Louise Bernard 2:33 p.m., May 27, 2022

After more than three months of war in Ukraine, the FranceInfo program "Vrai ou Fake" has decided to investigate a war crime.

For two months, the team of fact-checkers analyzed an amateur video.

Image, location, and even the voice of the author of the video, all elements of the video have been scrutinized. 

Three months after the start of the conflict, the news is still marked by the war in Ukraine.

For the first time since the fighting began, a Russian soldier has been convicted of a war crime.

Mariupol, Boutcha... macabre discoveries follow one another on the ground and war crime investigations multiply.

For the occasion, the program

Vrai ou fake

broadcast on the continuous news channel FranceInfo, investigated a potential war crime.

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The show, which specializes in fact-checking, will dedicate a module of a few minutes on the air on Saturday, for work that will have required more than two months of investigation.

To achieve this, the teams worked from a video posted on social networks.

We see what looks like a war crime: Ukrainian soldiers killed, some with their pants down.

Voice analysis

So the journalists analyzed and deciphered each clue left in the video.

They were thus able to confirm that the victims were indeed Ukrainian soldiers and they found where the video had been shot and especially by whom.

Who is this voice that films and comments?

To do this, the

Vrai ou Fake

teams used different tools.

"I have worked a lot on the analysis of amateur images for a long time. So the techniques of geolocation, image analysis, I mastered. What we had never done before was the analysis of If this had been done in the past by other media, we had never done it, so to make sure we were analyzing it correctly, we called in two companies that analyzed Russian soldier with software and they came to the same conclusion as us, that it was indeed the right person we were looking for", explains Julien Pain, the editor-in-chief and presenter of

Vrai ou Fake

.

“We will give our entire investigation to justice if necessary”

The journalists thus managed to identify the author of the video and therefore the alleged perpetrator of war crimes.

A rare and very important fact for the trials.

So what follow-up to their investigation? 

"I think it's not up to us, journalists, to take the step of accusing someone and building a case against someone. We do the investigation and the justice system does its job. And so , if justice asks us, whether it is an International Criminal Court, Ukrainian justice or French justice, we will give our entire investigation”, explains Julien Pain. 

True or Fake

is broadcast Saturday at 12:05 p.m. on the FranceInfo channel, channel 27.