A video sprang up on social media this week, allegedly showing Ukrainian border guards mowing down a group of migrants. I’ve done my best to verify the authenticity of the video, and am fairly sure it is genuine.
I will continue to monitor this story and follow up on it to post updates. For now, stick with fairly sure. Here are the facts.
On December 1, a Facebook profile named Vasily Rumak (Василий Румак), allegedly a Ukrainian soldier, posted graphic video footage of soldiers attacking a column of people (supposedly Middle Eastern migrants). The video and the account have since been deleted. However, the footage continued to be shared on Telegram, YouTube, and other places. See for yourself:
Note the watermark: Priluki, and the date 29/11/2021.
This might be staged theatrics (and it helps that the video is grainy thermal imagery, making it easier to fake), but it could also be a real crime that was committed somewhere else and misrepresented. There is also the chance that it is completely authentic. I was unsure even as I was compiling this post, but now I have, at least for now, concluded that it is real. I’ll explain in more detail below.
Background
The EU and Belarus are having a nasty border feud (see my previous entries here and here). The Ukrainian State Border Guard Service has mobilized in full force along the Belarusan border and is authorized to use deadly force.
On November 13, the 61st Jager Infantry Brigade had some interesting things to say on their official Facebook page. Note that this brigade was shifted to border security in the Northern region of Ukraine in 2019.
They quickly followed up with a clarification the next day, explaining that they had been misunderstood.
The Crime
The video footage was apparently recorded on November 29 in Priluki, a village in the Chernobyl region of Ukraine (note the date/timestamp watermarked in the video). The on-camera soldiers seem to belong to the 61st Jager Infantry Brigade, as that’s the unit responsible for security in this region.
The facts of what happened next are a little scattered but I’ll summarize as clearly as possible. (there is a pretty clear timeline of events on the Novorossia (Russian) website here, dated December 2). Back on November 29 when the massacre allegedly took place, the Ukrainian Border Guard Service allegedly posted the video themselves on their own website, then deleted it. That particular claim appears to originate from the Telegram channel Кремлёвская прачка, who posted a screenshot (see original post here):
She’s not necessarily lying, but yes, a picture can be manipulated to say whatever you want. I looked up this website with the Wayback Machine, but it hadn’t been crawled in that timeframe. In the absence of more information or evidence, I can’t verify if this screenshot is real or not. There is also a bigger question, did the shooting happen at all?
Also on December 1, the Ukrainian Border Guard Service posted an article to their site claiming that the video is fake. The 61st Jager Infantry Brigade also followed up with a Facebook post blaming “Russian propagandists” for creating the video, or possibly even killing migrants themselves. A little while later they shared a link to a news story claiming that the video must be fake because Priluki is a village in Belarus, not Ukraine. Yes, Priluki is a village in Belarus, but it is also a village near the border in Ukraine.
The Truth?
This is a crime that could have happened. Ukraine is a weird and violent place. The central government in Kyiv is desperate to join the EU and NATO, so doing their best to look as woke and politically correct as possible, at least when they’re talking to the Western media. But the same cannot be said for the rank and file. A large portion of their military is little more than loosely organized gangs of neo-nazis like the Azov battalion. They have killed civilians before and still do. As for posting a video incriminating themselves, well, they’ve done that before too. In honor of Holodomor Memorial Day, Ukrainian journalist Yuri Butusov published a video of himself shooting a howitzer into Donbass.
For every grain of 1933, for every victim of Soviet repression – fire on the Russian invaders! Shot!
– Yuri Butusov
The Minsk Protocol (signed by the Ukrainian government and separatists) prohibits heavy weapons. It’s also universally accepted common sense that journalists aren’t supposed to shoot guns. Ukrainians are punishing Russia by… killing their own people? Like I said, Ukraine is a weird and violent place.
Anyway, just because the incident could have happened doesn’t mean it did. We’re more than halfway through the weekend and the mainstream media in Russia has been weirdly silent about the whole incident. That’s a bad sign. When Ukrainians do something naughty, Russians are usually the first to complain about it. The fact that they are so far silent illustrates just how unsubstantiated the alleged shooting is, and there’s a fairly high chance that it is fake.
There is some good coverage in the English-language media, like this piece by the Donbass Insider.
On November 29, the Ukrainian news outlet Zhitomir News posted an article reporting a border incident involving firearms, and then deleted it. Fortunately, this one was successfully archived and can still be read (in Ukrainian) here.
The more I dig into this story, the weirder it gets. Apparently (I got this from the Donbass Insider article), back on November 14, a social media account for the Ukrainian Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security claimed that the 61st Jager Infantry Brigade is a fake. Not just that the page is a fake, but that the unit itself doesn’t exist.
This claim is weird on multiple levels. There are numerous references to the brigade all over the internet, including what I linked above (also here). How did Russian spies fake an entire Ukrainian military unit and fool a huge number of people, including… the Ukrainian military?
If the 61st Infantry page is fake, why didn’t the Ukrainians just report it to Facebook? I was in public relations for 10 years. I can confirm this is one thing that Facebook and most of the other major social media platforms are actually fairly good at. Do the Ukrainian armed forces just not know who is under them and who is not? Again, I cannot overemphasize how weird Ukraine is.
There is nothing about this in the Western English language media. No “fact checks” either. In fairness, I don’t think that is a lie, they genuinely aren’t aware of it. I suspect that our “journalists” seem to get all of their stories from Twitter and don’t even go outside anymore.
Update:
Russia Today article (Dec. 1): Ukraine says viral video alleging refugees were shot at is fake
Ian Kummer
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