Ukraine Special 01 - DIY BDA
Dear friends, family and colleagues,
As
indicated in the previous update, I will focus this post on a case study on how
to deal with reports emerging from the battlefield and determining the truth or
accuracy. This is most of the time a very painstaking, time consuming process. I
prepared the following case the explain all the steps that are needed to
perform accurate Battlefield Damage Assessment (BDA) on your own
On March 7th,
the following report came out, where Ukraine claimed it destroyed 30
helicopters on Kherson air base
Over 30 enemy helicopters destroyed in Kherson region overnight (ukrinform.net)
After such an
(obviously exciting) report, the following steps need to be taken.
1. Especially claims from Twitter need
to be taken with a grain of salt: try to notice the following signals:
a. Is it just one unique messages with
some re-tweets? It means the claim is likely not true. It’s usually just one
person making a claim, picked up by some people and retweeted
b. In English search only one or at
most three unique messages show up: try to search for the same news in the
original language. So for example, don’t search for “Kherson,” but for “Херсо́н”
2. Confirmation of equipment kills.
This can be done via the following options
a. Publication of gun camera footage by
attacking party. In this case, this would probably mean gun camera footage of
for example Bayraktars drones or drone footage of drones guiding artillery
strikes
b. Confirmation of the kills by the
attacked party. In this case Russia (so very unlikely)
c. Confirmation by commercially available
satellite imagery. This usually takes a couple of days before this is
published.
3. Assessment of the footage. Especially
under option 1a it’s very important to verify footage for the following points
a. Is it old footage? A lot of videos
are posted on the web as “new footage” For example, last week, this footage was
claimed as a TOS-1 Thermobaric rocket system being destroyed in Ukraine. The TOS-1
is high on the wanted kill list of Ukraine, since it’s one of the most destructive
Russian conventional weapons and as you can see, destroying one causes an
absolute devastating explosion. Point is: although the geography matches that of
Ukraine and also the crosshairs on the video are known to originate from an
Ukrainian guidance system, the video was posted six years ago on Youtube
Уничтожение миномётного расчёта! - YouTube
My assessment: most
likely footage from the 2014 Crimea/Donbass events.
b. Geo-location of the footage. Is the
footage really taken on the spot where the attacking party claims the attack took
place? In case of available satellite imagery it’s easy. It becomes harder when
assessing gun-camera footage. Luckily the camera of the Bayraktar drones is
very accurate and in high resolution. The quality of the Russian Orlan-10
drones is terrible. Thankfully there are a lot of tools like Google Earth and Google
streetview available. Things to watch:
i.
Position
of buildings
ii.
Structure
of roads
iii.
Urban
layout
iv.
Field
layout of rural areas
This is a very important element: not only to
confirm kill claims, but also to detect up to date battlefield activity. In
other words: where are the current frontlines located. Please see the example
from Syria below
Back to
Kherson: I initially had quite some doubts about the Ukrainian claims of 30 helicopters.
On March 15th, Planet Labs finally published this 24 megabyte satellite
image covering all of Kherson airbase. At the time there was a second attack
going on. That’s the black smoke that you see on the imagery. However, my interest
was more on performing a BDA of the initial strike with the 30 helicopter
claim.
Since I don’t
have to worry about geolocation and verification of time here, the painstaking
process starts of surveying the whole airbase for helicopter wrecks. Outside of
the black smoke area, I found only one are with six helicopter wrecks.
Photo© Planet Labs Inc.
I surveyed every
area of the base and I only could find these six wrecks. This means that Ukrainian
claims of 30 helicopters are certainly not true. In case the Russians would
have removed the wrecks, you would have seen some charred soil remaining. None
of that was there. So conclusion is: six helicopters destroyed, not 30.
In case you
want to play with the complete map yourself: here’s the link to the full map:
Twitter has
a lot of useful sources, each of them focusing on particular aspects of BDA/OSINT
Identification
of vehicles:
-(2) Oryx (@oryxspioenkop) / Twitter
-(2) 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) / Twitter
Actually
tracking of vehicles losses is a lot easier in this conflict than for example
in Karabakh and Syria. The Russians with their Z’s and V’s painted on their vehicles
makes it a lot easier. And trust me: most of the burned tanks right now on all
the footage passing by has Z’s etc.
Monitoring
of nuclear fleet:
-(2) The Lookout (@The_Lookout_N) / Twitter
-(2) Petri Mäkelä (@pmakela1) / Twitter
Monitoring
of Western/Russian Electronic signals intelligence (ELINT) activities
-(2) Gerjon | חריון (@Gerjon_) / Twitter
-(2) Manu Gómez (@GDarkconrad) / Twitter Both deliver mostly updates gathered via
Flightradar24: Live Flight Tracker - Real-Time Flight Tracker Map
Especially
when following those three monitoring channels closely, you will be most of the
time a lot less worried about the nuclear dimension and at some other times,
well, a little more worried
Identification
of Russian casualties by name
-(2) IgorGirkin (@GirkinGirkin) / Twitter
-(2) Necro Mancer (@666_mancer) / Twitter
These two
guys are like the Oryxspioenkop, but then for the soldiers. Really important
work, because the more Russian soldiers are really identified by name as
killed/wounded/POW, the harder it will be for the Russian propaganda machine to
counter reports. The IgorGirkin twitter was also really useful in tracking Russian
movements of equipment to the border in the runup to the Russian invasion.
It’s really
important all these channels can keep up the good work in the coming weeks/months.
Best
regards and "Slava Ukraini!"
Niels
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