Currently, the OSINT network dedicated to uncovering war crimes in Ukraine comprises – at a minimum – six legal firms, nine academic hubs, 19 OSINT investigative teams (including names like Berkeley’s Human Rights Investigations Lab, Osint For Ukraine, Global Rights Compliance and the Ukrainian Molfar), 17 special IT projects (which range from apps like e-Enemy to blockchain solutions like project Dokas), a sub-network of 23 judicial bodies in Ukraine and further afield, and 39 civil society organisations (including the 5AM Coalition) that collect and document potential war crimes and crimes against humanity. These actors are intricately linked with judicial authorities across the West and around the world.
The Joint Investigation Team and the CICED Database at Eurojust epitomise this collaborative spirit, pooling resources and evidence with enhanced support. Additionally, the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group – a collaborative venture between the EU, UK and US – provides tailored guidance to war crime prosecutors. Another effort, the Dialogue Group on Accountability for Ukraine – an initiative led by Ukraine, the ICC and the EU – aggregates workstreams from Ukraine’s General Prosecution Office, international accountability actors, domestic and foreign accountability providers, and civil society organisations. USAID’s Human Rights in Action Programme is funding study visits and advanced training (inclusive of OSINT modules) in international criminal law and justice for Ukrainian lawyers. Europol has also established an OSINT taskforce to facilitate international investigations of Russian war crimes in Ukraine. The Council of Europe has launched the CyberUA project, which aims to enhance Ukraine’s capabilities in handling electronic evidence related to war crimes and gross human rights violations. In short, there are several notable cases of successful international cooperation in leveraging open source information for documenting war crimes in Ukraine.
Between these achievements, however, interorganisational coordination is arduous. Actors may not know of each other’s existence and do not necessarily have the means, forums or trust to collaborate. ‘The current landscape lacks a unified model for archiving war crimes evidence, with various platforms operating in isolation and without full integration’, stressed Roksolana Burianenko, former programme manager for Mnemonic’s Ukrainian Archive. ‘The key issue is the absence of a coordinated approach and a governance system to harmonise efforts across different archives and actors. Such coordination is essential not only for accountability, but also for creating a digital memorial that captures the Ukrainian people’s suffering. In our digital age, establishing these archives and memorials should, and could, happen much faster than in the past’.
The result is paradoxical: actors across nearly every sector of society are tackling overlapping aspects of war crimes investigations, but those same actors are so siloed that communication is inconsistent and cooperation is sporadic, even in the digital age.
Leveraging OSINT
Despite the strengths that OSINT lends to war crime investigations, the sheer amount of information (and disinformation) in the open sources, the costs of upskilling to use this information, and judicial wariness of open source information pose several challenges.
Information Overload
The immense and ever-growing volume of digital evidence – from sources including social media, blogs, online forums, CCTV footage, livestreams and satellite – deepens the web of accountability’s inefficiency. The Ukrainian Archive contains a staggering 6,930,635 videos from 9,567 sources, and even this represents only a fraction of the pieces of open source evidence amassed by the 5AM Coalition. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s office keeps a diligent count of registered crimes of aggression and war crimes since February 2022. At the time of writing, this number exceeds 143,899 – a testament to the enormity of the task at hand. For comparison, the office records only 19,274 crimes against national security in the same period.
‘Overall, we have 5 million digital records in our system’, says a chief investigator for Mnemonic. ‘We are preserving the potential human rights violations and possible war crimes from all parties, but only a small percentage is being really analysed. While preservation of data was our initial priority, the community now aims to undertake analysis, mapping and tagging on a larger scale to harness the full potential of the preserved data. With all the data we have collected it would take decades, probably, if not longer, to investigate every single one of these files!’