Previous Subchapter → 9.2 Shock and Awe
The lynching footage - no matter which side - is aimed at destabilizing the psyche and provoking unsystematic violence.
This Quote stems from a post from a news analyst channel known as “Rybar”, a Pro-Russian Telegram channel, the post is an analysis surrounding a shock video of a prisoner of war being castrated.
While the victim is squirming on the floor, an unknown man approaches him with a cutter knife, immediately getting to work operating on the man on the floor with many quickly placed cuts. Not much if anything is said during the castration, what however becomes obvious is that the sadists in front and behind of the camera show no hesitation or mercy in inflicting this torture. In a subsequent video we are shown the victim of the lynching being put out of his misery, executed with a gunshot wound to the head.
This video is a perfect case study on how the fog of war can cloud the information environment, and how quickly competing narratives can emerge, we identified 4 contrasting narratives surrounding this video.
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The first, that the video involves a Ukrainian prisoner of war, accused of being a rapist, being mutilated by Russian troops.
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The second, that the sides have been misread, the prisoner being Russian, and the torturers Ukrainian.
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The third, speculated by Rybar, that the whole video was a fake.
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And the fourth, that both the prisoner and the torturers were Ukrainians, with Ukrainian forces attacking one of their own in a kind of twisted act of retribution.
Before moving on, we want to prepare you on what you are about to read, the description and breakdown of the crime will be discussed in detail in order to combat any allegations of forgery. The videos themselves will not be sourced in our source listing, but we will provide various links to articles which broke down the events within those videos and uncovered the identity of the perpetrator. If you decide to seek the videos out for yourself, that is of course up to you.
So… What about this footage and the suspicions Rybar levied? Is the video staged and how does Rybar’s allegation of the lynching victim being a pedophile affect this case? The video made its rounds online, having been extensively covered since the original video was first uploaded on various Telegram channels.
When watching the video, it becomes apparent that it is devoid of context, someone is getting tortured, but we do not have any details within the video that would indicate that this person was mutilated for a specific crime, but both the victim and the executioner wear some kind of military uniform, but similar to a video we showcased in the Ukrainian Narratives in which the bodies of various soldiers were filmed on a street after some kind of attack, there was some debate over which faction was in what role in the castration video.
All of these competing interpretations originated from Pro-Russian sources, at first the original source for the video, another Pro-Russian Telegram known as “Gruz200”, posted the video seemingly celebrating this atrocity, as if it were a kind of retribution.
But shortly after the video emerged, Pro-Russian sources began to deny the alignment of the alleged perpetrators with their cause, a Pro-Russian news agency known as Alt-Info reported the incident, but claimed that the castration was conducted on a Russian prisoner of war instead of a Ukrainian one, at the same time Rybar posted their analysis questioning the reality of the entire event, the Pro-Russia crowd seemingly couldn’t decide if the event was real, and an example of Ukrainian war crimes, or a staged incident of Russian war crimes, made for psychological warfare.
We analysed the video ourselves and came to the conclusion that it isn’t faked. Let us go over the reasons why we think the video couldn’t possibly be fake.
They Weren’t Actors
Faked shock videos, just like regular TV productions, are scripted and casted. While in regular circumstances there is a wide pool of actors to choose from like family, friends or hired professionals, in an active war zone the casting choices pretty much boil down to your own brothers in arms, or cooperative civilian volunteers in the area. Remember, if the video is faked none of the people in the video act genuinely, nor would they harm each other in order to produce the video. It also is unlikely that the actors from this small pool of people would be talented performers.
While this isn’t a requirement for faking a shock video, the amateur screenwriters of the video would likely have orchestrated the movie to portray the victim as unlikable or despicable. The victim was alleged to be a paedophile, but this detail does not become apparent in the video itself as the victim, perpetrator and bystanders do not converse. Instead the video resembles a spontaneous recording, as if the group just decided to carry out this torture on a whim. There also was no introduction to the violence like we would see in many other execution videos which have been staged in a different sense, having a structure to the video, making demands or explaining what the alleged criminal has done to deserve what is coming to him. If a bunch of amateurs directed this fake shock video, we might have gotten something more sensationalistic and dramatic, yet the video is direct and to the point in contrast. This is not a major factor, but something to keep in mind, how would people who have no experience in filmmaking direct their own movie, even if it was shock media?
Before the castration begins, the tied up victim is treated like a ragdoll, no considerations for his safety are in place. Soon after another soldier curbstomps the victim, the boot makes direct contact with the head and it was not a wimpy kick.
During and after the castration, the vocalisations and squirming of the victim make it more and more apparent that the actions committed against him aren’t acted for show, the violence is performed sincerely.
There is a Lack of Visible Blood
A significant reason why Rybar alleged the torture to be fake, is a lack of blood when the victim’s genitals are cut into. There can be various reasons why we wouldn’t see a fountain of blood and it is also important to keep in mind that fictional media can give us wrong impressions on how a lynching like this one should look and sound like. There not being as much blood as we might expect can be explained in part through the anatomy of the male genitalia, the body’s position on the ground and finally fabrics surrounding the wound soaking up the liquids and potentially obstructing the blood flow a little bit.
Regarding anatomy, the castration begins by the perpetrator cutting into the scrotal sack, which mostly is made up of loose skin and does not contain any big veins or arteries, meaning no profuse bleeding can yet occur. Over time the perpetrator cuts through the genitals more and more, eventually amputating the scrotum and after tearing out more flesh and more calculated cuts the phallus too. The more you see of the castration, the bloodier it gets, the flesh is coated red and blood is visible, but why isn’t a fountain of blood spurting out of the wound?
The victim lays on his stomach with his lower body slightly lifted for the torturer to conduct the castration. Blood flow is slightly inhibited by gravity, which is why it is often advised to hold one’s hand above their head to retard the bleeding. If one lets their arm hang down, more blood would gush out of the wound. One can also feel the blood pool in their head while doing a handstand and the head would progressively turn more and more red - in short; Gravity matters.
If the victim was tied to a pole or would have been sat down onto a chair, we would have seen much more blood gushing from the wound, with more visible staining on the victims clothing and potentially also more visible liquid pooling up somewhere, but the victim was lying on the floor with his lower body angled up and the wound pointing towards the ground, meaning that much of the bleeding was not visible to the camera, as the blood flowed into the inside of the victims trousers where it also was partially soaked up. If the blood seeped through the trousers and pooled below the victim, not much of it would have been visible, as the crime was committed on a dirt ground, which would have sucked up more blood. Rybar’s observations regarding the surprisingly little amount of blood are interesting, but it would be foolish to label the video as fabricated based on that observation alone, especially because much of the wound and the area beneath was obscured by the lower body of the victim which also occluded the light from reaching the ground and inside of his trousers.
There were no Prosthetics, no Makeup and no VFX
Now to the special effects; By implying that the mutilation shown on video is fake, it means that whoever produced the fake video used makeup specialists and prop makers to construct realistic looking prop genitals which can be cut into and convincingly be pulled out and away from the body. How were the props constructed? What paints were available? Where to source the fake blood? Was a specialist for this job hired? And how were the prosthetics attached to the body so they could convincingly be cut and torn out without the viewer spotting inconsistencies like a drastic difference in skin tone or a generally under-detailed prop? The video still has a degraded video quality, but if the video was faked and acted, one key detail would be missing in the final movie.
After the perpetrator fully amputates the victim’s genitals, he picks them up, presents them to the camera and throws them onto the ground where they are clearly visible. If this was a faked video, the director would only decide to let the actor do this if the prop was immaculately designed. Realistically, the actor would be directed to briefly pick up the prop and throw it out of frame to minimise screen time as much as humanly possible. Instead the flesh is held up and presented and then thrown into frame with the person documenting the act following the body part with his phone camera.
With all of these details considered, the castration video being faked is not only highly unlikely, it is an impossibility.
After the dubious claims of fakery and Russian victimhood appeared, the last narrative attempting to explain away this crime emerged from a very strange source, the alleged perpetrator of the atrocities himself.
In an investigative effort by Bellingcat and a Russian publication known as The Insider, this alleged perpetrator was found, a man from the Tuvan Republic of Russia named Ochur-Suge Mongush, he was alleged to be affiliated with the Pro-Russian “Akhmat Battalion” of Chechnya, Bellingcat’s investigators reported that they had managed to contact Mongush by phone, where he admitted he had been in the area where the crime was committed and gave an extremely bizarre explanation for the video.
Mongush was also quoted by The Insider claiming he had never held a weapon before, and that he had reported himself to the FSB after the castration video emerged, with the FSB detaining him for 2 days, and then exonerating after uncovering the apparent “Ukrainian fake”.
This theory fails to answer an obvious question. How was Mongush doctored into the video? And if the FSB had discovered the fakery so quickly, why have they not published any evidence of it?
This explanation, meant to whitewash the crime, instead makes it more believable, because the denial is paradoxical, somehow this is a fake so good that it is seemingly undetectable to the average viewer, and unexplainable by the victim of the fake, but also crude enough that, according to the story, it could be detected after a very short investigation by the FSB, the absurdity of this contradiction throws this video edit theory straight out of the window.
Combining these baffling justifications with the cross-referencing of various photo and video material from the castration video, execution video and images of Mangush from news broadcasts and social media, The Insider and Bellingcat became certain he was the perpetrator, showcasing photo comparisons and the similarities they spotted across videos. Certain key details remained consistent, the wide brimmed sheriff’s hat decorated with a seashell pattern loop, black bracelets around his right wrist and the same shirt he wore during the crime.
Bellingcat’s part in the investigation focused more on geolocation, in their article they refrained from showing Mongush’s face as it never was clearly visible in the lynching footage. By comparing visual landmarks in various video and photo material, like cracks on the ground, uniquely shaped trees and vehicles on the scene, together with Mongush’s testimony, Bellingcat was eventually able to triangulate the location of the crime scene, being the Pryvillya Sanatorium in Luhansk, as a result of this analysis, with location, crime and perpetrator all researched, this is an incident under investigation for war crimes.
All of these details aside, what Rybar and other outlets continuously point to, is the victim being an alleged paedophile. Few people are as hated as child molesters are, which is convenient to keep in mind when a story does not benefit your cause. If the viewer can be convinced that a brutal killing was conducted against a person who would even harm children, maybe the viewer could give the benefit of the doubt, or even treat the killer as the hero of the story.
So despite almost all of these outlets rejecting responsibility for the crime from their side, they are simultaneously trying to justify it as some ugly form of vigilante justice, even though no evidence is presented of the victim’s alleged sex crimes, this reeks of denialism: “We didn’t do it, but if we did, it was deserved.”
Each of these elements that Rybar attached to this analysis of shock content mainly serve to deflect away any culpability from Russian forces committing atrocities, and it is disappointing to see a publication with such a strong message, warning that viewing ultra violent media harbours a psychological cost, having an overwhelmingly negative influence on social interaction and the mental health of entire groups of people, could combine that message with unsourced accusations. Rybar claimed that Ukrainians had a habit of “defending paedophiles” in chat boards for example. They then followed up on this rhetoric by using it to brand Ukraine a “worthless nation”, yet we see no sources for this claim whatsoever provided, no examples of such messages, not a link, a screenshot, nothing. While condemning dehumanising shock content, this outlet created their own as a strange form of coping mechanism, and they seem to either not realise or just not care.
This highlights one of the most dangerous issues regarding information warfare and analytical reporting, those who are responsible for creating a healthier information climate and fighting misinformation, can instead be the ones that poison this climate, and spread that misinformation.
This is a trap we almost fell into ourselves. In earlier drafts of this video we presented Rybar’s post as an excellent analysis on the damage shock content can do, and we didn’t question their claims because we were distracted by that positive message, thankfully we had a chance to re-examine this topic with due diligence.