Videos showing potential Russian war crimes flood social media, 'overwhelming' human rights experts rushing to document them

• Videos that appear to show war crimes in Russia's war against Ukraine litter social media.
• Human Rights researchers are analyzing and cataloging these videos in real-time.

The camera moves rapidly. Sounds of artillery echo in the distance. A pile of mangled metal and rubber burns. Injured people are carried away from the large building, some on stretchers and some on the backs of others.

The video, posted and shared across social media early Wednesday, was one of several that showed the aftermath of what Ukrainian officials said was the Russian military's bombing of a children's and maternity hospital in southern Ukraine.

Another video posted to Telegram on Wednesday, and verified by The New York Times, showed the inside of the hospital. It similarly was littered with debris from broken windows, fallen ceilings, and damaged walls. A person says that there is blood everywhere.

Over the last several weeks, videos from inside Ukraine have spread across social media platforms, giving viewers across the globe a front-row seat to the atrocities of Russia's unprovoked attack on Ukraine. The onslaught of videos and images from the conflict has also provided researchers and human rights groups access to a trove of potential evidence as they seek to document atrocities and war crimes.

"We do reconstructions of scenes to really understand how that evidence plays out," said Milena Marin, the senior advisor at Amnesty International's Citizen Evidence Lab. "We combine all that with the testimonies to have a complete picture as much as possible."

The content comes from a variety of sources: often journalists or citizens on the ground who feel it's their "mission" to show what's happening to their cities, Marin said.

On TikTok, Ukrainians have posted videos showing the aftermath of nights of shelling and other attacks, showing holes bored into the sides of buildings and debris littering streets. A chilling video captured Sunday by a freelance journalist in Irpin, Ukraine, appeared to show the moment a Russian mortar strike killed a Ukrainian family trying to escape violence.

Access to these pieces of video and photo evidence is changing the way that human rights researchers operate, according to Marin. There's less need for on-the-ground researchers and translators, while organizations are able to quickly gather information directly from sources. The sheer amount of videos and images, however, can be daunting.

"The content is overwhelming and the scale of this crisis is overwhelming," Marin said.

What makes it more manageable for researchers is their ability to specialize. Marin and her team look for content specifically showing attacks on civilian areas or infrastructure, and strikes or attacks on "protected" spaces, like hospitals or schools. They're also hunting for videos that show the use of indiscriminate weapons, like ballistic missiles, and the use of banned weapons, including cluster bombs.

"Those are all likely war crimes," Marin said. "That is important for us to document, hopefully for future justice and accountability mechanisms."

Researchers have done similar, grueling work before, she said, pointing toward efforts to document crimes and human rights abuses in Syria and Yemen. But the "speed and the scale" of Russia's invasion of Ukraine has made this more challenging.

"Multiple fronts, multiple cities being attacked at the same time — lots of content coming through, and the nature of the content is particularly graphic," Marin said..

Researchers download and store content to prevent it from being lost forever

Compiling online evidence of atrocities comes with a sense of urgency. Because of its graphic nature, there are concerns that social media platforms will remove pieces of evidence because the videos or photos violate policies against showing or inciting violence.

"People report it because it's graphic, and then social media companies take it down. And that is literally evidence of war crimes," Marin said, adding that her team has long been in touch with social media platforms on the issue.

A September 2020 report from Human Rights Watch found 11% of the 5,396 social-media videos it cited in reports from 2015 to 2020 had been removed from YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook. The companies, at the time, refused to grant researchers access to the removed videos for archival purposes, the report said.

Social-media companies have previously been criticized for deleting content depicting human rights abuses during conflicts, including videos from the Syrian civil war. Researchers now download more content than they might currently need to prepare for potential takedowns, Marin said.

In addition to collecting the evidence, teams looking into atrocities in Ukraine have to verify the content they're cataloging is legitimate amid a sea of misinformation and disinformation that has appeared since the war began last month.

"It's always part of the equation," said Roman Osadchuk, a research assistant for Eurasia at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab.

There is always the possibility that someone could share an old video from a previous conflict with the intent to mislead viewers, Osadchuk said. Others could also inadvertently spread misinformation, sharing videos they believe show one thing when, in reality, they show something else.

Especially in the early days of the conflict, some videos posted to social media claiming to show the conflict actually used recycled footage and audio from previous conflicts. On platforms like TikTok, some clips originated from hyper-realistic video games, Insider previously reported.

Researchers compare video to satellite imagery to determine authenticity

The first step to verifying content is finding out where and when it was created. At Amnesty's Citizen Evidence Lab, Marin said researchers look for landmarks in the footage — buildings, trees, and streets — and match those with landmarks in satellite imagery, street-view captures, and ground-level photographs.

Determining where a video was filmed is fairly easy, Marin said, but finding out when it originated can be far more complicated.

"We've seen footage being recycled from one war to the other," Marin said. "I've seen a lot of the rhetoric, for example, from Russians that are trying to say that actually there's no war happening. They are saying that footage is from Syria."

The researchers analyze weather patterns and shadows to see if they match the conditions when the video was claimed to have been recorded. They also look for "scars" on the Earth and debris from previous incidents.

A weapons expert on the team helps figure out who may have launched an attack, analyzing evidence of equipment seen in the photos or videos, looking for insignia or clues relating to when a piece of equipment may have been manufactured and by whom.

Videos and photos take a backseat role in criminal trials

The primary importance of all these videos and images is about showing the world what is going on in a conflict, according to Bill Wiley, the founder and executive director of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability.

"It gets the message out to the wider public what's happening," Wiley said.

From a criminal evidence point-of-view, these photos and videos function as a "crime base," he said. Crime-based materials "constitute roughly 10%" of the evidence used in any international criminal prosecution, according to Wiley.

More important to these cases is what he called "linkage evidence," or "materials generated by the perpetrating structure," like internal documents and reports from perpetrators and testimony from insiders. The International Criminal Court in February announced it planned to investigate Russia for "war crimes and crimes against humanity."

Videos shared on social media, while important, do not themselves establish responsibility for the crimes, Wiley said.

"I mean, we know the Russians are shelling in the cities, for example, but, it's important to keep in mind that criminal prosecutions are focused on individuals, not institutions or countries," Wiley said.

"It is part of the puzzle but not the biggest piece," he added.