In early April, As Ukraine began to regain control of Bucha and other small towns northwest of Kiev, horrific images began to spread on Telegram and other social networks. Photos and videos showed bodies in the streets and tortured survivors describing loved ones, civilians, who were killed by Russian soldiers. In Chernivtsi, western Ukraine, lawyer Denys Rabomizo has painstakingly built an archive of the horrific evidence. His goal: to maintain social media posts that can help prove Russian war crimes.
“Psychologically, it’s very difficult to watch,” said Rabomizo, who coordinates a team of more than 50 volunteers who collect material online and also contact witnesses to alleged atrocities to collect testimonials. “So I’m thinking about archiving all this in a good way to use in the future.”
Such evidence could be presented in the coming months and years to the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands, which said in February it would begin investigating alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine. Lawsuit cases in Ukraine can also be brought before the European Court of Human Rights or in countries like Germany that prosecute certain crimes beyond their borders.
“Ukraine social media capture is an incredible source of evidence,” said Alex Whiting, deputy prosecutor at the Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor’s Office in The Hague, and visiting professor at Harvard University. A deluge of TikTok and Telegram posts could vastly increase the amount of evidence of alleged Russian war crimes, but they will only aid prosecution if judges accept such material in court.
War crime cases are usually built from witness statements, documents and conventional forensic evidence, but they are all difficult to collect after the chaos of war. Open source research methods that combine cues from social posts and other sources can fill crucial gaps, Whiting says. But until now they have rarely been discussed in such cases, and material posted by unknown persons was considered unreliable and at risk of manipulation.
Rabomizo and others working on the conflict in Ukraine, including open source researchers at Bellingcat, believe they can change that with new, stricter protocols and message archiving technology. “Ukraine will likely be the first time open source evidence has been extensively tested in court,” said Nadia Volkova, director of the Ukrainian legal advisory group. She is helping Rabomizo and others document possible war crimes through an alliance of Ukrainian human rights groups called the 5AM Coalition, named after the February 24 moment when the first explosions shook Kiev.
While open source evidence has not been well tested as evidence of war crimes, there are signs that the idea is becoming more mainstream. In December, the United Nations Human Rights Office and attorneys at UC Berkeley released legal guidelines, called the Berkeley Protocol, for collecting, verifying, and using open source and social media evidence of human rights abuses. Volkova has followed protocol and Berkeley’s Human Rights Center has advised her and others in Ukraine.
Gathering evidence online so it can meet a criminal court’s standards requires painstaking work. Links provided by Rabomizo and volunteers who work with him are passed on to a non-profit called Mnemonic, which has created software that downloads social posts from various platforms and generates a cryptographic hash to show that the material has not been altered. It stores the messages in a digital archive that is made available to researchers. Mnemonic manages similar collections for conflicts in Yemen, Syria and Sudan. The material contributed to criminal complaints filed in Germany and Sweden against the use of chemical weapons in Syria, but the cases have not gone to court.
This is not the first time Ukraine has become a testing ground for using online messages as evidence of military crimes. Bellingcat, a pioneer of the public use of open source intelligence, or OSINT, gained notoriety for his investigation into Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, which was shot down over Ukraine in 2014.
