Faced with the apparent refusal of Russian authorities to repatriate the remains of their fallen soldiers, Ukrainians are using – sometimes in extremely disturbing ways – the power of social networks to directly inform families of the death or capture of one of their relatives. The lack of delicacy of their tactics begins to raise questions.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
On the Telegram messaging platform, a channel created by the Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior, devoted entirely to the publication of photos or videos of Russian soldiers killed at the front or captured, had more than 1 million subscribers on Tuesday. It shows, among the official portraits of Russian soldiers indicating their rank, name and date of death, photos showing unidentified corpses severely swollen or downright unrecognizable. They are shown alongside videos of captured soldiers, with apparent injuries, who ask their relatives to pick them up.
Achilles’ heel ?
“If your relatives or friends are in Ukraine and are taking part in the war against our people, you can get information about their fate here,” says the Interior Ministry website, which leads to the Telegram channel. “Unfortunately, it is difficult to identify many of those killed. We voluntarily publish these photos and videos, you may recognize someone by indirect signs. Similar videos have also been posted on YouTube and other mainstream platforms by the Home Office.
” It’s troubling. There are images of soldiers captured in humiliating positions, on their knees or who sometimes seem to be in awkward positions,” says political scientist Simon Thibault, specialist in online propaganda and disinformation at the political science department of the Montreal university.
It’s a very thin line in this information war, the treatment of prisoners of war.
Simon Thibault, political scientist
“It’s possibly an Achilles heel [pour les Ukrainiens]. There are starting to be slippages. We understand the desire of the Ukrainian people to want to show how much war has a cost, but the way it is done, there are things that are very worrying,” adds Mr. Thibault.
Clear rules
The Geneva Convention (1949) is however clear: humiliating or degrading treatment which may undermine the dignity of prisoners of war is prohibited. Captured soldiers must not be intimidated, insulted or treated as a “public curiosity”, provides for the international treaty, a veritable bible dictating the rules of conduct in a war zone.
As for the remains of soldiers who died in combat, they must be “honourably buried” and their graves must be “properly maintained and marked so that they can always be found”, dictates the Convention. Each army must set up a “Graves Service” which is required to keep an up-to-date register of the locations of corpses, in order to be able to repatriate them to their countries of origin.
The deceased should be treated with respect. Before burying a body, officials should have collected documentation about it.
Walter Dorn, Professor of Defense Studies at the Royal Canadian Military College Walter Dorn
The dog tagsthose engraved metal medallions that most soldiers wear around their necks, serve this purpose expressly.
“Once upon a time, bodies were cremated on site, but nowadays they are returned to the government of the country they came from. The repatriation of the remains is the established course of action, ”says Mr. Dorn. However, the Ukrainians claim that Russia refuses to repatriate the bodies of its soldiers, despite numerous approaches to organize the repatriation of remains. It was against this background that Ukrainians began to publish photos of soldiers who died at the front.
“It’s in very bad taste and likely a violation of the Geneva Convention,” Dorn said. This could be considered a service to families, but on the other hand, it can be used for propaganda purposes as well. There are also risks of error. It sets a dangerous precedent,” he said.
Illegal technology used to identify corpses
Considered an “illegal mass surveillance tool” in Canada, the American facial recognition software Clearview AI has been used by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense in the context of the war since mid-March, according to the Reuters agency. Clearview, which is currently being sued in Quebec by the Commission d’accès à l’information for destroying photos of Quebeckers obtained illegally, has offered free access to the Ukrainian authorities to allow them to “verify the identity of persons of interest at checkpoints”, to facilitate the reunification of refugees who have been separated or to identify the bodies of soldiers. Clearview AI president Hoan Ton-That, who refuses to grant the same free licenses to Russians, said he does not want his technology to be used in violation of the Geneva Conventions. The software works largely with photos uploaded without consent from social networks like Facebook and VKontakte (VK), the “Russian Facebook” from which it extracted more than 2 billion images from users. Clearview had succeeded, from 2017, in illegally imposing itself in several police departments by offering free access to investigators, very often without the knowledge of their hierarchical superiors.