On June 25, 2019, the official Facebook page of the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) published a report about a militant of the terrorist organization Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) detained by the counterintelligence officers of the Security Service of Ukraine.

According to the report, the detainee is currently cooperating with the investigation under open criminal proceedings and giving testimony about the activities of the terrorist organization, as well as the involvement of the Russian Federation in the occupation of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts.

InformNapalm volunteer intelligence community especially noted the part of the militant’s testimony about the supply of Russian weapons and equipment to the territory of the temporarily occupied Donetsk, in particular, of the newest mobile portable satellite communications station Auriga, adopted by the Russian army in 2014.

Auriga in Syria and Donbas

This station previously featured in the investigations of InformNapalm. Its use by the Russian military was recorded on photos from Syria and Donbas.

In 2016, InformNapalm identified the Auriga station on the roof of a building in the village of Qalat Mirza (exact coordinates of the photo: 35.654480, 36.268471). Before that, soldiers of the Russian 291st Artillery Brigade (military unit #48271) were also recorded not far from that site. According to the official information, they were not supposed to be in Syria.

In 2017, InformNapalm volunteers found that Russia used Aleppo Airport terminal as a command post for its units in Syria. Among the modern Russian military hardware in the photo from the terminal, volunteers discovered the antenna of the satellite communications station Auriga (marker 2 in the photo).

At the beginning of 2018,Dmitry Tymchuk, head of the Information Resistance group, wrote about the deployment of Auriga stations in Donbas on his Facebook page. Mr Tymchuk tragically died of a gunshot wound on June 19, 2019.

 “The newest Russian mobile satellite communications station of the Auriga type was spotted in the area of Debaltseve. This station is designed to provide secure communications and is operated by the Russian Army”, he wrote on January 6, 2018.

Photographic evidence and a report confirming the deployment of Auriga stations in the Donbas were also published by DFRLab experts on October 15, 2018.

“On June 9, 2018, ВКонтакте (VKontakte or VK) user Artyom Donetsk posted an album with several photographs, which spanned an uncertain timeframe and depicted his activity as a Russia-led separatist fighter in the Donetsk oblast of eastern Ukraine.

The album included two photographs of him posing with another fighter outside of a building complex with an army green satellite dish deployed in the background. This radar dish is identical in appearance to the Russian Auriga-1.2V (Аурига-1.2В) satellite communications system, which went into production in 2014.” says the DFRLab report.

DFRLab compared the images of a satellite dish in the photo of a militant from Donbas (on the left, source: VK) with images of the rear side of the Auriga-1.2V system on the Admiral Grigorovich (Admiral Essen class) frigate of the Russian Black Sea Fleet (right).

Background information

The mobile portable satellite communications station Auriga is a modern type of Russian military communications equipment, which was unveiled by the Russian military industrial company OJSC Voentelecom at the Interpolitech-2014 international security exhibition in Moscow. It was also presented at Army-2015 international military technical forum. Later on it was mentioned in the reports on the training of telecommunications personnel in Armenia in 2015.

 Factcheking

Considering the above mentioned investigations of various analytical groups with photo evidence and evidence of the deployment of the Auriga satellite communications station by Russian troops in Syria and in the Ukrainian Donbas, we can state the following: The report on the JFO page about the testimony of a militant detailing the supply of the newest Russian weapons to Donbas is a confirmed fact. In addition, InformNapalm volunteer intelligence community runs an open database of investigations and evidence of the identified weapons and military equipment that could not have been captured in battle. The presence of this hardware in the Donbas constitutes direct evidence of the Russian military aggression against Ukraine.

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