Across the world, sleuths are looking for clues on social media to identify and locate the Russian perpetrators of war crimes in Bucha. ManvBrain reports
A woman in front of a grave with civilian bodies in Bucha, Ukraine, on April 7. Photo: Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images Lena, a corporate executive living in Germany, left her native Ukraine in the 1990s but stays in regular contact with her extended family there. When Russia struck the family’s town soon after the invasion started, they sent Lena photos of bomb damage.
In addition to her native Russian and Ukrainian, Lena also speaks English and German, so she’s the team’s go-to for transcribing and translating videos. One item that caught her attention was an audio clip that an anonymous user had edited onto a video and posted on YouTube with the tag “Bucha.” It seemed to be a recording of an intercepted phone call between a Russian soldier and a relative back home.
That’s not to say that Russia’s operational security is exactly tight. As society becomes ever more digital, all sorts of new resources keep emerging. For instance, John Deere tractors these days come equipped with geolocation and wireless networking. That’s great for helping farmers log which fields they’ve worked. It also lets Ukrainian farmers track machines that have been stolen by the military and transported across Russia.
One member of the unit, however, has been publicly identified so far, thanks to InformNapalm: Lieutenant Colonel Azatbek Asanbekovich Omurbekov. In November, he was blessed by the Russian Orthodox bishop of Khabarovsk before he deployed. After the ceremony, Omurbekov declared, “History shows that in most of our battles we fight with the soul. Weapons are not the most important thing.
Fred Abrahams, who supervises HRW’s crisis and conflict team, says the process is complicated by the fact that what happened in Bucha wasn’t a single incident but a monthlong occupation during which a series of separate events unfolded. Not every corpse lying on the street is necessarily a murder victim. “Some people were killed in fighting, some people died of natural causes. We found that in one case a woman who was on a respirator for health reasons, the electricity went out and she died.
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