WASHINGTON — A scientific technique used to spot deception by studying minute changes in facial expressions has been used to demonstrate that Kremlin dictator Vladimir Putin was lying when denying Russian responsibility for shooting down the Malaysian airliner over Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people aboard.
The technique and analysis of Putin’s speech were described at a public meeting held on July 16 by the American Foreign Policy Council think tank in Washington to mark the fifth anniversary of the Russian downing of Flight MH17.
Commander Aaron Brodsky, a retired U.S. Navy officer with 25 years service, is an executive of a company called Future Life that has vastly improved on older, polygraph-style and psychiatric techniques of studying human reactions.
Future Life has developed a method it calls Face2Face, which combines artificial intelligence, computerized databases, and psychiatrists’ know-how to gauge suppressed or hidden stress and other indicators which map an individual’s “emotional footprint.”
The technology uses images of a subject’s face captured each one-fifteenth (1/15th) of a second to analyze facial “micro-expressions” that may not be apparent in normal observation. In the U.S. Face2Face is being used by the American military to detect post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in war veterans and serving soldiers and by law enforcement involved in countering drug and alcohol abuse.
Brodsky said that one of the things it can be adapted for is to detect attempts at deception. He said it can tell “999 times out of 1000” whether a person is lying.
The Ukrainian military became aware of the technique while looking for ways to improve detection and treatment of its own personnel suffering from PTSD and during discussions asked whether the Future Life company could apply the technique to videos of Putin being interviewed about the downing of MH17.
Brodsky said the method monitors “six essential emotions” – anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise and neutrality as revealed by micro-images the subject and compared against a huge database of images. The data from the images is presented in graph form with different colors representing the six tracked emotions.
Putin, a world-class liar
He said his colleagues analyzed a YouTube video of Putin, which is still available for anyone to view, of an interview where he is questioned closely about MH17 and Russian actions in Ukraine.
Without knowing what Putin was saying they were able to highlight the tell-tale signs of deceit, especially in the first part of the interview, where he displays a strange combination of emotions in attempts to mask his anger at the persistent questioning and feigns fake smiles or bland expressions.
Only later, Brodsky said, did they hear the translation and find out that in the first half of the video Putin was denying Russia’s involvement in the MH-17 shoot down and in the second, talking about Russia’s involvement in Crimea.
Brodsky said that Putin, a former KGB agent, “is probably one of the best-trained liars in the world and knows how to have a poker (neutral) face.”
He said that Putin’s training allows him to swiftly re-set his facial expression: “when he recognizes he is being angry or contemptuous, he neutralizes himself and resets.”
But however swiftly Putin can adjust his expressions it is not fast enough to outwit Face2Face which interprets different emotions flickering across his face in multi-colored graphs that Brodsky displayed at the AFPC meeting and said “implicates him in our view” as a liar.
MH-17 was on its way from Amsterdam in the Netherlands to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia when it was shot down on July 17, 2014, over Ukrainian territory held by Russian-led separatists. All 283 passengers and 15 crew were killed.
Earlier this year a Dutch-led investigation team, which began shortly after the disaster, concluded that a Russian “Buk” surface-to-air rocket belonging to Russia’s 53rd Anti-aircraft Missile Brigade and operated by regular Russian military personnel was responsible for downing the airliner.
Dutch authorities accused four people from the separatist forces of murder and issued international warrants for their arrest. They were named as Russians, Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, Oleg Pulatov and Sergei Dubinsky, and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko.
Ukrainian SBU security agency special forces last month (June 27) snatched another suspect, Vladimir Tsemakh, in a special operation in Russian-occupied Donetsk. He is expected to be provided for questioning by Dutch authorities.
Bellingcat’s innovative techniques nail Russian guilt
Moscow’s guilt was established, to a large extent, by innovative techniques developed by investigative journalism group Bellingcat, which originated in the U.K. and uses open sources available on the Internet.
Bellingcat used Internet social and media platforms, and satellite images to track the movement of the military personnel and truck-mounted missiles and launcher as they made their way from their home base, crossed the border into Ukraine, brought the weapons system to a Russian-occupied area of Donetsk and the following day retraced their route back to Russia but this time with an empty missile pod.
Bellingcat has gained much of the credit for establishing the identities of Russian GRU military intelligence agents accused of using a military-grade nerve agent, Novichok, in a murder attempt last year against a Russian spy who defected to Britain.
Aric Toler from Bellingcat said nobody expects Moscow to hand over the suspects. His group is still working on establishing the identities of the four Russian soldiers who manned the Buk system.
Bellingcat has not been able to identify the four-man crew but has a list of all 25 “possible candidates” that would have accompanied the BUK system.
“We more or less stalked everyone in this brigade for about a year and a half to two years and know everything about them – way more than you can imagine about their lives,” he said. “So we know exactly who was serving and who was back at base, who was on vacation, who was training far away, and the important people, who were actually on the Russian-Ukrainian border in June-July 2014 when the downing happened.”
Toler said Ukrainian intercepts of communications among the Russian side showed that Girkin had talked by phone a month before the MH17 tragedy with Vladislav Surkov (Putin’s chief adviser on Ukraine) asking for more powerful anti-aircraft equipment because the Ukrainian military were pushing back the pro-Russian forces with their airpower.
Surkov is the most senior Kremlin official that can be held responsible for the MH-17 tragedy Toler added as Girkin asked him for an anti-aircraft system and a trained crew to operate it – a request fulfilled a month later.
Despite plentiful evidence of its responsibility, Moscow denied then and continues to deny responsibility for the atrocity.
Donald Jensen is a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis where he is an expert on Russia and the Kremlin information warfare.
He said that on July 17, 2014, he was working as a U.S. government adviser and his initial assessment was that the string of inconsistent and sometimes bizarre explanations emanating from Moscow indicated that the Kremlin had been taken by surprise and didn’t have a story prepared.
But Jensen said that he now considers it “possible that the various contradictory accounts of what happened from the Russian side were actually intended and the goal was to create chaos and uncertainty and to undermine the investigation of what happened.”
He said that most people probably did not believe the “Russian-invented lies.”
But he said some working for the American government or in elite, policy-formulating circles knew very little about Ukraine and believed the Kremlin versions.
Jensen said: “If you don’t know enough about a subject you tend to believe the first collection of explanations that are presented to you and those narratives are very hard to dislodge even once they are obviously and factually disprovable……. the damage is already done.”
He said the MH17 tragedy became a case study of how Moscow’s disinformation operations work in many places including the 2016 U.S. elections. “We must strengthen efforts so people in the West know how to tell truth from a fairytale,” urged Jensen.
