Ukrainian-Russian War: What does facial recognition software say about the crowd behind Putin?
- By Jake Horton, Adam Robinson & Paul Myers
- BBC Reality Check and BBC Monitoring
photo credit, Getty’s image
President Putin gives a televised address on New Year’s Eve.
Social media was awash with claims, echoed across news websites, that Russian President Vladimir Putin surrounded himself with actors for his New Year’s speech and at previous events. But what’s the proof?
We use facial recognition software to verify some of these claims.
The Russian president has a habit of posing at events where some of the attendees are not what they seem.
A 2020 BBC Russia investigation found that some programs presented as impromptu conversations with ordinary people were actually filled with friendly local dignitaries.
Blonde woman
Posts on social media, as well as news sites such as the Sun and the Daily Mail, show that a blonde woman has played a different character at several previous outings with Putin, including a fishing trip in 2016 and a worship service in 2017.
Others, including the Ukrainian report, say he could be part of Russia’s Federal Guard Service (FSO) – the security force that protects top leaders.
We used facial recognition software to compare women’s faces in New Year’s photos with those from 2016 and 2017, resulting in low matches of 29% and 28%, respectively.
“Normally a similarity score of 75% or more should be considered when seeking an identity match,” said Professor Hassan Ugail, director of the Center for Visual Computing at the University of Bradford.
Next, we compared footage from events held in 2016 and 2017, which resulted in a score of 99.1%, which strongly indicates that they are from the same person.
This woman has been identified in the Russian media as Larisa Sergukhina. The two events she has participated in have been in the Novgorod region, where she is a member of the regional parliament for the United Russia party, which supports Putin.
When we compared pictures of her on a boat in 2016 with her official party portraits online, we got a 99.8% match. Mrs. Sergukhina is also listed as the founder of a fish trading company in Novgorod.
The woman who was present at the New Year’s address was identified in Russian media as Anna Sergeevna Sidorenko, a captain and military doctor. Comparing his face at the event with images taken from a video interview posted online by Russian newspaper Isvestia yielded a 99.5% match. His name also appears on a list of members of the Russian military regiment published by the Ukrainian intelligence service.
Fisherman
We then see claims about a group of men using fishing gear, being photographed with Putin on a boat in 2016.
The same man, it was alleged, was also photographed at a church service in 2017.
By comparing the faces in the boat to the faces in church using facial recognition software, we obtained scores of over 99% similarity for the four men, so we dug deeper into their identities.
We found evidence that they all worked in the Novgorod region, and at least three of them appear to have been fishermen.
Aleksey Lyashenko (1) is the leader of the group of fishermen who was pictured with Putin. We know this from his social media accounts and profiles posted online about the crew.
Yevgeny Lyashenko (5 years) is Aleksey’s son. He is also mentioned in the profile as part of the same team. Both Aleksey and Yevgeny have social media accounts confirming they are father and son.
According to the same profile, the team is part of a local agricultural conglomerate called Evrokhimservis, whose deputy general manager is Larisa Sergukhina (3).
Sergey Alexandrov (2) is quoted in Russian media as a fisherman. We found his social media profile showing him on a boat in a fisherman’s outfit.
photo credit, vk
We couldn’t find any social media profiles for guy number 4, but we did find a matching image where someone commented, “How did it go with Putin?” with the answer: “He met Putin several times while working in Novgorod”.
Another uploaded image claims that two of these fishermen also met Putin disguised as a farmer in the Stavropol region. But comparing the farmer’s face shown to that of the two fishermen, the facial recognition showed less than 8% similarity for the two.
Ice cream seller
There have been several other instances where blonde women have been posed as potential actors at events in the past, including two photos of a woman serving Mr Putin ice cream at an air show in 2017 and 2019.
The images here are sideways, and lower resolution, which makes facial recognition unreliable, so we can’t use that to judge.
But we did find an interview on Russian TV in 2019 with a recorded woman claiming to be an ice cream salesman who served the president on both occasions.
And if it’s the same person, that’s not too surprising considering they were both taken to the same air show, visited by Putin two years apart.
People claim that the same woman who sold Putin ice cream posed as a staff member of Aeroflot, a Russian airline, but again facial recognition is not a reliable tool for comparing images in this case.
There was also an instance in May, when people claimed that an injured soldier who met Putin during a hospital visit had been photographed with him at a factory before.
However, when you pass the men’s faces from the two events through facial recognition, it shows about a 25% similarity, indicating that there is no match.
Additional reporting by Olga Robinson. Graphic by Jana Tauschinski.
