In July 2018, footage emerged allegedly depicting a Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) operation against an armed, pro-Ukrainian far-right formation. The SBU and most notable Ukrainian media outlets decried this video as a staged fake. We at the @DFRLab echoed this conclusion, writing in August that “there is no reason to put trust in this suspicious video” and that the “most likely way to conclusively debunk this video would be (…) in geolocating the scene.”

Nearly two months after the video was published online, this very thing happened.

Geolocation: Abandoned Donetsk Factory

Twitter user @666_mancer managed to geolocate the scene of the “SBU crackdown” video on September 11 and determined the video was actually filmed in non-government-controlled Donetsk, as opposed to Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Translated: “Here’s a possible location for where the video was shot. What do you say?” (Source: Twitter / 666_mancer)

“SBU crackdown” video. (Source: YouTube / Pavlo Pablo)

The location under question was, according to Wikimapia, a chemical factory called “Reactive.” While there are no ground-level images of the building accessible online, comparing the satellite imagery of the location with that from the video makes clear that they are the same location.

Additional details and photographs concerning the “SBU crackdown” video emerged among Russian and so-called separatist circles online, namely the popular Colonel Cassad blog. While the building in the video is almost entirely covered by a canopy in the video, we can see some of the windows in additional photographs published on the Colonel Cassad blog, with a long, vertical shape. The same window shape was visible in a 2015 satellite image on Google Earth. Below, the white arrow indicates the perspective from the video, and the dirt road (yellow) and roof of the building (red) are also highlighted on both the ground level and satellite image.