Nick Waters, who documents civilian harm caused by Russia’s invasion, explains how his team ensures their findings will stand up in court (…) Bellincat’s Ukraine database intends to be a living document. Collection started on the first day of the invasion and Bellingcat intends to keep updating it until the end of the conflict. The database is made of incidents that have resulted in potential civilian harm, including rockets or missiles impacting civilian areas and the destruction of civilian infrastructure. They’ve been logged and mapped by Waters’ team at Bellingcat and by the Global Authentication Project, a community of open source researchers led by Hannah Bagdasar. All contributions are vetted by Bellingcat researchers. “We verify the events and place them into this evidentiary database which in theory could be used as evidence in court,” Waters says. “We are pretty confident that our methodology works since we tested it during a mock hearing in 2021.” Waters works with three full-time colleagues and another six help on a part-time basis. The team includes lawyers and Russian and Ukrainian speakers, but its focus is limited. “We can’t do something we are not equipped to do”, Waters says. “We can’t interview witnesses, for example, because we are not trained to do that and we don’t want to contaminate testimony. So we don’t focus on things like Bucha or the bombing of the Mariupol drama theatre. We tend to focus on events that are slightly less high-profile but where we can really apply our methods effectively.” The events documented so far At the time of this writing, Bellingcat’s TimeMap documents 1,094 examples of bombings, shootings and airstrikes and places them in time and space. Up to 190 of the events documented are attacks against schools, cultural sites and healthcare facilities. A big proportion happened in big cities such as Kharkiv (219), Kyiv (95), Mykolaiv (74), Mariupol (70) and Kherson (57).
via reuters institute: How Bellingcat collects, verifies and archives digital evidence of war crimes in Ukraine
