GEOINT : How to find the location of a video of Ukraine
Since the beginning of the russian invasion in Ukraine, the Internet is overloaded with pictures and videos of the conflict. However, like discussed in previous Predicta Lab articles, these images may be deceiving. To show how to find out whether images come from a certain place, this article will demonstrate how to pin point the location shown in a video of Ukraine using open source research. This method is also called GEOINT.
Many members of the OSINT community share images of the conflit daily on Twitter in what they call “war threads”. This is the case for Aleph, on his account @no_itsmyturn. On April 5th, which marked the 4Oth day of invasion, he shared a footage of a car crossing a ravaged city. The caption reads “Morskyi, Mariupol #Ukraine”. Using these information and the video, we will now find the exact itinerary followed by the car.
The first step consists in finding where the video was first shared. Luckily for us there is a watermark indicating a Telegram channel on the image. The channel @Pravda_Gerashchenko belongs to a Ukrainian politician called Anton Gerashchenko. He posts very frequently so we need to click on his profile, then on “videos” to access the full list of the videos he shared. Please note that a lot of sensitive content is present there, therefore viewer discretion is advised.
We can spot our video more easily by scrolling down the lists, which shows the date of publication. Once we scrolled down to April 5th, we can recognize the thumbnail of the video of interest and the duration of 1:19, which corresponds to the one shown on Twitter minus 1 second. From there we can click on it to be redirected to the original message.
The video shared by @Pravda_Gerashchenko is indeed identical to the one on Twitter. We can now continue our search.
The Telegram message is captioned « Морской бульвар в Мариуполе », according to Google Translate this means “Sea boulevard in Mariupol”. For now the information shared on Twitter are accurate, but let’s check all this on Google Maps with the search « Морской бульвар в Мариуполе ».
Like expected, this request sends us to a boulevard in Mariupol facing the sea. However the street view does not seem to be the same as what we see in the video.
After an initial turn, the video follows a street bordered by buildings on each side. On the contrary, the various panoramic views along Sea boulevard on Maps show that the street overlooks a slope leading down to the sea without any building on it. Hence we are on the wrong street.
In order to redirect from this information, we can go to Google Earth which offers a better quality of satellite image and that will hopefully lead us to the right path.
Starting from the assumption that the video is indeed located in Marioupol and close to the Sea boulevard, we need to look for a group of buildings assembled in a way that will be recognizable from above.
On 0:49 we see in the video a building alongside the road, preceded by another one perpendicular and a bit set back from the street. They are followed on the other side of the road by an ensemble of buildings that are not quite in a parallelepiped shape and that seem to be assembled around an inside courtyard visible on 1:00.
The aerial view of this place should correspond to the plan below: the red rectangles represent the buildings and the green arrow indicates the direction of the car.
After a few research and a bit of luck, we can find the same ensemble of buildings around a street parallel to the Sea boulevard, the Voiniv-Vyzvolyteliv street.
Unfortunately, there is no street view on Google Maps or Earth for this street that would allow us to find the exact point of view we see in the video, but it seems that we are on the right track.
Now that we found the end of the itinerary, we will try to find its start using the same method.
Going back up Voiniv-Vyzvolyteliv street on Google Earth and following the direction taken by the car, we will try to find buildings or infrastructures with recognizable shape that appear in the video.
In the video, the car takes a single left turn, not a 90° turn but in diagonal before arriving onto Voiniv-Vyzvolyteliv street. If we go back up this street before the buildings we identified, there is indeed a street oriented in that same direction. The blue line below marks the road taken by the car in the direction indicated by the green arrow, and the white circular arc indicates the turn.
The first frame of the video shows a house with a sort of tower facing the road (1) on the right and on the left a vacant lot bordered by a fence along the road (2). If we find these elements in sky view, that will reinforce our hypothesis of itinerary.
These markers are visible from the aerial view, although the tower is difficult to discern.
For more confirmation, a panoramic view available on Google Earth shows a view from that same road. We can clearly see our two markers, which validate our starting point. The itinerary is complete !
In conclusion, the exact itinerary followed by the car in the video starts on an unnamed road just before the crossing of Mezhoda street with Voiniv-Vyzvolyteliv street, then it follows Voiniv-Vyzvolyteliv street until its crossing with Ukrainskoho Kozatstva street. We can take this exact path in the street view function on Yandex Maps, the russian browser.
Thus, finding the location of a video like we did here can help validate or refute the information we receive. More tragically, it also allows us to measure the extent of the material destruction caused by the russian invasion in Ukraine when we compare the pictures online to more recent images. You can see below the 4 Panfilova street, on the right as shown on Yandex Maps and on the left as it is in the video at 00:34.
