For those who are able to: please try to scrape and save any videos and livestreams of the Capitol storming and occupation. Just like after Charlottesville in 2017, many of those who are streaming will delete their streams once they realize how incriminating the footage is.
Bellingcat
@bellingcat
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bellingcat.comJoined January 2014
Bellingcat’s posts
Bellingcat can confirm that three members of the delegation attending the peace talks between Ukraine and Russia on the night of 3 to 4 March 2022 experienced symptoms consistent with poisoning with chemical weapons. One of victims was Russian entrepreneur Roman Abramovich.
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Scoop: Abramovich suffered suspected poisoning along with Ukraine peace negotiators earlier this month. Full Story on @WSJ shortly
New drone imagery shows Russian forces firing on a cyclists in Bucha, on Yablunska Street at 50.54148, 30.228898, where multiple corpses have been filmed and photographed t.me/nexta_live/246
A Russian spy, who presented herself as a Peru-born jeweller with a chaotic personal life, sought to befriend NATO staff and figures who worked at the organisation’s Allied Joint Force Command in Italy over several years.
Bellingcat has identified multiple examples of cluster munitions being fired into civilian areas of Ukraine, including residential areas, schools and hospitals.
This weekend has seen Russian officials, the and make various attempts to debunk and dismiss videos coming from the town of Bucha. Bellingcat, along with the online community, took a look at those claims.
If you're sharing videos and photographs from Ukraine with accountability in mind, please make an effort to share them with links to the source you're using, it greatly assists organisations who are verifying conflict incidents.
An investigation by Bellingcat, and #BBCEyeInvestigations has found that in the months before he was shot dead, Russian politician Boris Nemtsov was followed by members of the same FSB squad that tailed and other opposition figures
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Abramovich, along with another Russian entrepreneur, had taken part in the negotiations alongside Ukraine’s MP Rustem Umerov. The negotiation round on the afternoon of 3 March took place on Ukrainian territory, and lasted until about 10 pm.
This video of a Russian military column coming under attack and retreating was geolocated to 50.587111, 30.837889 by and confirmed by Bellingcat. Filmed in Brovary, northeast of Kyiv. goo.gl/maps/TJX8HUX3g
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Three members of the negotiating team retreated to an apartment in Kyiv later that night and felt initial symptoms - including eye and skin inflammation and piercing pain in the eyes - later that night. The symptoms did not abate until the morning.
We are analyzing this new video supposedly showing a mid-air explosion. By our initial estimation, the video shows an apartment block in western Parand (35.489414, 50.906917), facing northeast. This perspective is directed approximately towards the known trajectory of #PS752.
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The next day the group of negotiators drove from Kyiv to Lviv on the way to Poland and then Istanbul, to continue informal negotiations with the Russian side. A Bellingcat investigator was asked to help provide an examination by chemical weapons specialists.
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Based on remote and on-site examinations, the experts concluded that the symptoms are most likely the result of international poisoning with an undefined chemical weapon.
An American Neo-Nazi boasted of serving alongside military units in Ukraine. A former Trump advisor then claimed it was the “Biggest Nazi Scandal in US History”. But open source evidence places the Neo-Nazi in Florida, when he claimed to be in Ukraine.
Bellingcat and investigative partners and have discovered a hitherto secretive group of engineers involved in Russian missile strikes on Ukraine.
These strikes have killed hundreds and left millions without heating or power
The actual location of the photograph used by to support their claim the Azov battalion was operating at the Mariupol maternity hospital bombed by Russia was geolocated by to 47.101092, 37.671539, over 10km away from the actual hospital site. twitter.com/israel_mid_ru/
This post is unavailable.
With recent talk of Russian disinformation campaigns related to the current tensions around Ukraine we thought it would be timely to revisit some of Russia's previous attempts at disinformation, in particular the four M's that describe their use of satellite and aerial imagery 🧵
A joint investigation between Bellingcat and The Insider, in cooperation with Der Spiegel and CNN, has discovered voluminous telecom and travel data that implicates Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) in the poisoning of Alexey Navalny.
Thread: We're sorting through videos taken indoors - we assume most/all are inside the Capitol - from the Parler data dump. Apologies if any of these are already well known - each was posted on January 6th on Parler with geodata in DC. We don't know the associated accounts.
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Bellingcat chose not to report this story earlier due to concern about the safety of the victims. Given the choice of the targeted individuals to speak up, Bellingcat and its investigative partner intend to publish an investigation into the presumed poisonings.
We're looking for open source images of the moment when Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick was attacked on January 6th, which eventually led to his death, continuing efforts started by
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OK, new project: Let's find the people who beat the policeman to death. Someone sent me a photo of the scene but my notifications are getting flooded. Can anyone who has photos or video of that scene post them in the replies here?
We are seeking images of Uragan 9M27K and Smerch 9M55K cluster rocket and their submunitions from the current fighting in Ukraine, as well as videos of suspected cluster munition attacks. If you have any, reply with a link to the source if possible.
The man who attacked and broke his finger on Saturday is Travis Taylor, a Proud Boy previously identified by . torchantifa.org/dox-all-your-b
See a comparison below between his face and tattoos between 2018 and this weekend.
NEW: Bellingcat's worked with the to uncover a trail of digital evidence that appears to identify Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, as the leader of an online gaming chat group where US intelligence documents leaked
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An alternative less likely hypothesis was use of microwave irradiation. The symptoms gradually subsided in the course of the following week.
Video has surfaced of Riley Williams, a 22-year-old from Pennsylvania who is facing charges for her part in the US Capitol riot, making a Nazi salute.
New investigation from
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The experts said the dosage and type of toxin used was likely insufficient to cause life-threatening damage, and most likely was intended to scare the victims as opposed to cause permanent damage. The victims said they were not aware of who might have had an interest in an attack
. and have obtained several months of chat logs from the Patriot Coalition of Oregon, a network of pro-Trump, pro-police activists, which detail plans for violence in the streets of Portland
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The three men experiencing the symptoms consumed only chocolate and water in the hours before the symptoms appeared. A fourth member of the team who also consumed these did not experience symptoms.
Ashli Babbitt was shot and later died after she attempted to enter the Speaker's Lobby inside the Capitol on January 6.
We've retraced the shooting as well as Babbitt's ideological journey from Obama voter to MAGA and QAnon follower.
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According to two consulted CW experts and a doctor, the symptoms were most consistent with variants of porphyrin, organophosphates, or bicyclic substances. A definitive determination was not possible due to the absence of specialized laboratory equipment near the victims.
The man arrested at the Hostomel airport being accused of a Russian spy after being caught with sensitive information is in fact a Ukrainian priest named Mikhail Pavlushenko (mitropolia.kiev.ua/ru/priests/pro). His Facebook page shows a range of pro-Russian content
news.liga.net/politics/news/
It’s been great to see the response to the #Navalny documentary and ’s investigation into his poisoning, but it was just one of a series of nerve agent based assassination attempts uncovered by Bellingcat over the last 3 years.
Shireen Abu Akleh, a prominent journalist with Al Jazeera, was killed in Jenin on May 11
Bellingcat compared videos, public statements and commissioned audio analysis to determine events surrounding her death and to try uncover clues as to the perpetrator
We're still adding these Parler videos into one YouTube playlist, which you can play here:
youtube.com/playlist?list=
Apologies that it's all a bit chaotic / unsorted, we're just dumping them into YouTube as we find them from scraped Parler videos.
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Thread: We're sorting through videos taken indoors - we assume most/all are inside the Capitol - from the Parler data dump. Apologies if any of these are already well known - each was posted on January 6th on Parler with geodata in DC. We don't know the associated accounts.
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Additional reporting by the WSJ
Over the last two weeks, Bellingcat has received an unprecedented outpouring of support for our work collecting, authenticating, reporting on and preserving digital evidence from the war in Ukraine.
We want to say thank you to all!
Less than 48 hours after his arrest in Russia, releases a new, major, investigation into the corrupt money that funds Vladimir Putin's excesses, including details of the massive palace complex he's built for himself (with English subtitles)
youtube.com/watch?v=ipAnwi
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Here's the full playlist of videos we found on Parler, uploading on January 6 with geodata in Washington DC, from inside buildings (we assume the Capitol and nearby). We'll keep uploading videos here as we find more!
(Some are still processing)
Geolocated by Bellingcat to 50.758821, 30.365973, consistent with the following geolocation:
twitter.com/zwedowz/status
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A Russian helicopter is being downed in Ukraine.
Stunning footage.
New: Bellingcat has been given access to over 140 satellite images showing activity at a Crimean shipping terminal that some reports have claimed has been enabling the transportation of stolen Ukrainian grain by Russia.
US Law Enforcement are deliberately targeting journalists during protests against the killing of George Floyd.
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The location where the cyclist was shot was filmed after Ukrainian forces entered Bucha, where a corpse is clearly visible next to a bicycle.
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Roman Abramovich confirms through a spokesperson that he "suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning"
Bellingcat is documenting incidents of potential disinformation arising on the frontlines between Russia and Ukraine:
Russia says it no longer operates the the type of missile that struck #Kramatorsk railway station last week, killing dozens.
But open source evidence suggests otherwise. New from
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The clip, which some may find disturbing, shows the moment where a protester wearing a black, red and white cap climbs over the railing near the door, appears to pull an officer towards him, then drags him down onto the ground then down the steps by the back of his helmet.
A GRU spy who sought to gain access to the International Criminal Court as an intern left a long and detailed trail on social media.
Four synchronised videos showing different angles of the shooting of Ashli Babbit in the Capitol building (Graphic).
BREAKING: We have determined the real identity of "Elbrus", a high-ranking FSB officer who was tied to the downing of MH17 and planning the extraterritorial assassination of Russia's enemies abroad. His name: Colonel Igor Anatolyevich Egorov.
Here, we wrote this to help you
They don't like it when you expose their disinformation, so keep it up.
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The actual location of the photograph used by @israel_mid_ru to support their claim the Azov battalion was operating at the Mariupol maternity hospital bombed by Russia was geolocated by @digitaljonah to 47.101092, 37.671539, over 10km away from the actual hospital site. twitter.com/israel_mid_ru/…
BREAKING: & its investigative partners have identified the killer of Georgian Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, who earlier this year was shot in Berlin by an assassin arriving on a bicycle, as Vadim Nikolaevich Krasikov, a Russian citizen aged 54.
Russia has long been accused of exporting grain taken from occupied eastern Ukraine.
We recently published over 140 satellite images that appeared to show vessels with their AIS transponders off as they loaded up on grain at the Port of Sevastopol
US soldiers stationed on European bases that host nuclear weapons have exposed a multitude of sensitive security details -- including where weapons are stored & secret duress words -- by using flashcard learning apps that appear publicly in online searches
Thread - The New York Times reported last night that the GRU's Unit 29155 paid militants in Afghanistan to attack US troops. Bellingcat has been tracking the activity of Unit 29155 for quite some time now
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We have confirmed the @nytimes scoop: A Russian military spy unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan. From @nakashimae @missy_ryan me and @shaneharris washingtonpost.com/national-secur
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Satellite imagery from March 11th, via , shows the building next to where the man was shot was destroyed at that date, indicating the drone video was filmed before that date.
Most people reading this have tried using Google Reverse Image Search -- it's pretty easy! But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Our new guide goes into excruciating detail on various reverse image searching engines, and how to creatively use them.
Bellingcat has been logging incidents that appear to depict civilian impact or harm since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine.
We have now visualised this data in a TimeMap feature that allows users to explore what we have found 👇
Breaking: and its partners and have definitively linked the murder of Georgian asylum-seeker of Chechen origin, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, with Russia’s security service FSB.
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Check out our (clunky and incomplete) archiving effort from the Charlottesville event here for an idea of the type of materials to retain:
We note the decision of the Russian justice ministry to name Bellingcat as a foreign agent. This puts us in the same company as many of Russia's remaining prominent independent media outlets and human rights NGOs.
BREAKING: Bellingcat has identified a high-ranking figure whose identity was searched for by the Joint Investigation Team in connection with the downing of MH17 as Colonel General Andrey Burlaka, Operations Director of FSB’s Border Service
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There has been much speculation about the cause of the blast, and some initial claims about improperly stored explosive material, but nothing has yet been confirmed.
We can, however, state with confidence that this was not a nuclear blast.
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This isn't that complicated, people. There is a fire and a secondary explosion. There are literally none of the phenomena one sees with a nuclear explosion.
Thanks to our crowdsourced effort in finding new research leads from the travel itineraries of the FSB team that poisoned Navalny, we found three new apparent poison victims:
Russia has made a number of claims after a strike on June 27 killed at least 18 people at a mall in the Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk.
Bellingcat tested those claims against available open source evidence 🧵
Illustrating your tweets with old photos to make your content more noticeable during a conflict merely helps spread disinformation. Likes and clicks are less important than accurate information about conflict. twitter.com/KyivPost/statu
Bellingcat and partners are currently collecting, verifying, and archiving as much open source material as possible, and will make it available to accountability processes, including to the ICC:
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ICC urged to investigate possible war crimes in Ukraine by Russia and Belarus theguardian.com/world/2022/feb
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A number of people, including , noted that the hand that the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed to see moving was in fact a water droplet travelling across the car windscreen:
The following media includes potentially sensitive content. Change settings
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Getting fed up of this “it’s a moving arm” bullsh….. it’s a raindrop on the windscreen, alongside an inverted channel version for more clarity. The whole arm moving thing is just ridiculous. pic.twitter.com/ZiuEX4rFWc
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Robert Evans () examines the toxic online culture that inspired the Christchurch massacre shooter
Bellingcat has identified the individual who fell from a window of the Russian Embassy in Berlin & died as the son of FSB's Director of the Directorate for Protection of Constitutional Order, the same FSB squad that follows and poisons Russian dissidents.
UK authorities have just announced Denis Sergeev, who travelled to the UK under the alias Sergey Fedotov, has been charged as the third suspect in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal. Bellingcat first revealed Sergeev's involvement in the poisoning two and a half year ago.
The Radar Interference Tracker (RIT) is a new tool that allows anyone to search for active military radar systems
It has already proven useful in spotting potential movement of military equipment near Russia’s border with Ukraine – as explains
FROM HERO TO ZERO: Now we know who "Ruslan Boshirov" is.
We still don't know exactly who leaked the many US intel documents that have recently appeared online. But in a new investigation, spoke to several people on the Discord server where they may have first originated.
We can now send a satellite to take a picture of anywhere in the world.
Tell us where to look by responding to this tweet with the co-ordinates of the location, a screenshot/link, and why it's important.
For more information, read our announcement here:
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This video emerges as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claims the "provocation" in Bucha was committed after the departure of Russian troops.
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Провокация в Буче совершена после ухода российских военных, заявил Лавров
ria.ru/20220405/bucha
Our latest investigation into a group of Russian missile programmers behind cruise missile strikes in Ukraine required some creative geolocating.
explains how we did it.
Bellingcat and its investigative partners have established that Russian politician, Vladimir Kara Murza, was followed by a specialist FSB team prior to his suspected poisonings in 2015 and 2017.
Bellingcat has lodged a formal appeal with Russian courts against our designation as a "foreign agent". Our inclusion into the Foreign Agents registry is in breach of Russian and international law, is discriminatory and defies principles of free speech and basic common sense.
Over the last few days we have identified several videos which claims to show that Beirut was hit by a missile.
In ’s latest article we examine these videos.
Spoiler: none of them show a real missile.
Press release - Yevgeny Prigozhin's SLAPP case against Bellingcat founder has been struck out bellingcat.com/app/uploads/20
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For most every platform, there are sites that can do a basic scrape of a video, including livestreams. Just Google "download [platform] video" and you'll find a site that can do it, though you may have to fight through a lot of ugly ads.
Use Google Drive/Dropbox to save them.
Tomorrow on Bellingcat, a major investigation into the activities of Russian intelligence on European soil. Following that there will be another major investigation into the activities of Russian intelligence on European soil, likely followed by at least several others.
Thank you all for the submissions, help and suggestions for our January 6th work. We're currently bringing together all the videos and images, as well as additional videos and images from Parler, and organising them to map out, in time and space, the events of the day.
Breaking: Bellingcat has identified the true identities of the the team of GRU officers who attempted to poison Bulgarian arms manufacturer Gebrev in 2015, as well as their current activities. We have submitted relevant data to law enforcement.
We did a deep dive into those creepy "Amazon FC Ambassadors" that defend the honor of Amazon and Jeff Bezos to anyone criticizing them on Twitter:
After the publication of the report by , & showing FSB’s poison squad tailed before both of his poisonings, he has been subject of renewed tailing - this time by a car we linked to the FSB.
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Clicks this thread,
About the GRU.
(Let's breka down our new report identifying the third Skripal suspect, Sergei Fedotov, who we have unmasked as Denis Sergeev).
A mail server vulnerability has publicly exposed more than a year’s worth of email logs, as well as highlighted security and infrastructure issues, faced by the administrators and maintainers of controversial websites such as 8kun.
Russian forces built a makeshift dam to cause flooding around the occupied city of Tokmak prior to Ukraine’s counter-offensive.
A video appearing to show Ukrainian soldiers harassing a Russian-speaking woman was widely circulated by pro-Russian figures and even official government social media accounts.
But online investigators have exposed the video as staged:
Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, shared incredibly racist "advice" to "Minnesota negrs" [the word has several meanings in Russian: coloreds, blacks, negroes]
The re-post is from Dmitry Steshin, a journalist known for his nationalist views.
We translated some bits.
Russia’s operation to smuggle grain from occupied Ukraine is evolving. A new investigation by Bellingcat & has tracked ships taking grain from Crimea direct to Iran. Grain exports have also begun from other occupied ports
We just published a new report that we've been working on for quite a while, identifying a dozen individuals linked to the downing of MH17 who were in the Donetsk region in mid-July 2014. Most of these people had only been known by their call sign before.








