In early April, as Ukraine started to regain control of Bucha and other small towns northwest of Kyiv, appalling imagery began to spread on Telegram and other social networks. Photos and videos showed bodies in the streets and anguished survivors describing loved ones, civilians, killed by Russian soldiers. In Chernivtsi, in western Ukraine, attorney Denys Rabomizo carefully built an archive of the gruesome evidence. His aim: to preserve social media posts that could help prove Russian war crimes.
“Psychologically it’s very difficult to look at,” says Rabomizo, who coordinates a team of more than 50 volunteers who gather online material and also contact witnesses to alleged atrocities to gather testimony. “So I think about trying to archive all this in a proper way to be used in the future.”
Such evidence could, in the months and years ahead, be submitted 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. Cases over actions in Ukraine might also be brought at the European Court of Human Rights or in countries like Germany that prosecute certain crimes beyond their borders.
“Capturing social media from Ukraine is an incredible source of evidence,” says Alex Whiting, deputy prosecutor at the Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor’s Office in the Hague, and a 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 prosecutions if judges accept such material in court.
War crime cases are usually built with witness testimony, documents, and conventional forensic evidence, but all are hard to collect after the chaos of war. Open source investigation methods that combine clues across social posts and other sources could fill crucial gaps, says Whiting. But they have rarely featured in such cases to date, and material posted by persons unknown has been seen as unreliable and at risk of manipulation.
Rabomizo and others working on the conflict in Ukraine, including open source investigators at Bellingcat, believe they can change that with new, more rigorous protocols and technology for archiving posts. “Ukraine will probably be the first time open source evidence will be tested extensively in court,” says Nadia Volkova, director of the Ukrainian Legal Advisory Group. She’s been helping Rabomizo and others document potential war crimes through an alliance of Ukrainian human rights organizations called the 5AM Coalition, named for the moment on February 24 that the first explosions rocked Kyiv.
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Although 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 lawyers at UC Berkeley released legal guidelines, called the Berkeley Protocol, for gathering, verifying, and using open source and social media evidence of human rights violations. Volkova has been following the protocol, and Berkeley’s Human Rights Center has been advising her and others in Ukraine.
Collecting online evidence so that it can meet the standards of a criminal court requires painstaking work. Links logged by Rabomizo and volunteers working with him are fed to a nonprofit called Mnemonic, which has created software that downloads social posts from different platforms and generates a cryptographic hash to show the material has not been altered. It saves the posts into a digital archive that will be made available to investigators. Mnemonic operates similar collections for conflicts in Yemen, Syria, and Sudan. Its material has contributed to criminal complaints filed in Germany and Sweden against Syria’s use of chemical weapons, but the cases have not reached court.
This is not the first time Ukraine has become a testing ground for the use of online posts as evidence of military crimes. Bellingcat, which has pioneered and popularized the public use of open source intelligence, or OSINT, won prominence through its investigation into Malaysia Airlines flight 17, from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, which was downed over Ukraine in 2014.
In 2015 Bellingcat concluded that a Russian army missile had shot down the aircraft, in part by analyzing photos posted online that showed a missile launcher moving through a part of eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian separatists and losing one missile along the way. An investigation led by the Netherlands later independently came to the same conclusion.
Several years later, Bellingcat investigators got talking with lawyers at the nonprofit Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) about how gaps in evidence of civilian deaths in Yemen from airstrikes by a Saudi-led coalition were a barrier to filing legal cases. The two organizations have since used open source video to contribute to a case being built under UK law against arms suppliers whose products were used in the attacks. GLAN and Bellingcat are also jointly developing a more rigorous methodology for collecting online videos and other material used in investigations. The protocol is still a work in progress, but it will be used on material from Ukraine judged to show potential crimes. Bellingcat plans to publish the methodology once it is finalized.
That protocol requires investigators to use a clean and unused computer login and web browser clear of cookies and to take careful notes of every step taken, such as which search terms they enter and why. Software called Hunchly, primarily marketed to law enforcement, also records an investigator’s every action. It captures each page a person views, time-stamps it, and stores a cryptographic hash. “It’s slightly more onerous than a usual investigation, but we’re trying to get to the point where you could put our evidence in front of a judge who hasn’t heard of OSINT and has never been on Twitter,” says Nick Waters, a Bellingcat investigator working with GLAN. “I want to use this information to hold people to account for their actions.”
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Last year, Waters and Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins took part in a mock trial jointly organized with GLAN in which opposing barristers sparred over the reliability of material gathered by the group before a British judge—who now serves on the International Criminal Court. The judge ultimately decided that open source evidence was valid.
Bellingcat is also feeding links of posts from Ukraine that merit further investigation to Mnemonic for archiving. That has helped the nonprofit to pull in several hundred thousand items since it began operating in March. Mnemonic has also developed tools to help researchers search and verify open source information as they build cases around specific incidents. Hadi al Khatib, Mnemonic’s executive director, says the volume of material from Ukraine is much greater than from any conflict he’s seen before, with the amount of material posted on TikTok and Telegram more prominent than in previous conflicts documented by open source investigators.
One thing that isn’t new about working on the war in Ukraine is that social platforms often pull down posts of interest to investigators for breaching policies on depictions of violence. Valuable evidence that isn’t collected in time by Mnemonic or others using rigorous methods can be effectively lost forever, says al Khatib. “I don’t see why social media companies don’t build tools to facilitate the human rights community in what we’re doing,” he says.
Twitter spokesperson Elizabeth Busby did not comment on whether the company specifically supports open source investigators but said all researchers can use the company’s “uniquely open” API to access public tweets. TikTok did not return a request for comment; Meta spokesperson Drew Pusateri declined to comment.
Even without help from social platforms, investigators will have a potentially overwhelming supply of material to sift through. The ICC’s prosecutor last month asked for new funding for technology to help his office handle video and other digital evidence. Despite new archiving protocols, the sifting required could become a sticking point in court. “The defense is going to be concerned that the information is cherry-picked and that potentially exculpatory information was left out,” says Whiting, the deputy prosecutor for Kosovo.
Al Khatib and others working on gathering evidence of potential Russian war crimes in Ukraine remain optimistic that the firehose of tweets, TikToks, and Telegram posts can bring greater accountability than in previous conflicts. “If it does start to become recognized as a standard, then you have a much bigger pool to draw from, says Dearbhla Minogue, a legal officer at GLAN. “And it will greatly increase the chances of any given atrocity being prosecuted.”
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