How Ukrainian civil society is documenting alleged Russian war crimes

As Ukrainian forces have recaptured some parts of their country from Russia’s occupying army, the world has been shocked by the cruelty of alleged war crimes committed by Russian soldiers. But even before the grim discoveries in towns such as Bucha and Irpin, Ukrainian civil society networks were documenting the atrocities they saw happening on their doorsteps.

Their hope is that the evidence they collect will be used to prosecute Russian soldiers committing war crimes and other alleged violations, whether in domestic or international courts.

Euromaidan SOS, a decentralized initiative first launched by the Kyiv-based Center for Civil Liberties, or CLL, is one such network that brings together volunteers in Ukraine and abroad to collect evidence and testimonies of alleged violations committed against Ukrainian people. Conceived during Ukraine’s Maidan revolution of 2013-2014 to provide legal assistance to protestors and monitor abuses of the security forces of former president Viktor Yanukovych, the initiative was restarted this year after the Feb. 24 Russian invasion.

While Euromaidan SOS engages some legal specialists, the project is “unique” because it engaged hundreds of nonexperts, Oleksandra Matviychuk, head of CLL, told Devex by phone.

“We have a lot of volunteers [whom] we train, not lawyers,” she said. “Before the war started we had experience of how to make civil oversight available for ordinary people, we had a lot of civil monitors of police, courts in Ukraine, and now we use the same approach.”

Specialists, including via Zoom, teach these ordinary people how to conduct a basic questionnaire using a simplified methodology for collecting evidence to “international standards,” Matviychuk said. That preliminary information is then analyzed to decide where more detailed interviews are necessary.

Volunteers with more training, including lawyers, work in the project’s “mobile groups” conducting more advanced work in the field, such as visiting the scenes of alleged abuses to verify and collect information. Euromaidan SOS also has a database to collate and store the evidence it collects to be used for any future legal action.

The focus is to “collect the testimonies of real people,” rather than to gather masses of multimedia captured in the conflict — though this won’t be turned down either, Matviychuk said. Finding witnesses to interview in Ukraine is “not difficult,” she added.

“We have evidence of indiscriminate weapons [prohibited under international law],” said Matviychuk, “but it couldn’t be our main focus because we have ordinary people, they are not military experts.” In addition, the nonspecialist volunteers do not hear testimonies of sexual violence survivors because they are not trained to do so.

“They [witnesses] told us about shelling in kindergarten, hospitals, schools, objects of critical infrastructure, their house, their flat … this is the main widespread testimonies now,” Matviychuk said.

Getting help from experts

War combatants are bound by international humanitarian law such as the Geneva Conventions, which ban the targeting of civilians or civilian infrastructure, among other things. But Russian forces — as well as a small number of Ukrainians — are widely accused of breaking these laws.

Looking into those crimes is a job for the experts — who have also mobilized. Ukrainian investigators are working in territory recently retaken from the Russians, alongside international colleagues from the European Commission and organizations, such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

A legal architecture is also forming. While the office of Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova is the only institution in Ukraine with the authority to investigate war crimes, on March 29 — more than a month after the Russian invasion — the government of Ukraine announced a Task Force on Accountability for Crimes Committed in Ukraine that allows international legal experts to support the country in seeking avenues for accountability.

Both the Ukraine Prosecutor General’s office and International Criminal Court have opened platforms for evidence to be submitted. Russia is no longer a signatory to ICC’s founding statute, meaning it does not recognize the court and does not fall under its jurisdiction. And though Ukraine is not a signatory either, it has accepted ICC jurisdiction for crimes committed on its territory since 2013, meaning the court has authority over anyone suspected of abuses in Ukraine.

NGOs such as Truth Hounds and Human Rights Watch are also collecting testimony, and another NGO, eyeWitness to Atrocities, is supporting documentation efforts by providing witnesses with a smartphone app that instantly verifies multimedia evidence they record.

But if the Balkan conflicts are any indication, the road to justice for Ukrainians could take many years. Former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević — who was accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes — died before his trial was completed.

“War crimes investigation is a detailed business,” Chris Stephen, a journalist who wrote a book on the trial of Milošević, wrote to Devex via Twitter. “If you look at indictments at the ICC, or detailed indictments, for instance at the former ICTY [International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia], you'll notice they specify actual crimes and victims. The bombardment of Sarajevo, for instance, was broken down into the names of the victims, and the date and circumstances of their death. It is, in fact, identical to any murder investigation.”

Collecting evidence

Motivated individuals have also taken the initiative to record what’s happening in their country. Just before the war, Yuriy Bilous, a lawyer with background in commercial and business law, had ventured into the human rights field by trying to support detainees in Russia — a far cry from investigating war crimes in his own country. Bilous said he is not part of Euromaidan SOS but sends the evidence he collects to Matviychuk.

“The proof is there every day, new and new,” Bilous said. “Yesterday, I interviewed a woman whose husband was killed by Russian soldiers, for example. He was not a soldier. He was on his way to get humanitarian aid. He was shot dead in front of his son in Bucha city.”

Bilous has a list of around 15 most common questions he asks, starting with asking the witness to tell their story since the start of the Russian invasion. He asks for details about attacks they witnessed or experienced — how long they lasted, from which direction they came, what buildings were targeted, whether any troops or military equipment entered their neighborhood — and what exactly they saw if they witnessed incidents such as murder or looting.

To people from Kharkiv who remained underground for nearly 24 hours a day, Bilous asked how long they were in a bomb shelter, why they went there initially and why they remained there, how they hid, what they did while inside, and what was happening outside.

From a man who suffered a heart attack because of Russian bombs, Bilous obtained the medical reports complete with hospital stamp and photos to support his story.

Such testimonies gave a glimpse of what was being done in Ukraine in the first phase of the war, even before Russian forces retreated from the towns surrounding Kyiv, and revealed the brutal physical evidence suggesting they had committed war crimes.

A day in court?

So what will be done with the evidence collected by Bilous, Matviychuk, and many other Ukrainian volunteers?

They send the evidence to the Euromaidan SOS database, and the tranche is brought together in a secure database with a “partner in Switzerland,” Matviychuk said. The partner’s name and location cannot be publicized due to the high risk of hacking.

“We do it for future justice. We will cooperate with the International Criminal Court. The prosecutor has already announced that he asked for initiatives and organizations to send him evidence, and we will do it,” she added.

Euromaidan SOS will explore other judicial pathways too. These include OSCE’s Moscow Mechanism, an investigatory body, and the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, a new body set up to investigate crimes committed in the current war.

Bilous is also sending his evidence to journalists, politicians, and human rights activists. But — perhaps like any dedicated professional — he is also a little nervous about his work.

“We also need professional help in training now from the world's best experts in this field. … [We] need experts on [legal] standards of proof for war crimes, genocide,” he wrote to Devex.

“I want the evidence I collect to be legally correct as much as possible for a future tribunal,” he added.

So what weight might the evidence already collected carry in any future trails?

“Interviews with witnesses are fine no matter when they happen. Most war crimes trials happened long after the fact,” wrote Stephen, the journalist who covered the Milošević case. Key for the ICC will be “whether the evidence is credible” he continued, adding that “the kind of interview doesn't matter,” and that witnesses would need to be cross-examined.

Update, April 22, 2022: This article has been updated to better reflect that the organization eyeWitness to Atrocities collects multimedia evidence.