‘Dumb and lazy’: the flawed films of Ukrainian ‘attacks’ made by Russia’s ‘fake factory’

The video shows a ghostly scene. A night-time battle is taking place in a forest. There are flashes and mysterious bangs. An unidentified figure cries out in pain. The wounded man is wearing a helmet. Otherwise there are few clues as to where the footage was shot, or what exactly is going on.

A TV report by Russia’s state-run channel one gave the answer. The man seen in eerie silhouette was a Ukrainian saboteur, it said. He was part of a diversionary team sent across enemy lines into pro-Russian separatist territory. His mission? To blow up a local chlorine plant in the rebel-held town of Horlivka, the channel said.

During the firefight two infiltrators were killed, it added. By happy coincidence, representatives of the Donetsk People’s Republic – one of two pro-Moscow entities in the east of Ukraine – retrieved the video from the wounded man’s head camera. He had chucked it away, channel one told its viewers.

There was only one problem with the Kremlin’s dramatic account of the incident. It was entirely fake. The soundtrack of shooting and explosions was actually more than a decade old. It had been recorded in April 2010, according to open source researchers, during a Finnish military exercise.

Ukraine’s intelligence service believes the video is the work of the GRU, Russia’s military spy agency, which has worked actively in Ukraine since the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the shooting down of the MH17 passenger plane. The film’s creators appear to have lifted the original Finnish video from the internet.

They spliced its soundtrack on to new video content made two weeks ago – editing out a few excited “ooohs” from Finnish recruits.

“Russia has a long record of doing this. It isn’t surprising,” Elliot Higgins, founder of the investigative website Bellingcat told the Guardian. He added: “What’s surprising is they haven’t got any better at doing it. In some ways they have got worse. It’s really dumb and lazy.”

Higgins said international audiences were mostly impervious to Kremlin disinformation. But he said domestic Russian viewers tended to believe fake TV footage, which was “theatrically” created for state propaganda purposes. This was especially true of the older generation, he said.

Over the past week Russia has churned out numerous false stories from what Ukraine’s foreign ministry Dmytro Kuleba called a “fake producing factory”. They include claims Ukraine is planning to attack separatist enclaves, and that it on Monday smuggled armoured vehicles and saboteurs across the border – supposedly recorded by helmet cam.

The Kremlin’s media goal is to create a pretext for invasion, Higgins suggested. As part of this strategy Russian TV has begun actively promoting information which suggests a vast humanitarian crisis is unfolding in eastern Ukraine. It has claimed residents have come under heavy Ukrainian shelling – something Kyiv says is not true.

The information has ranged from reports on increased bombardment to more outlandish “provocations” such as an attempted car bombing on Friday outside the separatist administration building in Donetsk. The same day the territory’s pro-Moscow leader, Denis Pushilin, released a video saying the situation had become so grave civilians had to be bussed out to safety and Russia.

Pushilin’s evacuation order was released on 18 February. Bellingcat, however, discovered from the video’s metadata on the channel Telegram that it had actually been filmed two days earlier – last Wednesday. “It’s incompetence,” Higgins said. At the time the situation across the line of control between the Ukrainian military and separatists positions was calm.

A large part of Russian efforts to lay the groundwork for a Kosovo-style intervention in east Ukraine is to claim that the Ukrainian efforts to regain control of the territories in 2014 amounted to “genocide”. Putin has used the word on several occasions. He has also made comparisons to the massacre at Srebrenica in Bosnia.

“What is happening in the Donbas today is genocide,” Putin said last week. Russian diplomats circulated a document at the United Nations claiming Ukraine is engaged in “exterminating the civilian population” in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Late on Sunday night Russia’s embassy in Washington sent a similar document to US journalists.

The “genocide” theme was also repeatedly mentioned during Putin’s extraordinary security council meeting on Monday in Moscow. It has featured extensively in state media bulletins, leading up to the request by the separatist authorities for military and economic help from the Kremlin, as well as legal recognition, granted by Putin on Monday evening.

In 2014, during the peak of the conflict, numerous mass burials were carried out, particularly in Luhansk, where the bodies of many of those who died in the war could not be buried immediately due to the intense fighting. During a visit to Luhansk in September 2014, the Guardian saw stacks of simple wooden coffins at the morgue, which were later buried in hastily dug mass graves.

However, to describe the deaths in Luhansk and other parts of the current separatist areas as “genocide” is grossly misleading. Both sides used artillery on civilian areas during the gruesome battles of 2014, but there was never any mass programme to execute civilians based on ethnicity, language or political preference.

Starting last summer, separatist authorities began exhuming bodies from graves, to perform DNA analysis and identify the remains of people they said had been “victims of Ukrainian aggression”. At the time, the move caused alarm among some of those monitoring the region, with a sense that the exhumations might be later used politically. Now, that seems to be happening.

Meanwhile, top Russian propagandists have openly accused western leaders of warmongering. In a recent segment, Dmitry Kiselyov, who runs a primetime weekly news show, asked: “who needs war?” The answer was a list of foreign leaders and dignitaries: Boris Johnson, Prince Andrew, Joe Biden, Recep Erdoğan, Emmanuel Macron and Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukraine’s embattled pro-western president.

For some pro-Kremlin opinion-makers, the turn toward war has been marked by a quick change in message. Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT, spent weeks mocking US and European officials for their warnings that Russia was preparing for war. But early last week, she changed her opinion: “Russia cannot but stop this war. What are we waiting for?” she asked.

The video editing technology may be new, but the message is an old one. Finnish media pointed out that the Soviet Union in November 1939 used a similar excuse to start the winter war against Finland. The day before the Soviet invasion Moscow claimed that Finnish troops had launched “an attack”.