The Washington Post’s Philip Bump takes a look at the work of Bellingcat the open-source investigations group that is documenting war crimes in Ukraine:
In a phone call with The Washington Post, Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat’s founder, explained the importance of geolocating such videos as part of the process of documenting possible infringements of international law. Over the past several years, Bellingcat and its partners — including Mnemonic and the Center for Information Resilience (CIR) — have built a system for collecting, verifying and storing evidence from conflict zones that might eventually be used to enforce the rules of war.
“The main thing we try to find out at the moment is the location of each of these videos because the intent is to make them searchable for future accountability processes,” Higgins explained. Once geolocated, the information is put in a spreadsheet that’s maintained by Bellingcat and CIR. The evidence itself is archived by both Bellingcat and Mnemonic, and the data used to populate a map created by CIR.
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What’s remarkable about the conflict in Ukraine is that Russia made it far more likely that any potential criminal activity would be documented by open-source investigators because of its history in the region. Bellingcat was founded in 2014, days before a Russian antiaircraft battery accidentally shot down a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet over Ukraine. The MH17 investigation became one of Bellingcat’s most notable, pitting the group against Russian misinformation regularly. But that and the ongoing conflict between Russian proxies and Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine helped build a community of people trained in observing and identifying actions in Ukraine.
“We had an ad hoc, amateur online community who are sharing, engaging, geolocating and working to counter Russian disinformation from Day One of the conflict,” Higgins said — something that took years to develop as they sought to build a similar accountability system in Syria. “Even before the conflict in Ukraine started, we had people tracking the movements of Russian vehicles. … What we’re seeing happening in Ukraine in the moment is quite unique. I think it really shifted the balance of power within the information system that has emerged around Ukraine.”
Lots of eyes and cellphones on the ground. Lots of outside observers ready to figure out where documentation occurred. A system for tracking and storing those videos and that evidence. The only question, then, is whether criminal courts will use that evidence in potential investigations and indictments. And that, given the novelty of the system, is still not entirely settled. While Bellingcat’s evidence (and testimony from staffers) was used in MH17 legal proceedings, war crimes probes are something else entirely.
“This could be the first time that this evidence is used directly in accountability processes, so we’re trying to engage very early on with those different accountability processes to talk them through exactly what we’re doing, get feedback from them,” Higgins said. He has served for several years on the technology advisory board for the International Criminal Court where he has advocated for using open-source evidence. “We’ve been collaborating with various organizations to build the best process possible to meet what their expectations would be for this kind of evidence,” Higgins said.
It’s important to recognize that other fields, including the media, have embraced the techniques of open-source investigation. The New York Times hired a Bellingcat researcher to aid its visual investigations team, for example. The evolution of documentary evidence in the social media age — starting, Higgins pointed out, with the Arab Spring more than a decade ago — has meant revisiting assumptions about how to conduct investigations of such conflicts.
“A big part of the open-source community,” he added, “is the idea that it’s better to work together and share information than it is to get exclusives and scoops.” The media having overcome that instinct to embrace open-source investigations offers some cause for optimism that investigators might do that, too. Bellingcat researchers have participated in mock trials aimed at evaluating the strength of their evidence, with success.
One would be forgiven for being skeptical about bad actors being held to account on the international stage. But if there is an effort to prove that Russian officials violated international law in their use of munitions in Ukraine, conviction may end up hinging in part on a video uploaded to social media, located by volunteers and indexed and validated by groups like Bellingcat and Mnemonic.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion has been stymied by the strength of the Ukrainian public. His team might be held to account by the global public more broadly.
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