Hundreds of thousands of evidence of Russia's crimes are collected by Ukrainians to achieve justice

The war in Ukraine began just a few weeks ago, but videos of civilians who have witnessed atrocities are already in the hundreds of thousands. With the help of government activists and applications, witnesses and victims of alleged war crimes are intensifying their efforts to provide the audiovisual material and create the most comprehensive digital evidence package ever gathered in a modern war.

More than 253,000 people have sent reports and images of Russian forces' movements and actions through an official chatbot called “e-Enemy”, which is one of half a dozen digital tools that the government has put in place to collect and corroborate evidence, through the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Affairs.

Ukrainians are not long in joining the cause. The warcrimes.gov.ua portal has received more than 10,000 submissions of detailed evidence from citizens, an official told Time magazine. This portal, under the category of war crimes, contains almost 6,500 submissions of photos, videos and other documentation.

Although it is not just a matter of denouncing what the invading forces have already done. Citizens also update every step they take on Ukrainian soil, also with the e-Enemy app, where troop movements in the area are reported. A friendly interface responds with flexed arm emojis and encourages further collaboration: “Remember. Each of your contributions to this bot means one less enemy.”

Thus, when tanks pass through inhabited areas, the Ukrainian army knows in a matter of minutes which sector the convoy is in. Real-time updating helps improve defense strategy.

The app also guides users to make the material complete, with geotags and timestamps on images. As the app existed before, it already had registered users with their verified identity, a key step in preventing the spread of false material. “We use rigorous authentication to remove fake content, so we know who is behind the report,” explains Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukrainian Minister of Digital Transformation. “It corners you to do things right, so it will require several photos from certain angles and so on. As a result, between 80% and 90% of the content submitted by users is usable by us and our authorities,” he told Time.

All categorized data goes to a centralized database of the Office of the Attorney General of Ukraine.

The huge amount of visual material that is circulating on social media poses a huge challenge for sites specializing in verifying information, which could eventually be used in a war crimes lawsuit. The magnitude represents an unprecedented systematic effort for a military conflict. Although the objective of bringing Russian leaders to justice is difficult, it is not the only one. “Also contribute to the development of international law and the use of open source information as evidence in complex cases,” Nadia Volkova, director of the Ukrainian Legal Advisory Group and member of an alliance of Ukrainian human rights organizations called the 5AM coalition, explains to Time. Moreover, it is a defense against the avalanche of Russian misinformation.

“We have never seen the amount of material we are dealing with,” said Hadi al Khatib, founder of Mnemonic, an organization that claims that it has collected 400,000 documentary evidence since February.

Wendy Betts, from the eyeWitness to Atrocities group, created a special application for non-governmental organizations to collect evidence. This activist also claims that she is inundated with images. “The last time I checked we had gathered in the last six weeks approximately what we would accumulate in six months around the world,” he assured the AFP agency.

Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky launched the idea of appealing to international experts for a “special mechanism” to investigate thousands of war crimes allegations.

Ukraine could represent a new page in the collection of audiovisual material for a possible war crimes trial. Despite technological advances, such evidence has only rarely been admitted before a court.

“This war has been the most radical change in the war since World War II, at least in Europe,” Fedorov tells Time. “If we look at what happened in the cyberwar, we changed the playbook basically overnight... I firmly believe that we will be able to change the way international justice is administered also in the aftermath of this war.”

Using that material in court is something quite different. The party submitting such evidence has to prove that they were not adulterated.

This is the goal of a special application designed by eyeWitness, which stores all the metadata of each recording. “We can't verify anything that has already been posted on social media,” Betts explains, so “the recordings have to be filmed with the app's camera.” This means that organizations and activists have to rely entirely on the application, since their material will be stored there.

EyeWitness has been working on the eastern front of Ukraine for five years now. And both Betts and Khatib emphasize that civilians are well trained to contribute to the effort.

In that regard, activists and officials are urging users to adopt the terms of the Berkeley Protocol, a set of global guidelines released in 2020 that sets standards for the collection of public digital information, including social media, as evidence for the investigation of human rights violations. It was created based largely on the lessons of the Syrian war.

This could mean that much of the evidence collected by civilians meets the evidentiary standards of international courts. One of the keys, experts say, is to focus on documentation that could identify those involved and on communications that would help provide proof of intent.

“The concept of a civilian investigation, or citizen collaboration in investigations... began in Syria in 2011,” explains Bill Wiley, a Canadian activist who has been investigating war crimes for 25 years.

Wiley founded the Commission for Justice and International Responsibility (CIJA) with the aim of verifying information stored on thousands of mobile phones and hard drives, testimonies of the atrocities of the jihadist group Islamic State (IS).

“From a strictly judicial point of view, modern technology is a double-edged sword, which often cuts the wrong way,” he reflects. But “any test is going to be necessary to complete this gigantic puzzle,” he explains. “It will take time, but in the end there will be search and arrest warrants against Russian leaders,” Wiley predicts.

Although it is quite a challenge, Flynn Coleman, an international human rights lawyer who has focused on digital documentation of war crimes, explains that it is an important step. “Technology often advances faster than laws... But there are signs that the legal system is moving towards the acceptance of more of these citizen tests,” he said in dialogue with Time. Gathering evidence, in itself, is a fundamental stage: “It is a basic right for all survivors and families. We need a record for humanity of what happened here: not just justice, but a record, because memories fade. And we have to do it now, while the memories are fresh.”

(With information from AFP)

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