Week 8: Justice is Served!

Mariska K - May 5, 2025 2:29 pm

Hey everyone! Thanks for joining me for week 8 of my senior project blog! 

This week, I combined my research from both strategic and tactical intelligence to analyze the role of OSINT in holding Russia accountable for war crimes committed against Ukraine. By evaluating how broader geopolitical regulations impact direct combat, war crime accountability produces multi-source intelligence solutions to help both soldiers and citizens. 

To start this week, I researched the current international laws and treaties that regulate war crimes. First, there’s the most common and one of the oldest modern military regulations – the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention presents a series of agreements specifically to protect civilians, wounded/ill soldiers, prisoners of war (POWs), and medical/religious personnel. Both Russia and Ukraine are parties to the Geneva Convention, but Putin continues to violate the agreement and has recently pulled out of some of the articles. Next, shortly after the first Geneva Convention, the Hague Convention was formed to address some of the gray areas in Geneva. The Hague Convention establishes the “laws of war,” including rules on weapons use, occupation, and surrender. Again, both Russia and Ukraine are parties to the convention, but it has not been upheld by Kremlin forces. To govern these agreements, the countries can be party to the International Criminal Court (ICC) by ratifying the Rome Statute. The ICC is the main international organization responsible for trying those prosecuted for war crimes. Russia withdrew from the Rome Statute in 2026, but Ukraine recently gained ICC membership in 2025 (Ricci & Crawford, 2024). 

Russia has continued to violate these international agreements, which it is a party to, during its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The exact methods of the crimes committed are incredibly graphic in detail, but there are many broad categories in which Russia has violated international law. Russian troops have been recorded killing civilians; sexually assaulting civilians; destroying homes, UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and religious buildings; mistreating POWs; and committing many more illegal and atrocious acts of violence.  

Russian troops do not commit these actions out of self-defense or preservation. Troops are instructed from the highest levels of the Russian Military Doctrine. Officers and noncommissioned officers are instructed to act in “gray zones” that test the boundaries of violence (Tech4Humanity Lab at Virginia Tech, 2023). In 2014, Putin made a change to the official Russian Military Doctrine that essentially authorized troops to use all means necessary to prevent Western expansionism by NATO (Tech4Humanity Lab at Virginia Tech, 2023). The doctrine highlights any organization attempting to destabilize Russian power as the utmost threat. Because Putin frames the war as the fault of Western/European involvement in Ukraine, military actions against Ukraine have followed this 2014 doctrine’s allowance of inhumane violence. 

Although it seems difficult to combat the Russian mission to commit these acts of violence, OSINT does greatly assist in bringing light to the situation. There are a few key roles OSINT plays in war crime accountability. 

1. Processing Information Overload: The current OSINT evidence archive for war crimes consists of around 7 million videos from about 10,000 sources, with 143,899 war crimes reported by September 2024. Because of this massive amount of data, it puts a great strain on government or classified intelligence agencies to store and process the videos while also carrying out numerous other duties. For example, the intelligence agency of Ukraine typically focuses its attention on tactical intelligence because of the need to preserve the small number of troops and resources. OSINT analysts can lower the burden on these agencies while still holding war criminals accountable. 
2. Contributing to ICC Cases: In a recent development, OSINT is being used more and more in the ICC trials for war crimes. OSINT is valuable for court evidence as it expands beyond the traditional evidence triangle of law enforcement, forensics, and witnesses. In fact, there’s a history of OSINT being used in war crime trials dating back to the Nuremberg trials that used open-sourced photos and film. OSINT is being used in the ICC currently, but it doesn’t come without 2 main legal challenges. First, different courts/judges have varying admissibility criteria for using OSINT evidence because there are arguments about whether OSINT is ethical and follows privacy laws (which will be covered in week 9). Second, because there are loads of OSINT data, judges are sometimes overloaded with information, leading to confusion in the court, so lawyers must be selective when choosing OSINT evidence. 
3. Showing the Truth: Since there are challenges with OSINT in the courtroom and the enforcement of international law as a whole, OSINT must be used outside of legal institutions to show the international community the reality of the violence in the Russian invasion. The Russian military and media sources will often try to cover up their crimes, which makes it difficult to see the truth. However, open-source media, particularly videos and reports circulating on social media, allow the international community to view raw footage of the conflict. With support from the international community, Ukraine can receive the needed materials and political support to win the war. 

Now that we’ve covered the main purposes of using OSINT to track war crimes, I’ll go through and demonstrate a couple of examples of what finding and analyzing this data may look like. I’ve found this data using social media intelligence (SOCMINT) tools, which is valuable as many adults in the U.S. interact with social media content more than other sources of information. As always, click the image or see the image citation to go directly to the post website. Content Warning: Due to the subject matter, some posts will show violent images not shown in this blog post. Viewer discretion is advised. 

1. 

   Similar to the use of Chloropicrin grenades on Ukrainian bunkers from week 3, Russia has continued to use and evolve its tactics in chemical warfare. Chemical warfare, specifically the use of CS gas from this video, violates the Geneva Convention (which Russia is a party to). However, this YouTube video from Times Now World highlights Russia using chemical-laced kamikaze drones and drones armed with CS gas on civilian populations, and Ukraine has reported over 6,000 chemical attacks by Russia. This video is OSINT itself, but also got some of its data through OS-SOCMINT by viewing Telegram messages made by Russian drone battalions.

2. 

   This image from Reuters shows the aftermath of the April 24, 2025 attack on a Kyiv civilian residential building that resulted in the death of 12 civilians and several others wounded. Russia originally attempted to deny the attack, but OSINT analysts were able to track down the cause of the damage by looking at a large piece of debris – a North Korea KH-23A short-range ballistic missile. This is not the only example of Russia attacking civilian populations, which is in violent violation of multiple laws of war. 

3. 

   In this Reddit video by u/TotalSpaceNut that was originally sourced from Telegram, 2 Ukrainian POWs are shown bound with their hands behind their back while Russian forces shout numerous expletives at them. Eventually, the soldier on the left is thrown down and kicked repeatedly with no means of defense. There are many other instances of Russian mistreatment of Ukrainian prisoners, including starvation and lack of access to medical care for wounds obtained in combat. These instances of mistreatment are in violation of both the Geneva and Hague Conventions, but these sources shed light on the reality of the Russian Military Doctrine. 

While several individuals collect this data like I did above, there’s a network of organizations that are needed to help Ukraine. There are non-profit organizations such as the OSINT for Ukraine’s Project Mariupol and Bellingcat. Both of these organizations have been crucial in storing and presenting data in an easily digestible format. I encourage you all to view Bellingcat’s interactive map of Russia’s harm to Ukrainian civilians since the start of the conflict at this link: https://ukraine.bellingcat.com/?range=2023-04-21&range=2025-05-04. In addition to these non-profits, for-profit corporations also assist the collection efforts, like the Ukrainian start-up out of the UK, Molfar. Governments and intergovernmental organizations also play a key role in the network, such as the Europol OSINT Taskforce, the Council of Europe CyberUA project, and ICPA free OSINT training platforms. Collectively, these organizations, along with 6 legal firms, 9 academic hubs, 19 OSINT investigative teams, 17 IT projects, 23 judicial bodies, and 39 civil society organizations, make up the “Web of Accountability” that aims to provide international support for Ukraine (Ricci & Crawford, 2024). The Web has been valuable for archiving OSINT data but has also had its challenges. Due to a lack of an international framework for this archive process, there’s limited interoperability between organizations in the Web, meaning information sharing is difficult and resources are wasted on duplicating analyses (Ricci & Crawford, 2024).

While researching the role of OSINT in war crime accountability, I compiled all the research I’ve done on North Korean involvement with Russia into a PowerPoint presentation to give during my briefing to the AFIO May chapter meeting at Blue Skies of Texas on Monday. So, I’ve been frequently checking in with Mr. Franklin to ensure I covered all the targeted objectives, as well as learning different presentation skills incorporated with giving an intelligence briefing. 

To finish up the week, I met with Mr. Franklin to do a quick run-through of the presentation and go over logistics for the meeting on Monday. We also tackled different ways to combat the issues with OSINT in the ICC but came to the conclusion that the solutions are much more complex than one-step suggestions. Additionally, I asked him with 7 million videos and the issue of information overload, how can we find a “sweet spot” of having enough information to be reliable, yet still keeping the amount small to prevent overload. He mentioned that intelligence officers always face this conflict of probability versus magnitude in collecting data. There may be 40 reports of an event occurring, but there’s only a 20% chance those reports are valid. On the other hand, there may be only 10 reports of an event occurring, but there’s an 80% chance those reports are valid. At that point, intelligence officers must decide whether to prefer the magnitude of reports or the certainty of the information being reliable. 

That finishes week 8! We’re now on the home stretch to completing 10 weeks of analyzing the role of OSINT in Ukrainian defense! Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you next week!  

References: 

Ricci, A. & Crawford, J. (2024, September 26). Puzzling Pieces: OSINT and War Crime Accountability in Ukraine. Royal United Services Institute. Retrieved April 29, 2025, from https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/puzzling-pieces-osint-and-war-crime-accountability-ukraine  

Tech4Humanity Lab at Virginia Tech. (2023, April 27). Ukraine War OSINT Analysis: A Collaborative Student Report. Virginia Tech Department of Political Science. Retrieved March 31, 2025, from https://tech4humanitylab.clahs.vt.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/UkraineWarOSINTAnalysis-ACollaborativeStudentReport-SM-1.pdf

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