MATT BURGESS
***
ON THE SNOWY roads near Kursk, tanks and military equipment stop traffic. Videos from around the Russian city--roughly 100 miles from the border with Ukraine--show cars waiting in line to cross train tracks being used to transport tanks from one place to the next. Dozens of military vehicles have been filmed parked together. And shaky footage shows tanks rumbling across snowy ground alongside a busy road. All of these records have one thing in common: They were shared on TikTok.
***
"There is a lot of data out there," says Benjamin Strick, investigations director at the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), a nonprofit organization that focuses on countering influence operations. The CIR team, along with other open source investigators, have been busy verifying and mapping videos of troop movements in Russia and Belarus for several weeks, painstakingly comparing landmarks in video footage with satellite images and other official data to confirm their authenticity. The CIR's map of verified videos plots the movements of military equipment and troops all around Ukraine's eastern flanks. In January, the CIR mapped 79 pieces of footage; in February, it has verified 166 videos so far.
***
