Yet More Russian Disinformation – Milblogger’s ‘Ukrainian Tank Graveyard’ Video

The independent Russian news site The Insider reported  on Wednesday how the Russian milblogger “Brigada ‘North-V’ of the Russian Armed Forces' Palace of Culture” posted a video on his Telegram channel on Saturday, Sept.14, entitled “Cemetery of Ukrainian armored vehicles destroyed in the SVO zone.”

The footage shows a line of around 10 damaged, immobile tanks standing at the side of the road on the edge of a typical Ukrainian town. They are filmed from a car as it drives past the column. There is no commentary, just the sound of the car’s engine and “music” from the car stereo.

The implication of the video is that this was a recent event which is initially borne out by the markings visible on some of the tanks which resemble the “circle in a triangle” identifier that appeared on Ukrainian vehicles at the start of the Aug. 6 incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.

The video was fact checked by experts who cast immediate doubt on its veracity. Firstly, the open-source intelligence (OSINT) project EjShahid geolocated the video and found that it had been filmed in the central street of the village of Myrne in the Kramatorsk district of Donetsk region, more than 300 kilometers (190 miles) from the Kursk town of Sudzha, the epicenter of Ukraine’s move into Russia.

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Initial reports said Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine would be the subject of discussion before the next day’s meeting of the UN General Assembly which would address Ukraine’s victory plan.

Then, based on the location of the “tank graveyard” further investigation by the military issues website “Russo-Ukrainian Warspotting” concluded that the video in fact dated from October 2022 when images of the destroyed tank column first appeared. Even more damning was the fact that these were in fact Russian tanks that had been hit and captured by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).

Some of the markings on the tanks were similar to that carried can be confused with the triangle identifier that the AFU applied to their armored vehicles for the offensive.

Military analysts and an AFU source told The Insider, that before the Russians began marking their vehicles with the more familiar “Z” and “V” symbols at the start of the full-scale invasion they used the triangle outside of a circle marking seen in the video.

Screenshot of one of the damaged Russian tanks seen in the video showing the triangle outside of a circle marking previously used by Russian forces.

Others have commented on the crosses painted on the vehicles which was also used to mark some AFU vehicles, but military analysts say these were added after the tanks were captured so that friendly Ukrainian units did not attack them again.

It is thought likely that the tanks were not hit in a single action but had been recovered during Ukraine’s September 2022 counteroffensive to the east of Kharkiv and were deposited in Myrne during the process of moving them south - as witnessed by other photos published by Warspotting that showed some of the tanks being placed on Ukrainian low-loader trailers.

Screenshot showing captured Russian tank on a Ukrainian low-loader for evacuation from the battlefield.

One anomaly, according to the military vehicle modeler Buschlaid, was the presence of a Ukrainian T-80BV, recognizable by its 2016 digital camouflage scheme, which had been captured by Russian forces and was now recaptured by the AFU.

The barrage of dis/misinformation and propaganda that has long been a feature of Russia’s so-called special military operation had been turned up a gear by pro-Kremlin mainstream and social media since Ukraine’s “incursion” (counter-invasion) into the Kursk region.

Almost weekly, Russia’s Ministry of Defense publishes videos and claims of false success of its armed forces in the border areas of the Kursk region. These are nearly always easy to disprove by analysts of action emanating from different areas of the battlefield and at earlier times than claimed.