There are two remarkable things about the Ukrainian war documentary Peace for Nina, now touring the film festival circuit.
The first is the story it tells.
Ukrainian soldier Ihor Branovytsky was captured by Russian separatists when they overran Donetsk airport in 2014. After that, he vanished. The film follows his mother Nina’s search as she tracks down fellow prisoners who recount the horrible truth that Ihor was executed by a paramilitary leader and former car wash employee, Arsen Pavlov, nicknamed Motorola.
Remarkably, as news of her quest spread, a Kyiv journalist tracked down Motorola’s cellphone number. More remarkable still, Motorola gave an interview from across the front line. He wouldn’t comment on Branovytsky’s death, but blithely took credit for executing 15 other prisoners. A year after that, Motorola was himself dead, blown up by a bomb planted in the elevator of his apartment block by an unknown assassin.
The second remarkable thing is how Nina was able to piece together what happened to her son between his capture and death. This was possible through videos uploaded by the separatists themselves. Video evidence like this has sparked a revolution in war crimes justice. The prevalence of the cellphone has allowed anyone to become a war crimes investigator, giving prosecutors around the world an avalanche of evidence.
Its availability has already transformed Ukraine’s war crimes investigations, the most extensive ever undertaken in history. Since the Russian invasion, more than 1,020 indictments have been issued, most backed by voluminous data.
“In Ukraine the level of video evidence they have is just next level,” says Dr. Alexa Koenig, co-director of America’s Berkeley University Human Rights Center, told this author. “A Tsunami has hit international criminal justice.”
Dr. Koenig has been developing protocols allowing lawyers to navigate war crimes video archives, and many trials now hinge on such evidence. Germany jailed a Syrian official who arrived disguised as a refugee, when video evidence revealed the torture he inflicted back home. Another Syrian was convicted in the Netherlands for a brutal execution, thanks to film uploaded by his own staff celebrating it. In The Hague, the International Criminal Court jailed a Congolese warlord thanks to video confirming his use of child soldiers.
But marching in lockstep with the spread of video evidence are the fakes. AI images are often indistinguishable from the real thing. “Pictorial evidence is clearly on the up, technology is improving,” says the International Bar Association’s executive director Mark Ellis. “But potential manipulation of these types of videos, that too has increased.”
His solution was to invent an app, Eyewitness to Atrocities, which is free to download and guarantees images arrive at a special hub tamper-free. Launched in 2015, Eyewitness will shortly celebrate, if that is the right word, receiving its 100,000th war crimes image, the bulk from Ukraine.
This video revolution comes with its own problems, with lawyers obliged to sift through mountains of files. This is keenly felt by defense teams, who operate with a fraction of the staff available to prosecutors. “In a normal ICC trial there might be 20,000 documents disclosed, but in these (digital) cases, where evidence is collected from just about anyone with a phone, you might end up with 200,000,” says Marie-Helene Prouix, a defense lawyer at The Hague. “It’s hard to imagine how a defense team can manage that, given the limited resources and time they have.”
The video revolution is also grueling, as investigators hunt through thousands of distressing images for the one they want.
That also formed a central part of Nina’s five-year search, trying to piece together a timeline from the moment Ihor was first shown in captivity, arriving at a rebel base on a tank. She meets witnesses and relatives of other victims, and finds a silver lining in the community she builds with other grieving parents.
But the film also records her discovery of a heartbreaking image. When Ihor went to war, his mother gave him a blue fleece to stay warm. He took it, cheerfully telling her he wouldn’t wear it because it made him look unsoldierly. He wore it in captivity, though, which drew Nina’s attention to one of thousands of videos she searched.
There he was in his fleece, standing in line with other prisoners, his face bloody from a beating, shortly before he was murdered.
“She fights not only to have her son’s killing recognized as a war crime, but also to ensure that no other victim is denied justice,” says the film’s director, Jeanne Dovhych. “We have values as a civilization, and we must defend them.”
Chris Stephen is a former war correspondent with The Guardian. He has written on war crimes justice matters for publications including The Hill, International Institute for Strategic Studies, and Counsel, the magazine of the Bar Association of England and Wales. He is the author of The Future of War Crimes Justice (Melville House, London and New York) and Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic (Atlantic Books, London and New York).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
