In April 2022, information appeared in the media that space pictures of strategic objects of the Russian Federation became available in the maximum resolution for all users of the popular service. We checked whether this is so.
April 17, 2022 Ukrainian edition of Defense Express Published Material "Find Putin's bunker: Google has opened high -quality satellite images of all strategic points of the Russian Federation." The next day, news with similar headlines appeared in other Ukrainian publications (UNIAN, "Today", "Apostrophe", "Focus", "Ukrainian Truth", Zn.ua), and in Russian ("Ren-TV", "Secret of the company", Dailystorm, "Tsargrad"). The authors of these publications argue that there were previously some restrictions on the publication of such images (reasons are not called), but now these restrictions have been removed. Most articles and messages are illustrated by pictures of five objects: the aircraft carrier cruiser Admiral Kuznetsov, the storage of nuclear ammunition near Murmansk, a flight test training ground with the latest Su-57 fighters, a mine launchers and air base near Kursk. Some articles also mention the notorious incident On August 8, 2019, the Nezonox training ground, the base of submarines in Kamchatka, the Pyotr Great Nuclear missile cruiser and other objects.
First of all, we tied most of the aforementioned space cosmits to the terrain. Then, using the desktop version of the service Google Earth We were convinced that all found objects were qualitatively shot from the space more than once. For example, a flight test training ground in the Astrakhan region (coordinates 48.3092275, 46.1871688) was photographed during 2021 at least 13 times (at the illustrations below this is visible in the upper left, each picture corresponds to a white risk). Let the freshest photograph of this location was really inaccessible or blurry until April. However, it is easy to make sure that the neighboring pictures are no worse in quality and no less informative.
Maybe Google has now published not only the latest, but at the same time a whole pack of old, equally detailed pictures? It is easy to check that this is not so. For example, article The Barents Observer publications, from which it follows that in the fall of 2018, high -quality cosmits of the storage of nuclear ammunition were already in the public domain (in the screenshot from the Wikimapia service using the Google pictures, this storage is signed as “Technical Territory No. 4”).
The most interesting thing is found in a direct comparison of the pictures of the same strategic objects of the Russian Federation on the services of Google Maps and Yandex.cards - it turned out that the images that lie in the public domain on the domestic platform are sometimes even better than that of overseas colleagues!
On April 19, the verified account of the Google Maps service on Twitter answered To the question of one of the users regarding recent news: “Please keep in mind that we in no way change blur in our satellite pictures of Russia.” Similar comment by the representative of Google Published And the TASS agency. Strictly speaking, these words only answer the question whether Google has stopped blushing anything in the pictures of the territory of Russia, but they do not give an answer, whether something fundamentally new was put into open access. Nevertheless, by the totality of facts, our verdict is unequivocal.
Not true
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- Is it true that the Tiktok user found a field with hundreds of zombies in Google Earth?
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