How we verified footage of Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian basespublished at 12:44 British Summer Time
Benedict Garman & Richard Irvine-Brown
BBC Verify
After video emerged yesterday of what appeared to be a series of Ukrainian drone attacks across Russia, we began the process of verifying them to help us report what looked like a new development in the war.
We used mapping services such as Google and Yandex (a Russian search engine with good coverage of the country) to geolocate where the footage was from.
After that, we carried out reverse image searches to
check these were newly-published videos and not old material being passed off as new.
In one video, of burning
planes on the ground after a strike at the Olenya air base in the Murmansk
region, we could match the runway layout to what’s shown on mapping sites.
Another
showed a drone flying through the sky filmed from
a nearby petrol station forecourt, which we found by matching it with images on Google Maps. We also checked the weather on Sunday to see if it matched the
overcast and wet conditions seen in the video, which it did.
The Ukrainian SBU
security service has also shared its own images of the planning for the
operation, some showing officers poring over layouts of the targets. We were
able to match the outlines you see in some of these to the airstrips shown
on Google and Yandex maps.
