How the Pro-Fascist Bloggers Lie or Are Confused About the Alleged Kupyansk Mass Grave Video
On Oct. 9, 2022 a video alleged to have been taken from a mobile phone of a Russian soldier was posted in a Ukrainian Telegram channel “Katarsis +”:
The comment under the video reads:
До нас потрапило відео з Куп‘янську до його деокупації.
Як русосвині знищували українське цивільне населення
[We got a video from Kupiansk before its de-occupation.
How the Russopigs destroyed the Ukrainian civilian population]
The video was reposted - at first without attribution - by Maksym Zhorin, a former Azov commander.
His comment currently reads:
Ще окупований Куп‘янськ, Харківська область. Цивільне населення. Розплата буде!
Відео взяте з телефона окупанта.
[The still occupied Kupiansk, Kharkiv region. Civilian population. There will be a reckoning!
The video was taken from the occupier’s phone.]
Originally the part about the source of the video was not there.
Of course, the pro-war (i.e. pro-fascist) bloggers immediately began claiming that the video actually shows Ukrainians murdering pro-Russian collaborators.
It is not the aim of this posting to prove or disprove any of the versions, but it will be shown that the pro-fascist bloggers’ arguments are weak.
Argument 1: the metadata in the file proves the video was shot on the day it was posted.
the available metadata of the ill-fated publication are scattered across the network - the media file was filmed today, October 9, 2022, at 13:24, posted on Zhorin’s channel almost an hour later. pic.twitter.com/NHLE0rKtxW
— Ener (@Ener47358199) October 9, 2022
However, the metadata only shows, when the posted clip was created. It would only show the (probable) recording date of the video if we were sure that this is the original unedited file directly from the phone. But there is no indication of this. E. g. this could easily be a part of a larger video and thus would not necessarily conserve the original metadata. This possibility must be conclusively excluded before using the metadata as an argument. As of now, the argument proves nothing.
(I’ve seen a claim that Telegram changes the date because the video is automatically reencoded by it, but I have checked several videos on neutral channels and found that this claim is unsupported.)
Argument 2: the name of the file proves the video was shot on the day it was posted.
Some pro-fascist bloggers have posted images like these:
Here is the metadata of the video that the Ukrainian Nazi Zhorin posted on his channel today. The video was recorded today on October 9, 2022 at 13:24, and posted on the channel of the war criminal Zhorin at 14:12.
Any more questions?https://t.co/hZSCtYd7UZ pic.twitter.com/HPyj8ulrlM— iͥEͤaͣrͬlGrͬeͤy (@iEarlGreyTV) October 9, 2022
I have seen it being explicitly argued that the “VID_…” name of the file as you can see on the screenshot is in the metadata and shows the actual creation date independently of the date in the metadata, because the filename is assigned by the camera.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The filename that you see on the screenshot was assigned by an Android device after the Telegram function “Save to gallery” was used. On my phone 3 uses of the “Save to gallery” feature on the mass grave video resulted in 3 files with different names, with the date in the beginning of the file name being the date of the saving almost up to the second.
So the filename was not assigned by the camera and has zero to do with the date of recording.
Argument 3: Zhorin first threatened the collaborators in his original messages, then got cold feet and blamed everything on the Russians. So he must have shot the people (or the video) himself, since he posted it.
Zhorin now backtracking after the initial backlash he got (his channel is flooded with angry people). So he edited it and claimed the original video came from a Russian phone and that he was just showing it, but everything stays on the internet Mr.Zhorin. pic.twitter.com/EjwezsalCB
— Ghost (@mdfzeh) October 9, 2022
That’s a pretty brazen lie since nowhere in the original text is there any threat against anyone but the Russian occupiers who allegedly massacred the people on the video. Zhorin explicitly referred to “the still occupied Kupyansk”, i.e. he has claimed from the very beginning that what we see on the video is a Russian deed. And since the video was first posted by “Katarsis +” and not by him, the claim of his involvement is also nothing but a fantasy.
There are various secondary arguments, that are even less serious (one of the victims wears a jacket so it couldn’t have been in high summer - but the Russians were there until the 9th-10th September, and such a jacket protects from rain; one of the corpses moves - well, we don’t know if those were all corpses, some may have been merely wounded or thrown there just like that; etc.), but it is clear that the “technical” arguments by the pro-fascist bloggers have been a failure so far.
To reiterate, here I’m not proving the authenticity of the claim that this is a massacre committed by the Russians - a different mode of argumentation is necessary for this. Rather, I simply take a look at what the pro-fascist bloggers claim and see whether their claims hold water. And of course I know that they will deny everything, after all, following the Holocaust deniers, they deny even the highly documented facts like the fact that Bucha massacre was perpetrated by the Russian army, for which we have not only various witness testimonies (including that of perperators), satellite images, but also at least 2 high-quality drone videos. Most investigators of Nazi crimes could only dream of such a cornucopia of evidence. Most supporters of Russian fascism are not rational. But since they use pseudo-rational arguments, it is useful to explain what is wrong with them.