LONDON – An independent investigative group, Forensic Architecture, based in London came up with the new evidence of Russian military forces participating in the Battle of Ilovaisk. The evidence is pulled together as a digital platform, published on Aug. 19.
The group of architects, software engineers, and investigative journalists presented a digital map which reconstructs the events of the Battle of Ilovaisk. The evidence Forensic Architecture collected had been presented before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.
The Battle of Ilovaisk is a watershed event that took place in August-September of 2014. It was one of the fiercest battles in Russia’s war against Ukraine and turned into a massacre by Russians of Ukrainians who had been promised safety if they surrendered. To this day, Russia denies its involvement in the battle.
The digital platform
The platform demonstrates Russian military presence in eastern Ukraine in August–September 2014 in the most comprehensive way ever presented before. It sequences different events of the battle and shows the connections between them.
A team of four people put together the “events that have been discovered in conversation with other events, either in time, space, or both,” said Lachlan Kermode, researcher and software developer lead at Forensic Architecture.
It is an open-source investigation for which the team used a bunch of various media files – testimonies, satellite locations, photographs, and videos. Kremlin-owned TV channels’ coverage of the conflict also helped to carry this investigation out, said Kermode: “Russian media, while it may not have sort of like filmed any particular thing taking place that we hadn’t known about before, it did verify and corroborate various claims that would make made by other [sources].”
Only on YouTube, they were 2,500 videos related to the Battle of Ilovaisk, the researchers said. Not to review them all manually, they applied a machine learning technique and trained the program to identify the tanks automatically. It enabled them to cut down the number of videos to 100.
“That was the machine learning workflow that we developed for this investigation, in particular. And this was the first time that we used that machine learning,” said Kermode.
Then they went further and taught the machine using synthetic images to identify a specific Russian-made tank T-72B3, a relatively new model produced in Russia and used by its army in the frontline of Donbas.
Forensic Architecture verified four T-72B3 tanks present around Ilovaisk at the time. The researchers were able to prove the involvement of 150 Russian vehicles in the battle. The total amount of the Russian hardware that the researchers were able to identify in both Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts totals 293.
“It reinforces a lot of the suspicions of the extent of Russian involvement and definitely visualizes it on a scale that could have never been appreciated beforehand,” said Nicholas Zebashi, project coordinator and researcher at Forensic Architecture.
Evidence presented before European Court of Human Rights
The evidence pieced together by Forensic Architecture was used in the case which is heard by the European Court for Human Rights. The lawyers presented the digital platform before the court in February 2019 when addressing their major arguments to defend the rights of 25 Ukrainian soldiers captured by Russian militaries during the Battle of Ilovaisk.
That was the first time ever that the European Court for Human Rights heard such a digitally supported presentation, believes Jessica Gavron, legal director at the European Human Rights Advisory Centre located in London.
“We understand that the evidence has not been submitted to the European Court of Human rights before [in such a way],” Gavron said. “It is purely a presentation of evidence that is unusual – it is visual and it is digital.”
While the platform was presented to the court in winter, Forensic Architecture went public about the project only now as since then they have been polishing it before putting online.
On Aug. 29, 2014, Ukrainian soldiers were captured by Russian and Russian-backed separatists’ military units during what was called a “green corridor,” an opportunity that was supposed to allow the Ukrainian forces to get out from Ilovaisk encirclement safe. That safety guarantees were provided to the Ukrainian side by Russian commanders. However, Russian and separatists’ units attacked unarmed Ukrainian combatants, killing 366 and detained around 300.
The families of some captives approached the lawyers at the Ukrainian Legal Advisory Group based in Kyiv and asked them to defend the rights of their loved ones. With the lawyers’ help, the families applied to the European Court for Human Rights on behalf of the soldiers in early autumn 2014. After the captives were freed in winter 2014-2015, 25 of them, the servicemen of then-volunteer Donbas Battalion, became the applicants in the case themselves.
“From 2015 we have started applying to the court with additional claims, providing the court with the details of the situation the soldiers had faced – conditions of detention, cruelty, and tortures,” said Alina Pavliuk, a lawyer at ULAG.
Suing both Russia and Ukraine
The defendants in the case are both Russian and Ukrainian governments as both sides must be responsible for the human rights violations during the Battle of Ilovaisk, the lawyers believe.
Russia is mainly accused of illegal detainment of the Ukrainian soldiers in breach of the agreements reached by Russia and Ukraine, and of transmitting the captives to the separatists.
“For one day the captives were held in the Russian military camp in the fields, without any medical help, without almost any food, drinking water, and then were transmitted to the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic,” said Pavliuk.
“The matter of transmitting the captives to the DPR, where anything could have happened to them, taking that the representatives of the DPR clearly articulated while in the Russian military camp the threats to shoot away, to kill them – that is where the Russian Federation has to face responsibility,” she continued.
According to Pavliuk, Russia breached the third Geneva Convention when letting the separatists it controls to torture the captives. The relevant convention says that prisoners of war “are protected against any act of violence, as well as against intimidation, insults.”
“They were held in the basement without ventilation, in high humidity. They were under mental pressure and tortured physically – the majority of them were being beaten both during the examination and just occasionally, by the guards,” Pavliuk said.
“Seventy of the captives were taken to Ilovaisk in the mid-October for forced labor aimed to reconstruct the city. The separatists made them cleaning the streets, filling the holes in the buildings with bricks. Since then all of them have been struggling with health issues,” she added.
All these human rights violations must be investigated by both Russia and Ukraine. While Russia has never started such an investigation Ukraine failed to carry it out properly that is why the claim in the European Court for Human Rights is brought against it as well, the lawyers explained.
In August 2018 the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office announced that it had found no guilt of Ukrainian commanders in the Battle of Ilovaisk. The mid-results of the investigation that was “nearly finished” at the time showed that the responsibility for the mass-murder of Ukrainian soldiers is fully on Russia.
“The only factor that directly affects the reason of Ilovaisk tragedy is the military aggression of armed forces of Russian Federation in a form of a direct invasion in the territory of Ukraine,” the report says. It outlines that Ukraine notified of suspicion in numerous crimes Nikolay Bogdanovsky, first deputy chief of the general staff of the armed forces of the Russian Federation, who gave security guarantees for the “green corridor.” It also says that the number of suspects in war crimes since the conflict started totals 107 people. The report, however, does not say how many people are charged with crimes in relation to Ilovaisk tragedy specifically.
“In this court application we raised an important issue of the effectiveness of the investigation held,” said Pavliuk.
“There is an aspect of the responsibility of the Ukrainian side, the commanders that were carrying out the operation,” she added.
“Even though the Ukrainian government has no control over that part of Ukraine, it is still its territory, sovereign territory, and it still has certain obligations to make certain diplomatic and other efforts to resolve human rights issues so obviously that is much, much more limited than if it had control over its territory,” said Gavron.
The claim against Ukraine is based “mainly on the facts related to the sufficiency of the efforts that as we understand Ukraine took to investigate what happened to the servicemen that were detained and their efforts to provide them with any kind of remedy of what happened,” she continued.
The court’s decision
Currently, all of the sides addressed their arguments and are awaiting the court to make a decision. It may take a while, the lawyers said.
“According to the most positive prognoses we are to hear the court’s decision in three years approximately,” said Pavliuk.
According to Pavliuk, the European Court of Human Rights will make decisions on all the individual claims related to the conflict only after dealing with the interstate case, Ukraine v. Russia [concerning Donbas]. The Ukrainian Ministry of Justice filed this claim in 2015. It touches “human rights violations in certain territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.”
If the court rules in favor of Ukraine in this one, there will be more chances to win in individual cases, the lawyers believe. The interstate case is dedicated to resolving the issue over Russian jurisdiction. The Ukrainian lawyers hope Ukraine will be able to prove that Russia controls the separatists in Donbas hence it is responsible for their actions and for the violations of human rights in the east of Ukraine.
