There is an air of 2014 in these videos of railroad convoys carting through the snowy Russian steppe trucks, tanks, combat vehicles and other multiple rocket launcher systems. Published at the time on Vkontakte, a Russian clone of Facebook, or on Instagram, they will be exploited to identify the military equipment used by the separatist groups to seize part of eastern Ukraine, a few weeks only after the annexation of Crimea by Moscow.
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Taken from the TikTok social network, this same type of data now allows analysts to document the rise of the Russian army on the Ukrainian border. “As we assumed, part of the vehicles of the Eastern Military District is being transferred to Belarus,”written like this January 17 Rouslan Leviev, after identifying a new Russian military camp in Belarus, some 40 kilometers from the Ukrainian border. This Russian expert has been following the activities of the Russian army since 2014 as well as those of the Wagner mercenary group in Ukraine, Syria and Africa.
Since the end of October, he has focused on the Ukrainian border, near which they have gathered, according to some analyzes, up to 40% of all combat units of the Russian Army. Along with other experts with a wide variety of profiles – professionals, activists or simple Internet users – he documents, classifies and analyzes Russia’s military preparations on social networks. An activity of burning topicality: on January 19, in Kiev, the American Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, assured that Russia could launch an offensive against Ukraine “at any time”.
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Since the first major Russian military maneuvers in Ukraine in 2014, the work of these digital sleuths has been facilitated by several developments. “The main difference is that access to satellite images is much cheaper,” explains Konrad Muzyka, director of a consulting group specializing in the analysis of the Russian armed forces. “Today you can get a high resolution image of an area of one square kilometer for around fifteen euros, that was impossible in 2014.”
General radio silence on the soldiers side
New tools have also appeared: thus Rouslan Leviev and his group were able to follow very precisely the path of the Russian army’s rail convoys towards the Ukrainian border thanks to a simple Internet site allowing, by typing the identification of a wagon, all about its freight, its origin and its destination.
“It gives us a good idea for large equipment, for example we can count tanks and artillery pieces”, explains Rob Lee, a doctoral student at King’s College London and a specialist in Russian defense policy. “But this is only one piece of the puzzle, we can miss important details such as ammunition stocks or logistics”, he tempers.
Russian officials, well aware of this activity, are adapting. If the Russian soldiers did not hesitate in 2014 to chain the selfies on the front, the radio silence this time is almost general. “They’ve been locked down severely in recent years, and now there are far fewer photos taken from inside military camps,” confirms Konrad Muzyka. Analysts who tracked Russian army rail convoys also saw, from November, their access to the website allowing this tracking removed, while the military convoys themselves mysteriously disappeared from the platform. While the West still wonders about Russian intentions, Moscow continues to do everything to maintain a thick fog of war on the Ukrainian border.