Analysis: Drones, phones and satellite technology are exposing the truth about Russia's war in Ukraine in near real-time
Analysis by Nic Robertson, CNN - 13h ago
© Rodrigo Abd/AP
Russia's lies may be catching up with it faster than it ever imagined.
The war in Ukraine is defying President Vladimir Putin's expectations at every turn, not only with Russia's failure to capture Kyiv as planned but with the war crimes his soldiers are alleged to have committed in Bucha, a city close the capital, exposed for the world to see.
Throughout history, wars have been won by forces turning new technologies to their advantage. The 1415 victory of English King Henry V over the French at the Battle of Agincourt came courtesy of his archers and their newly developed longbows, raining arrows over a range the French could not match.
The war in Ukraine may see another historic first, with technology cutting through the fog of war, exposing the aggressors' lies and accelerating efforts to bring about their defeat.
Satellite images of murdered civilians that match videos, recorded weeks later, of bodies at the roadside are providing compelling evidence of Russian war crimes, convincing Western leaders to ramp up sanctions on Russia and accelerate weapons supplies for Ukraine.
How this will affect the final outcome of the war is unclear. But what is evident at a time when Ukraine is urgently seeking any additional leverage as Russian forces regroup for a new offensive, is that Russia's actions in Bucha are strengthening Ukraine's hand.
While battlefield satellite imagery has been available to governments for decades and was instrumental in pinpointing war crimes during the Bosnian civil war in the 1990s -- notably locating a mass grave of many of the 7,000 Bosnian Muslims slaughtered in the town of Srebrenica in 1995 -- it has never been so immediately available in the public domain as now.
Putin and his battlefield commanders appear not to care or not to have grasped the fact that orders and actions now leave an indelible record beyond their control that could come back to haunt them.
They will be aware that in many past conflicts -- even as recent as the Syrian civil war -- leaders like Bashar al Assad escaped conviction and have even been rehabilitated, despite vast troves of incriminating documents spirited from government offices and police stations.
But this is not the only lesson to which Putin should pay attention. Following the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian civil war, the war crimes tribunal in the Hague used political and military leaders' own words to help convict them.
When the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) put Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic on trial, it had video of him looking over Sarajevo, condemning the civilians below to artillery and mortar fire.
His military partner in war crimes there, General Ratko Mladic, also saw his words come back to help convict him, as video showed him on the outskirts of Srebrenica directing the filtering of civilians, many of whom would shortly be slaughtered by his soldiers, following his orders.
That type of link may be harder to pin on Putin, but his 20-page thesis published last summer on why Ukraine is not a country, and his TV comments on why Russia should invade, will, if previous war crime courts are a precedent, count against him as author and director of the war.
If Putin were to come to trial, his unravelling may turn out to have begun with his inability to understand his army's weaknesses and Ukraine's strengths. Failure to fulfil his first major objective, the capture of Kyiv, forced his troops to retreat, leaving their tide of terror exposed.
They did what they have done so many times before, in Syria, in Chechnya, in Georgia: committed awful abuses. And Putin and his officials did what they have done so many time before: lied to cover their crimes.
Russian defense officials claimed photos and videos that emerged on April 2, showing murdered civilians -- shot in the head, some with their hands and legs bound -- were fake, saying their troops left before the killings occurred. "The troops left the city on March 30," the defense ministry said in a statement. "Where was the footage for four days? Their absence only confirms the fake."
They were very clear about the date. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, one of Putin's most seasoned spin masters, doubled down on the clumsy cover-up, insisting "Russian forces left the Bucha town area as early as the 30th of March."
But publicly available satellite images from space-tech company Maxar, taken March 18 while Russian troops were in control, showed the civilians lying dead at the road side in exactly the same locations as Ukrainian forces discovered them when they re-entered the town in early April. And drone video shot before March 10 showed a cyclist being shot and killed by Russian troops. Ukrainian forces found his body weeks later, exactly where he fell.
In the months prior to Russia's invasion and the days since Maxar's images appeared, tracking Russian forces and their destruction, the public's understanding of the battlefield has been revolutionized. Coupled with the near-ubiquitous use of smartphone cameras, geolocation technology and sophisticated drones, Putin faces the possible reckoning he escaped in previous conflicts.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wants more cameras, and wider access, to let the public see for themselves: "This is what we are interested in, maximum access for journalists, maximum cooperation with international institutions, enrolment of the International Criminal Court, complete truth and full accountability," he said in a video address on Monday.
Ukraine's enigmatic leader has realized it's not just high-tech, tank-busting weapons like Javelins and NLAWs, or surface-to-air missiles like Stingers and Starstreaks, that could turn the tide in the war. It's truth, and the tools -- satellites, drones and smartphones -- to deliver it.
Unparalleled in any modern war, technology could hand the underdog this surprising advantage, undermining the lies of an oversized aggressor. Zelensky was at pains for the United Nations to understand this when he spoke to them Tuesday: "It is 2022 now. We have conclusive evidence. There are satellite images. And we can conduct full and transparent investigations."
Like Henry V in 1415, Zelensky knows an advantage when he sees it. While satellite imagery may not be as game-changing as a six-foot yew branch and a length of hemp string, if he can use it cleverly, he may force Putin to talks much sooner than the Russian President would like.
© Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesUkrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking to the United Nations Security Council on April 5
Yesterday
NEW YORK (AP) — CBS News reporter Debora Patta has covered conflicts in Africa and the Middle East, and the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Europe. She has seen violence and death at close range before. But the atrocities she witnessed in Bucha, Ukraine this week stood out, and overwhelmed her.
“We need to be disturbed by these pictures,” Patta said on “CBS Mornings,” after describing what she and other journalists witnessed in the outskirts of Kyiv.
The war changed this week from a media perspective, which is how most people outside of Ukraine experience it.
Before, events had been seen primarily from a slight distance — fiery explosions caught on camera or drone-eyed views of burned-out buildings. Now, with the Ukrainian army retaking control of villages near Kyiv that had been brutalized by Russian soldiers, journalists are capturing the aftermath of horrific violence at close range — of dead bodies bound, tortured and burned.
While there’s a sense that images like these might change public opinion or have an impact on how a war plays out, historically that hasn’t often been the case, said Rebecca Adelman, a communications professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in war and the media.
Still, several countries, including the United States and Britain, imposed additional sanctions on Russia this week, and they cited the brutality in Bucha as compelling them to do more.
Whatever the impact, Adelman said it is critical to have journalists on hand to document what is going on. “Bearing witness is crucially important, particularly in cases of catastrophic loss,” she said. “Sometimes the photograph is all you have left.”
Photographs and video from Bucha showed body bags piled in trenches, lifeless limbs protruding from hastily dug graves, and corpses scattered in streets where they fell, including one man blown off a bicycle.
Journalists from around the world also interviewed Ukrainians emerging from their hiding places to tell stories about the barbarism they witnessed from Russian soldiers.
TV anchors and correspondents warned viewers that they were about to see graphic and disturbing pictures — a warning that came four times in one episode of “World News Tonight” on ABC. “I'm sorry I have to show you this,” CNN's Frederik Pleitgen apologized, before motioning a camera to show body bags piled in a van.
“While we may want to look away, it is becoming harder and harder to close our eyes to what's happening,” NBC “Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt said in his warning to viewers.
Veteran television news producer Rick Kaplan said that, from what he's seen, news organizations have been careful in what they've shown without flinching from the story.
“Every day we have these images it brings (the war) home more and more,” said Kaplan, a former president of both CNN and MSNBC. “It's a good thing that this horrifies us. Can you imagine if we were blase about it?”
The gruesome images from Bucha, in particular, have dominated news reports around the world.
The BBC reported on the continued “world revulsion.” Italian state TV gave no warning before showing bodies with bound hands, half-buried in sandy terrain. “What you see from here, unfortunately, are signs of torture on the face,” journalist Stefania Battistini said. “All are wearing civilian clothes.”
Narrating a story on Fakty, Poland's most-watched evening news program, anchor Grzegorz Kajdanowicz said “it is our duty to warn you, but also to show you what the Russians did in Bucha and several other places.”
It was different in Russia, where state television falsely claimed Ukraine was responsible for either killing civilians themselves or perpetrating a hoax. Russian TV has also run images of dead bodies in Bucha, some taken from CNN, with the word “fake” stamped on the screen, according to Internet Archive, a company that monitors Web and television content.
The Russian propaganda prompted many Western news organizations to debunk those claims by using satellite imagery to show that many dead bodies that were documented on the ground this week by journalists had been in the same spots when Russia controlled the town.
Some of the most graphic images were compiled in a short video made by Ukraine to accompany President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's speech to the United Nations on Tuesday. To a soundtrack of somber music and the cries of children, the video showed close-ups of corpses and body parts.
Technical difficulties delayed its airing until well after Zelenskyy talked, giving networks like CNN and Fox News Channel that had aired the speech time to present it later in edited form. But MSNBC appeared to show it in full, leaving anchor Andrea Mitchell visibly shaken.
“That's just horrific,” she said. “I don't think the world has seen anything like it.”
Ukraine has a clear motivation to show the world what is happening, and journalists accompanied Zelenskyy on a visit to Bucha on Monday.
While television and the Internet give greater immediacy to war coverage, heart-wrenching images — and their potential to shape public opinion — are hardly new.
Harvard historian Drew Faust, author of “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” noted that when Matthew Brady had an exhibit of his Civil War photographs in 1862, The New York Times wrote, “if he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”
When a memorable photo was circulated of a 5-year-old boy sitting dazed and bloodied after being rescued from a bombing in Aleppo, Syria in 2016, NPR asked in a headline, “Can one photo help end a war?”
It hasn't yet.
A danger, too, is that in a world not easily shocked people will become numb to the pictures. That's Faust's fear, particularly as she expressed surprise that many people became strangely disconnected to the news of so many people dying of COVID-19.
As more communities are liberated from Russian rule, the number of ghastly images will almost certainly multiply.
“A little caution will be needed going forward so every news program doesn't become a parade of horrible images,” said news consultant and retired NBC News executive Bill Wheatley.
Yet one of the surprises of this war, along with Ukraine's ability to stave off a quick defeat, is the way Zelenskyy has been able to win the information battle and unite opposition in a way that was not anticipated. In that context, the images may help make a difference.
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Associated Press correspondents Colleen Barry in Milan, Italy; Louise Dixon in London; Vanessa Gera in Warsaw, Poland; and Amanda Seitz in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
David Bauder, The Associated Press
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