The war in Ukraine has killed, wounded, and displaced thousands of people and devastated the countryside and cities across the country. It has disrupted global supply chains; upended notions of the so-called rules-based international order; prompted countries like Germany to boost military spending; and Finland and Sweden to take the extraordinary step of joining NATO. The conflict has also highlighted shifts in social media for newsgathering and content verification, forcing newsrooms to adapt to new platforms and tackle savvy propaganda.
Storyful has so far verified more than 1,650 videos and images relating to the war, spanning the buildup of tensions ahead of the February 24 invasion to the latest events.
Ukraine winning information war
As Russian forces threatened Kyiv on February 25, President Volodomyr Zelensky and members of his cabinet stood in a darkened street to reassure Ukrainians they had not fled the capital. Zelensky pointed to the leadership of the Ukrainian government and said each was “here”, including Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, who held up his mobile phone with the date and time visible. It was a video tailored for social media, and Ukraine’s social media strategy has been savvy throughout the conflict.
Zelensky released a video with top Ukrainian officials as Russian forces threatened Kyiv.
From Zelensky’s nightly addresses – which typically show him dressed casually and without visible trappings of office – to the military orchestra’s ode to Bayraktar drones, footage of strikes on Russian tanks set to rock music, and governors announcing air raid sirens with custom Telegram stickers, Ukraine has embraced social media to spread information, shape public opinion, and boost local morale.
The Ukrainian military has embraced memes and social media culture: for instance, after Russia said that an August 9 fire at an ammunition depot in Crimea was caused not by a Ukrainian attack but an errant cigarette, social media exploded.
Ukrainian military accounts have since repeatedly referenced the claim, even sharing a video poking fun at it and Russian tourists who holiday in Crimea. On the other side, Russian attempts at social media messaging have often fallen flat.
Mikhail Ulyanov, Moscow’s ambassador to International Organizations in Vienna, found this to be the case when he tried to argue with a group of Ukraine supporters who try to disrupt Russian propaganda on Twitter, the Fellas of Nafo (the North Atlantic Fellas Organisation). Confronted by one Twitter “fella” over his claim about Ukrainian aggression in Crimea, Ulyanov replied: “You pronounced this nonsense. Not me.”
Ulyanov was bombarded with memes; the phrase has since been weaponized against Russian officials across social media, and can be found on merchandise sold to raise money for the Ukrainian military at the fundraising website Saint Javelin, which itself grew on social media and is a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the Western weapons of war wielded by Ukrainian forces. Zelensky has been presented with a personalized Saint Javelin T-shirt.
Social platforms used to show the unfolding war
Twitter is used by commentators on all sides and Facebook remains widely used by government sources, but it is through Telegram that most of the videos of the conflict are spread. The Russian platform, which is not as simple to use as others, has become a center of information from the Ukrainian and Russian governments, combatants, and hundreds of channels that aggregate videos of the war.
In the buildup to the war, however, the clearest picture of events along Ukraine’s borders came via Tiktok. By searching hashtags like “war” or “military equipment” in Russian and Belarusian, as well as locations along the Ukraine-Belarus border, Storyful was able to find and verify videos of Russian vehicles and movements across wide areas. Such regular posting helped Storyful to map the Russian military buildup ahead of the February 24
Storyful verified a February 15 TikTok video showing Russian military vehicles just 10 miles from the Ukrainian border.
Personal stories
When Vinnytsia woman Iryna Dmytrieva posted a video on a sunny July morning of her young daughter pushing her own stroller along the street as they made their way to an appointment, it was just another moment showing the life of little Liza, the four-year-old star of Dmytrieva’s
Moments later, that picture of normality was ripped apart forever, as a missile struck a busy square, killing more than 20 people. Amid the reports emerging on social media that morning were graphic images showing the lifeless body of a little girl in a denim jacket, lying on top of her stroller: Liza, her life cut short in the most brutal way imaginable. Her mother, wounded, survived, and has since spoken of her loss online.
As reporting on the war in Ukraine has proliferated via local and international reporters, and official information and data, it has often been through stories and accounts like those of Liza and Iryna Dmytrieva that the most compelling first-hand accounts have emerged. These stories are what put a human face on the conflict, what allow us in some small way to imagine what life in Ukraine has been like for the past six months. Whether it was the packed train stations and clogged roads as people fled the initial bombardments, or the harrowing aftermath of deadly strikes on residential areas as people tried to go about their normal lives, or acts of defiance in the face of unimaginable adversity, it was often people on the scene with smartphones in their hands who were the first and most compelling witnesses.
Sometimes, sources have been nervous when contacted. In one instance, a source Storyful contacted about footage of military vehicles building up on the Russian side of the Ukraine border appeared to believe they were being contacted by security services and asked if they had to take down their video. Others, such as people in Kherson, later scrubbed their profiles of any indication they were involved in protests against Russian forces.
For many years,Storyful has stressed the importance of sensitivity and security in contacting sources on the ground. These people may have experienced or may be experiencing dangerous, upsetting events. Because so many videos are filmed by witnesses who need to remain anonymous for their safety, or by combatants who may not be alive to give consent, some sources may never be identified or named. Even in the absence of an original source being confirmed, verification of other elements of footage – date and location of capture, for instance – remain crucial, when every bit of footage could someday be evidence in a war crimes trial, and when there looms large the potential for mis- and disinformation.
Disinformation and open-source verification
False narratives and fake or misrepresented videos and images have been spread in the runup to and throughout the Ukraine war, underlining the crucial role verification of these images plays in getting an accurate picture of what’s happening on the ground.
The videos released by Zelensky early in the conflict, such as this one, were subject to bogus claims he’d used a green screen and had actually left the country. Video analysis showed no evidence to support such claims.
In one example of a faked video from the runup to the war, separatists released the video below.
The separatists claimed that they had stopped an attack by Ukraine-backed Polish saboteurs, a claim that was then circulated by Russian media and denied by Kyiv. Numerous similar claims came from the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic in the runup to the invasion. The video above was described as showing a February 18 incident. “Our defenders were forced to open fire from on-duty weapons. The enemy suffered losses of at least two militants killed, three wounded and was forced to retreat,” a DPR statement said. “According to our reconnaissance, the saboteurs planned to blow up a container with chlorine in the territory of a sewage treatment plant near the city of Gorlovka [Horlivka].”
Kyiv denied the allegation, and a subsequent analysis of the video file released by the separatists, undertaken by this Twitter account, showed that even though the attack was claimed as having happened on February 18, the video file was created on February 8. The metadata also pointed to the addition of a soundtrack MP4 file, overlaying the video. That filename pointed to this YouTube video, from where the soundtrack of shooting in the faked video was taken.
In April, amid reports that Ukraine had struck and sunk the Russian cruiser Moskava off the Odesa coast, viral posts purporting to show the ship on fire spread across Twitter. When investigated, however, the video turned out to be 2019 footage of a deadly commercial ship fire in the Black Sea.
In some versions of an inauthentic video, a green filter was used to make 2019 footage appear to be the Russian warship Moskava at night.
Before the battle for Mariupol began, video circulated on February 24 claiming to be an explosion in the city. That, too, was old footage; in this case dating back to at least a month before the war began.
Russia’s diplomatic Twitter accounts have been prominent sources of false or misleading information. On March 9, Russian forces bombed a maternity and children’s hospital in Mariupol, on the assertion that patients and staff had left the facility. The Russian Embassy in London tweeted about the attack the following day, claiming that the hospital was no longer operational and imagery of the bombing’s aftermath were fabricated. Twitter later removed the tweet and similar comments in the thread.
Screenshot of deleted Russian Embassy tweet
Russian embassy accounts pointed to the blogger Marianna Podgurskaya, saying she “played” the roles of two pregnant women. Her Instagram account, however, clearly showed she was heavily pregnant. One of the women she was alleged to have “played” was later confirmed to have died, along with her child.
Screenshot of deleted Russian Embassy tweet
Gathering evidence
In the fog of war, and against the backdrop of the kind of misleading information and imagery outlined above, the fundamentals of video verification have remained the same: where did this happen, who filmed it, and when was it shot? Storyful has asked these questions every day in vetting information and images from the war in Ukraine.
In one example, Ukrainian fighters under siege at the Azovstal steel plant pleaded in stark battlefield dispatches to the UN and others to evacuate their wounded and hundreds of civilians sheltering from constant bombardment. Storyful used the Azov Battalion’s Telegram channel to verify street battles, drone videos of devastating destruction early in the fight for Mariupol, and Russian military channels to keep track of their attacks on the steel plant.
Storyful geolocated Azov Battalion footage of a tank firing close-range at a building near Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol.
Shortly after Azovstal fell and many of the survivors were moved to “filtration camps” in Russian-controlled Donetsk, an advisor to Mariupol’s mayor posted about their location on his Telegram channel, with a crude circle marking it on a satellite view of Olenivka. When dozens of people were killed in a fire at the camp at the end of July, graphic video from multiple Russian Telegram channels allowed Storyful to verify that it was the same location.
Storyful geolocated videos of a fire at a detention camp in Donetsk where Ukrainian POWs died.
At the start of August, Bellingcat verified a series of graphic videos showing the castration and killing of a Ukrainian POW that circulated on social media, first among pro-Russian channels.
The life-and-death importance of open-source verification was again made clear recently when a pro-Russian Telegram account, Grey Zone, reposted photos and a video from a Russian reporter in Popasna, Donetsk. The reporter visited a building occupied by the paramilitary group PMC Wagner and may have inadvertently revealed their location by including a visible photo with the street address. Storyful has not confirmed that the Ukrainian military determined the location solely from the post, but the building was attacked days later, killing and injuring a number of Russian fighters and, it was reported, the Grey Zone channel’s administrator (the channel has not updated since August 13).
Vicarious trauma
Persistent exposure to graphic images of war and human suffering puts journalists at risk of vicarious trauma, a medically recognised condition that can manifest in similar ways to post-traumatic stress disorder, sometimes years after exposure. It can affect journalists at all levels of their career and can be debilitating.
At Storyful, journalists are constantly encouraged to be vigilant about exposure to graphic content (whether from Ukraine or elsewhere), and to walk away or hand off a story to someone else if it is simply too much. Earlier this year, information sessions were held on vicarious trauma, and staff are encouraged by managers to take leave and other time off if needed. We have institutional resources, too, and anonymous access to counseling services. Organizations such as The Dart Center, Amnesty International, and the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley have all written about and provided resources on this issue.
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