Maxar / HRL
Russian military base in Pskov oblast, May 6, 2024
A team of researchers from Yale University has documented, with the help of satellite images, the location of 210 military and re-education camps in Russia, where thousands of Ukrainian children were taken. The Russians made a mistake: they took selfies next to the children.
The American researcher and activist Nathaniel Raymonddirector of the Humanitarian Research Laboratory (HRL) at Yale University, reported this Monday at a seminar in the Swedish Parliament, how his team of researchers identified thousands of Ukrainian children in Russian re-education camps.
In 2022, says Raymond, the United States Department of State tasked HRL with estimating the number of displaced children by Russian authorities and the magnitude of the phenomenon.
Initially, Raymond’s team considered the task to be almost impossible. “How to find hidden and protected children by Russian security services? In a kidnapping case where we only have the internet and satellite images?”, says the investigator, quoted by AFP.
The solution came thanks to a mistake made by the Russians: local authorities took selfies next to Ukrainian children. “To gain favor with the Kremlin, they took photographs next to children on buses,” Raymond explained.
“The most curious thing is that forgot to disable geolocation on your cell phones. We were able to extract the latitude and longitude of the place and we saw, in the photographs, that we were able to identify the devices, including their Apple Watch watches. It was then that we began to delve deeper into the investigation”, he added.
After the issued against Vladimir Putin by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2023, Russian authorities stopped publishing this type of information online.
Cross-referencing the information collected with other accessible data, in particular the official photographs published by the Russian authorities, HRL was able to identify 210 military and re-education camps across Russia where a part of Ukrainian children are found.
“The fate of these children must be an absolute priority in the ongoing negotiations”, highlighted Raymond.
The team of researchers, who published their study in September, estimates that there is a total of 36,000 Ukrainian children in these camps — where they will likely be “re-educated” with the help of the new Official Russian Dictionary, in which .
