While the object that Tsemakh claims he was hiding is bleeped out by the film producers, his mouth movement clearly indicate that the word contains a “u” (“у” in Cyrillic) letter (in Russian pronounced “oo”).

Since the discovery of this video, some Russian bloggers and media have claimed that Tsemakh does not utter the word “Buk” in the bleeped-out segment, but instead the one-syllable word “khuy” (хуй), Russian for dick or dickhead. In this interpretation, he is alleged to be referring to the “dickhead” who he was “dragging out” [“прятал этот хуй”]. However, this explanation is inconsistent with the timing of the speech segment, with Russian grammar, and with the context of Tsemakh’s narrative. If Tsemakh indeed had uttered “I hid this dickhead”, in Russian he would have had to use the accusative case for animate objects [“прятал этого хуя”], which would have required 5 syllables to fit within the bleeped-out section of his interview (“..э-то-го ху-я…”). If he had uttered “I hid the Buk”, only 3 syllables (“…э-тот Бук”) would have to fit under the bleep. If Tsemakh were to say the three-syllable utterance of this phrase, it would be “прятал этот хуй” — “I hid this dick” (object), rather than the five-syllable “I hid this dickhead” (person), which while technically possible is obviously illogical for the circumstances described in the interview.

An experiment using Yandex’s advanced text-to-speech (TTS) engine shows that only thе second hypothesis (“этот Бук”) is possible, as the 5-syllable utterance would not fit under the beep. To conduct the experiment we applied Tsemakh’s speech cadence to Yandex’s TTS voice engine (by selecting simulated voice “Ermilov”). We ran two scenarios: in the first one, we synchronized a computer-generated phrase saying “I hid that dickhead” (“Я прятал этого хуя”) to overlap with the start of the un-bleeped sound “I” (“Я”) in the original recording. In the second scenario we superimposed the phrase “I hid that Buk”, again synchronizing the beginning of the phrase with the unredacted audio.

The two resulting audio files can be heard here: scenario “Khuy” and scenario “Buk”

As can be seen from the graph below, only in the “Buk” scenario there was no tangible desynchronization between the original and the simulated speech.

In addition, the context of the statement would make little sense if he had spoken about “hiding a dickhead”, as this reference would be disconnected to both the preceding sentence (“it hit a Sushka”), and to the subsequent one (“I will show where it/he lifted off”). All of the scenarios around the “dick” or “dickhead” scenario make little sense when considering grammatical and phonetic circumstances; however, this segment of the interview makes perfect sense when assuming that he said “I hid the Buk”.