Original article (in Bosnian) was published on 01/04/2022
Videos are being shared on social networks that allegedly show the concentration camp where the Ukrainian battalion Aidar “tortured and killed civilians”. However, the footage does not show any camp but the military base where this battalion stayed and trained.
On March 11, 2022, a Facebook page, Srpski narodni info (Српски народни инфо), published a video which is claimed to show the concentration camp in Ukraine. The post states:
Let’s move on with Ukraine.
TAKE A GOOD LOOK ALL OF YOU WHO WRITE THE NAZI VOCATION “GLORY TO UKRAINE”!
Aidar Battalion concentration camp was discovered by the LNR army near Starobelsk.
A real Nazi concentration camp was discovered in the village of Polovinkino, Starobelski district, where they tortured and killed civilians who fell into their hands.
The video, which lasts one minute and 26 seconds, features the logo of the People’s Militia of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) and shows the premises in an abandoned and visibly damaged building. In one part of the video about the alleged concentration camp, the spokesman of the People’s Militia of the self-proclaimed LNR, Anton Mikuzis, and a woman whose identity is not stated, also speak.
The same video was published on March 13, 2022, on the Facebook page called Serbian Info Warriors.
By the time this analysis was written, posts on these two pages had been viewed more than 5,000 times.
What are the facts?
The activities of the Aidar Battalion, as well as other paramilitary organizations such as Azov, have been the subject of considerable attention since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Initially a volunteer unit, Aidar has been recognized as the 24th Assault Battalion of the Land Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine since 2015. According to a 2014 report by Amnesty International, members of this battalion committed crimes in the northern part of Lugansk.
The mentioned video was originally published on March 11, 2022, on the social network Telegram. The description of this announcement states that it was a “concentration camp” in which members of the Aidar battalion “tortured and killed civilians who fell into their hands”. In addition to the video that was published on the mentioned domestic Facebook pages, in the same post there is another video that allegedly shows “concentration camps”. This video, which lasts a little more than three minutes, is part of the same narrative, and, it is clear that when you look at both records, they were made in the same location.
The Ukrainian fact-checking website Stop Fake wrote about the alleged concentration camps of the Aidar Battalion in Ukraine in an analysis from March 18, 2022. As they point out, these are completely unfounded allegations. The footage, in fact, shows a military base used by the Aidar battalion in the village of Polovinkino, Starobelski district. According to Stop Fake, the Aidar Battalion is stationed in the border areas in the Luhansk region.
The battalion was stationed on June 19, 2014, in the village of Polovinkino near Starobelsk. The presence of the Aidar base in this village has always been known – it is mentioned in articles by Ukrainian Pravda (2014), BBC (2015), Zerkalo nedela (2017).
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The fact that Russian propagandists, after the invasion of the village of Polovinkino, are really recording stories at the Aidar base is confirmed by visual coincidences with the stories that were previously recorded by the Ukrainian media. First, the main entrance gate to the training camp is shown in Hromadsky’s story from 2014. With minor changes, it is also shown in the plots of RT propagandists and the so-called People’s Militia of the LNR. The design of the entrance to the camp, two brick buildings on the side, and a blue door on one of them – are scenes that coincide entirely with the earlier stories.
Namely, on June 15, 2014, a video about the Aidar Battalion, created in the same building that is now claimed to be a “concentration camp”, was published on the YouTube channel hormadske. Stop Fake states in the mentioned analysis:
“The territory was equipped for torture. Literally every meter here is saturated with cold, humidity and fear “, says Anton Mikuzis, the so-called official of the UNM LNR press service, in one of the stories. But the rooms depicted in the propaganda stories, in fact, served in part as housing for Aidara fighters, not as parts of a “secret prison”. This can be seen in the similarity of one of the rooms from the propaganda stories with the barracks of fighters shown in the Ukrainian report (video published on the YouTube channel hromadske).
The photos above are a comparison of shots – on the left is a screenshot of approximately 00:38 seconds of the video posted on domestic Facebook pages, while on the right, there is a screenshot taken at 7:16 minutes of a video posted on the YouTube channel hromadske.
Other fact-finding platforms have also addressed this inaccurate claim, such as the Romanian Veridica platform. You can read their analysis from March 20, 2022, here.
Thus, the analyzed footage shows the military base where the members of the Aidar Battalion were stationed and trained. However, there is no evidence that this facility was used as a concentration camp in which this battalion “tortured and killed civilians”.
Also, no credible and independent sources reported the discovery of concentration camps in Ukraine during the war this year, which is confirmed by the advanced Google search.
The very notion of concentration camps is charged with a negative historical context and is very serious and dark. According to Britannica, it refers to:
(…) a detention center for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are detained for national security reasons, exploitation or punishment, usually by executive order or military order.
Given that there were camps in occupied Ukraine during World War II in which German occupiers killed Jews and members of other groups, the insinuations that concentration camps of any kind are being opened in that country are even darker.
The claim that the army of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic found a concentration camp in which members of the Aidar Battalion “tortured and killed civilians”, published on the Facebook page Srpski narodni info, is assessed as fake news.
Other publications of the same claim receive the rating for the distribution of fake news.
