Social networks allow you to watch war crimes in real time, but the wheel of justice is spinning very slowly.
There will be retribution for Bucha, – Ukrainians promised after how mass graves and related corpses were found after the retreat of the Russian army from the northern outskirts of Kyiv.
“We will find them. We have a very clear task, “said Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian president. in Munich in 1972.
“There will be exact retribution. No one will run away, “Politico quoted him as saying.
But in reality, the path to attracting Vladimir Putin or other Russian officials will be very different. It will be a slow and difficult forensic process under full international control. And the prospect of immediately charging someone is very small. Putin has already been indicted in a court of public opinion. “Judges” from President Joe Biden to ordinary citizens have already found him guilty of war crimes under the influence of video from smartphones that recorded Russian atrocities. Satellite images of private companies were also used to refute Moscow's allegations that Ukrainians themselves laid out corpses in the streets of Bucha when Russian soldiers retreated.
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Experts say Ukraine, where 70% of the population had access to the Internet before the invasion, will be a “test case” for evidence gathered by users. Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court have been working in Ukraine for more than a month, investigating eight-year-old war crimes. They also investigate real-time cases documented on victims' smartphones. However, messages on social networks will not replace the traditional criminal expertise, intelligence and documents needed to prove crimes on the battlefield. Theoretically, investigators can check the metadata and say that the video is exactly what they are talking about. That footage of a soldier shooting civilians was shot in Kharkiv in 2022, not in Palmyra in March 2016. However, the use of this information in court is a different matter altogether. And when it comes to persecuting high-ranking officials, such images rarely give an idea of who is actually giving orders.
“The process of bringing together soldiers and leaders can go up the chain of command at the ministerial level, to top generals and even to President Putin,” said Clint Williamson, a U.S. war crimes investigator. He currently heads a joint EU-US team investigating Ukraine. According to him, the structure of direct command and control in the Russian army can theoretically simplify the task. But “the whole process of filling out documents and bringing people to court can be very, very time-consuming.”
For several weeks, activists knew that something terrible was happening in Bucha. A Human Rights Watch report released on Sunday recorded at least one killing of peaceful Ukrainians on March 4, citing eyewitness accounts. But the situation became fully known only last week, when Russian soldiers left Bucha and foreign observers were able to enter the town to begin the “gloomy work” of documenting the damage, said Andrew Stroeline, media director of Human Rights Watch Europe. He explained that in the event of an obvious mass grave, as in Bucha, the main thing is to save space so that forensic experts can “study these remains piece by piece.” They must establish how people died, whether the cause and time of death are the same or different. Investigators need to overcome the chaos of war, as well as pressure from families who want to bury their dead relatives.
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This is a case of slow and confident work. This means gathering evidence that will stand up to scrutiny in national and other courts, “Stroeline said.
In the past, victims of war crimes have documented their own suffering with technology available to them. Videos smuggled from Kosovo to Albania “helped a lot” in the late 1990s, recalls Stroeline, who assisted the International Criminal Tribunal in the case of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
VHS cameras. Now everyone uses smartphones and can actually do the same thing, ”he explained.
However, investigators have not yet figured out how to use the full potential of the evidence gathered by witnesses. According to Wendy Betts, director of the eyeWitness project at the International Bar Association, the war in Syria was “one of the first to be documented by digital technology.” Social networks have helped “close the gaps in the investigation that always arise between the immediate events and the ability of professional investigators to find out all the circumstances.” At the same time, such personnel are easy to manipulate. And because of this, according to Betts, they are difficult to use in court. Data from the “Syrian Archive” videos from social networks can confirm how difficult it is in the laboratory to confirm certain shots. Of the 3.6 million videos, only 650,000 were analyzed. The authenticity was confirmed only in the case of 8249 of them. Betts says that Ukrainians are also generating a “powerful layer of video, and that's good.” – explained the expert.
It will be recalled that after the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Kyiv region, the first photos of the bodies of dead civilians lying on the streets of Bucha appeared – some with their hands tied, some with gunshot wounds to the head – the Russian Defense Ministry denied responsibility.
Russia has said the images are “another fake” and has tried to convene an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on what it called “provocations by Ukrainian radicals” in Bucha.
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