‘Execution video Ukrainian soldier can serve as evidence’

• Wessel de Young

  news reporter

The video of the execution of 41-year-old Ukrainian soldier Tymofi Shadura appeared online around two o’clock on Monday afternoon. The images immediately went all over the world. The video quickly had hundreds of thousands of views on Reddit.

But the short fragment has more meaning than a short-lived internet hype. The images could be important in possible criminal cases against war criminals, say lawyers who specialize in the law of war.

This video went all over the world. Please note: the images can be experienced as shocking.

“One of the reasons why this image is going so fast is because it is so extreme that you can’t take your eyes off it,” says Yorrick de Vries, who does open source research for NOS. “It piques your morbid curiosity and your sense of injustice.”

As a viewer you literally stand next to the shooter(s), which makes watching a shocking experience. At the edge of the image you can see the barrels of the Kalashnikovs spewing fire. Shadura falls and then gets hit several more times, in the uncensored version. In most videos, the image then changes into blocks that only show vague contours.

On Ukrainian Telegram channels, the video was viewed three million times in no time. A little later, the video also appeared on Twitter, where it attracted 60,000 viewers. De Vries has often seen gruesome material from the war go viral. But how fast it has gone with this video, according to him, is exceptional. With the hashtag ‘execution’, it started with 10,000 tweets per hour, rising to 150,000 posts per hour.

At about the same time, the image also appeared on a Russian Telegram channel; Telegram is widely used by both Russians and Ukrainians to follow the news. On the Russian channel Rvvojenkor, the images attracted half a million viewers. The Russians expressed surprise that the video was so popular on Ukrainian channels.

An hour after the appearance of the images, the first ‘works of art’ also surfaced, a cut-out of Shadura who is portrayed as a saint in some images. Those artistic versions of the executed soldier are also widely shared and reinforce the martyr effect.

In the meantime, little is known about the origin of the images. There is a good chance that they come from a Russian mobile phone that the Ukrainians have taken from a captured Russian, or found on a fallen soldier, De Vries assumes.

According to Marieke de Hoon, the metadata on the phone contains a wealth of data, as was found in the MH17 process, for example. De Hoon is a lecturer in criminal law at the University of Amsterdam and was involved in the mega-trial as an expert. The metadata is not usable without further ado. “Are we seeing what we think we’re seeing? Does the audio match the video? Voices can be evidence.”

Extensive research is needed to determine this. And that’s a problem in Ukraine, which now has thousands of cases like this. De Hoon thinks international cooperation can offer a solution in this respect. “That investigation could also be done by the NFI,” she says.

“This video raises fears for other prisoners of war. Because this is only one,” says Liesbeth Zegveld, lawyer and professor of war justice. If enough of these kinds of videos appear, “facts of general knowledge” will arise. These can serve as supporting evidence in individual criminal cases against war criminals. The video could help to illustrate behavioral patterns, she believes, especially if they come from one area.