On Monday, a local news portal for Horlivka, a city currently controlled by Russian-led separatists of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), shared an image of a piece of military equipment. The message included additional images that compared this piece of military equipment to the RB-531B Infauna, a new Russian-made electronic warfare vehicle. The message reads:

#Horlivka Good day to the beloved city, friends, the Donbas, Ukraine! About that “civil war” in Ukraine, about those who “aren’t here”, about those things that “miners and tractor drivers dug out” from their flooded mines — the brand new, state-of-the-art Russian electronic warfare complex RB-531B “Infauna”…

(Source: Twitter / NovoGorlivka)

The photograph included with the message was quite low resolution, but some key details were discerned upon close inspection.

(Source: Twitter / NovoGorlivka)

This tweet gathered over 100 retweets at the time of publishing, and received coverage from larger Ukrainian news outlets, such as Gazeta.ua.

Can we verify that this photograph was actually taken in Horlivka, and identify the type of military equipment pictured?

Geolocation

At first glance, this photograph offered a difficult geolocation challenge: there were no visible signs identifying the area, with only a few nondescript buildings along with a high fence and a yellow building with a green ladder. The building on the right part of the photograph was easily the most identifiable aspect of the photograph, along with the high fence that would be more likely in a high-security or industrial area, rather than a residential or commercial part of a city.

(Source: Twitter / NovoGorlivka)

Instead of going on a wild goose chase in looking at every street in Horlivka, we focused our search to just this one building. The fact that the building was clearly higher than the nearby trees means that we could maybe spot it in panoramas or drone footage of Horlivka showing the cityscape.

A panorama of Horlivka found in Google Image Search results showed a few buildings with a similar color scheme.

This area, as detailed on Wikimapia, is a grain elevator on International Street in Horlivka. One of the best ways to find ground-level imagery of a location, especially in Ukraine, is to search for a city and street name on YouTube, providing dashcam videos of people driving through town. If we do this with International Street in Horlivka, we find a video titled “Horlivka before the war. International.”