A bombed maternity ward in Mariupol in the south of the country, a family killed by a mortar shell in the middle of the street in Irpin in the suburbs of kyiv… These videos, almost shot in real time, you have no doubt seen them circulating on the cloth. Many of them use social networks to inform about the war in Ukraine. Ilias Shcherbakov, a 40-year-old Ukrainian chemical engineer, uses his Twitter account in particular to show what is happening in Kharkiv.
The sports training campus of Karazin University was also considered as the military target. As well as the resident buildings around it @maria_avdv you wanted the original footage #Kharkiv #UkraineUnderAttaсk pic.twitter.com/XLZm0hFDvt
— Ilias Shcherbakov (@inhere_ua) March 7, 2022
The second city of the country, gutted, is deserted by foreign journalists. In the snow, every day between two attacks, Ilias takes his bicycle and his mobile phone to testify to the strikes against civilians. “I go there by bike because it’s faster and I try to shoot very short sequences to show the damage to the infrastructure”he says.
My objective is to show what is happening here. Everything that is affected, kindergartens, schools, residential areas. And I hope that my videos will serve to convict those responsible for these crimes.
Ilias Shcherbakov, resident of Kharkivat franceinfo
Like him, Maria Avdeeva, 50,000 followers, never lets go of Twitter. In her videos, which she posts every day, this research director in Kharkiv challenges Westerners to denounce attacks on civilians. “They say they don’t target residential areas, but I see that every night they send bombs to these neighborhoods. They have already destroyed 300 historic buildings and apartments too. The whole historic center of Kharkiv has been destroyed. been devastated by Russian bombardments”.
Usually on such a sunny Saturday afternoon streets of Kharkiv will be crowded with youth and families with children. Now I witness deserted streets with a total sense of deja vu with the WWII. You can’t provoke Putin, he’s already started a total war and will not stop in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/FAGw7aK69i
— Maria Avdeeva (@maria_avdv) March 12, 2022
Despite a city under siege, Ilias and Maria have no intention of leaving. And it doesn’t matter the many death threats they receive directly.
Photos, videos or satellite maps… all these precious documents are collected by NGOs, which analyze and record them. Currently, 40 NGOs are working on collecting evidence in Ukraine. Among them, the investigation site Open Factothe French equivalent of the British site Bellingcat, a pioneer in this field.
“We tend to think that on the Internet everything remains available. The reality is that the most interesting elements and in particular these facts tend to disappear”, exposes the co-founder of Open Facto, who prefers to remain anonymous.
Archiving is extremely important. It will be necessary to cross-check, verify, geolocate an image, date it, put it into perspective, and possibly transmit these elements to a court for what is called in English accountability, this need to report in order to define responsibilities at the following a conflict.
co-founder of Open Factofranceinfo
Amnesty International’s evidence laboratory has also succeeded in bringing to light a war crime: a Russian air strike killed 47 civilians in the suburbs of Chernihiv in the north of the country. They were queuing up to buy bread. “It’s not new for us, but it’s very hard to work on this sequence, to understand what is happening in this conflict, to manage the so many contents, says Milena Marin, who co-directs this proof laboratory, based in London.
“Even if we did it in Syria or Yemen, on demonstrations, sometimes on videos of torture, execution, it goes beyond us in a way. The work we do is generally difficult but there, Ukraine, it’s very stressful to see all this destruction, the civilians killed, there before our eyes, on our screens, continuously. It’s quite hard “she continues.
But what to do with all this material? Is there any hope of one day seeing Vladimir Putin brought to justice? These questions were asked of the man nicknamed the “criminal tracker”: Colonel Éric Emeraux. This retired policeman headed the Central Office for Combating Crimes Against Humanity for three years. He himself arrested in the Paris suburbs, in 2020, a high dignitary of the Rwandan genocide, 26 years after the facts. For him, this evidence is a gold mine for international cooperation.
“Behind, they will be processed by the judicial police services of the different countries, of the different Member States, including France, but also by the International Criminal Court. This means that all the experts will take up each piece of evidence one by one, confront it with testimonies. All this material will then be entered into databases, in which all Member States can integrate their evidence”, he says.
“All the experts will take each piece of evidence one by one, compare it with testimonies. What we do each time for Bosnia, Rwanda, Liberia, is to redo the investigation. I usually say : if we had questioned Milosevic, in 1996 or 1997, saying to him ‘you are going to end your days in a jail in The Hague’, I am not convinced that he would have been sure of what we could have said to him. What seems important to me is to give ourselves the tools and procedures to ensure that this type of aggression is judged and condemned.he concludes.
The soldier nevertheless regrets that France does not open, as Germany or Spain have just done, an investigation for a possible war crime in the name of universal jurisdiction. A few weeks ago, on this legal basis, the court of Koblenz in Germany succeeded in having a former Syrian colonel of the Damascus regime sentenced to life imprisonment.