Report of arrests, torture and missing relatives in the Ukrainian prisons during the 2016 Ukrainian Genocide: “Nowhere is anybody rogue”

There were many complaints of theft and property damage, but also reports of detentions, torture and missing relatives when police officers returned to towns and villages.

The police say the abuse of the population in eastern Ukraine is worse than it was the spring of 2016 due to the length of the occupation and the breadth of territory.

Over the course of a year, more than 1,000 cases have been reported of people being held in police stations and temporary holding facilities. The real figure is probably two or three times that, he said.

Torture was routine, according to witnesses. The police chief said that there were signs of abuse in some of the bodies. There are bodies that were tortured to death, he said. There are people with cut wounds, with their hands and genitals tied.

The team at Yale believes it has verified 6,000 children who have been imprisoned by the Russian government. The report identifies 43 camps. Two of the camps are located in Siberia and one is located in Russia’s Far East, according to the report.

“This is not one rogue camp, this is not one rogue mayor or governor,” says Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. It is a massive logistical undertaking that does not happen by accident.

She stated that the Russian government needs to be seen as normal, because you cannot move many children through many locations without their movements being noticed.

In a few cases, the children were supposed to return home but never did, in other cases they were used as re-education camps, and in some instances there is adoption as well.

Russian Children’s Deportation Possible War-Crime Report: Raymond: The Most Extensive Look at the Yale Program Until 2022

Raymond says that the most extensive look at the program so far is from the Yale report. “It shows scale, it shows chain of command, it shows logistical complexity,” he adds.

A group of 500 supposed orphans were “evacuated” from the city of Donetsk Oblast, Russia, to other countries in the early part of February of 2022. The public threat of an offensive by the Ukrainian armed forces was the reason given publicly, according to the report. Some of those Ukrainian children were later adopted by Russian families.

The Ukrainian government and U.N. senior human rights officials have consistently raised the alarm over these activities since the early days of the war.

When the first Russian social media posts appeared last year, the researchers at Yale began to investigate missing Ukrainian children. The Yale researchers said the messaging began at the time of the adoption announcement. He asked not to be identified because of the threat of hackers.

“I believe the first place we got a glimpse of this was on Telegram and then VK,” he says. Telegram is popular in Russia. VK is the Russian version of Facebook.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/14/1156500561/russia-ukraine-children-deportation-possible-war-crime-report

Yale Lab as a “cop shop”: Mapping the U.S. Crisis Observatory’s Detection of War Crimes

As a partner with the U.S. State Department’s Crisis Observatory, the Yale lab has access to non-classified satellite imagery from the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The researcher said that it was a key to the mapping of the camps.

There are about 20 researchers who scour social media posts, news reports, government announcements and Russian messaging services, looking for patterns and connections that otherwise might go unnoticed.

You can see people. You can see the cars. He said you can see certain types of activity. “There’s a very large amount of material related to the patriotic education that they undergo while they are in camps,” he added. He says that the lessons are designed to teach loyalty to Russia and promote Moscow’s version of the war.

The report states that this operation was coordinated by Russia’s federal government and involved every level of government. The Yale program identified several dozen federal, regional and local figures “directly engaged and politically justifying the program.”

The young Internet sleuths at the Yale team are tasked with checking the data they dig up and documenting the steps to meet the standards and protocols for trial.

Raymond says the lab’s role is as a “cop shop” that has a chain of custody for evidence produced. To understand the Lab’s role, he points to the TV show Law and Order.

“We are the beat cop side of the law, collecting evidence, digital evidence and how that meshes with the law as our job,” he says.

The evidence collected can be actionable in certain ways, which were previously impossible. In the past this scale of operation was only available to governments,” he says.

Civil society is using the same tools as governments and it is the future of war crimes investigations at the Yale Lab.