file reveals a creation date of February 8, ten days earlier than it was shared on Telegram, a CNN evaluation exhibits. And three days earlier than the alleged date of the assault.
The messaging platform preserves metadata for the movies posted there and it can’t be modified.
But that’s not all. Another part of the metadata — referred to as a “pantry creator tool” — revealed that Adobe Premiere Pro was used to edit the video utilizing totally different property — referred to as “ingredients” — from a separate repository.
“It seems to be a composed video, meaning that it is a collection of several assets, for example, when you add audio to a video or build a collection of smaller clips, images etc.,” stated Givi Gigitashvili, analysis affiliate on the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
“The ingredients file path of this particular video contains a name ‘2021-02-04 ВИДЕО-ЗАПИСЬ ДРГ(+).mp4,’ which may indicate that some ingredients are from 2021,” he added.
The location of that and different video property additionally has “2021” and “February 2” as names for challenge folders, once more suggesting that the authentic timeframe dates again to final yr.
Among these property, additionally within the Pantry part of the metadata, is a filename “M72A5 LAW and AIPLAS live fire.mp4.”
As first observed by Eliot Higgins, founder and artistic director of Bellingcat, the filename corresponds to a YouTube video with the identical title, that includes explosions and gunfire at a location in Finland.
CNN requested Rob Maher, an audio forensics knowledgeable at Montana State University, to analyze the media property. He in contrast the increase sequence audio from one of the photographs within the YouTube video with comparable audio within the Telegram video.
“The sequence of booms is remarkably similar in timing,” Maher concluded. “For the particular boom I compared, the timing is not exactly identical, but it is inexplicably similar.”
According to Maher, so as for the increase sequences in each movies to be that comparable, “the geometrical relationship between the artillery piece, target, and microphone would have to be the same” — which means that they might have to be in the very same place in each movies.
If the geometry was totally different “the relative time of arrival of the various boom sounds would be different” as a result of the increase sound would propagate at totally different speeds to the microphone.
“It seems pretty unexpected and coincidental that those acoustic arrival times would be so similar in these two ‘unrelated’ videos,” Maher concluded. “If the assertion is that the separatists’ video contains edited sound, this might be one explanation.”
Maher’s findings are corroborated by other sound designers and experts on Twitter such as Ciaran Walsh, who compared the spectral analysis of the explosions in the two videos, and arrived at similar conclusions.
“I think (there’s) plenty of evidence indicating that audio is added from that YouTube video,” Gigitashvili stated.
It is not the first time that separatists have been seen posting questionable videos on Telegram. A CNN analysis of the Friday video statements by the leaders of the DPR and Luhansk People’s Republic revealed that the footage was recorded 2 days earlier.
