KGB Failures: Analysis of the Minsk Shootout Video

Experts pointed out key points in the published footage.

On 28 September, law enforcers broke into the flat of Epam Systems employee Andrei Zeltser in Minsk. A shootout began. As a result, Andrei and one of the law enforcers working for the KGB were killed. The Belarusian media uploaded a video on the Internet on the same day. It immediately caught people's attention by the fact that it had been edited. How reliable is it?

The video of the shootout in the house on Yakubovskogo Street in Minsk was analyzed for Belsat by expert Aliaksandr Papko:

- The video is edited. It consists of pieces taken at least from three cameras. One was in the stairwell. The second was apparently on the clothes of one of the law enforcers. The third was in an apartment, but it's not clear who installed the camera.

We see eight men in jackets and caps, representing themselves as police, breaking into the apartment. They are not wearing helmets or bulletproof vests. They do not raise their pistols. Suddenly a video from the apartment appears: a young man is holding a shotgun; a woman is nearby taking video on her phone. No fragment from her phone appears on the published video. It's clear why. Nor it is clear how long the law enforcers have been breaking down the door. The picture changes again, and one can see law enforcers breaking into the apartment. They don't raise their pistols immediately; the video cuts out.

They show the footage from the apartment again: a young man shoots. Another piece is the video of the security forces. One of them is making four shots with a gun and then runs away from the corridor where the comrade-in-arms is falling in front of him. The montage does not explain how much time elapsed between the break-in and the shotgun against the KGB officer. The video shows neither the shooter's murder nor the bodies of the dead.

"If there had been no dead people (I guess there will be proper funerals and people will be able to see that deaths were not fake), I would have immediately said it had been staged. This is neither the pattern of the KGB nor the Alfa squad. It is not the situation when one has to break in," says Vasiliy Vovk, a major-general of the Security Service of Ukraine.

"It doesn't look like a special operation. It doesn't look like actions when capturing a criminal or an alleged criminal in an apartment where special services officers enter for the first time. [...] People are standing in the firing line. It's unprofessional. Even novice members of the Alpha squad already know how to get in, how to protect each other," explains Vasiliy Vovk.

Yesterday's video is not a special operation, say the experts interviewed by Belsat.

"The KGB had questions to this man. Instead of clarifying everything in the framework of the procedural legislation, they carried out a raid," said a member of the BYPOL initiative.

Security forces without insignia have already broken into the apartments of those suspected of involvement in the protests. According to BYPOL's investigation, these were combined units of GUBOPiK, riot police, SOBR, and local police. However, there were no KGB officers among them, according to former prosecutor Oleg Talerchik. The law enforcers were instructed to break down the doors.

The police officers were instructed to break down the doors: "If we, for example, find any symbols, we will bring them to administrative responsibility. If not, then we register it as disobedience. The order is to detain them," said high-ranking officers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the published "leak".

Tatyana, a Belarusian journalist, had her apartment broken into this summer by eight people - SOBR, GUBOPiK and police: "I tried to ask them why so many people had come, whether they knew who they had come to. They replied they didn't, they weren't interested in that at all. They get a search warrant in the morning and follow the order".