A Yale University research lab is using satellite imagery to track the locations of Ukrainian children abducted to Russia since 2022, uncovering 210 “reformation” and military training camps where they are being sent, its director told AFP.
Requested by the US State Department that same year, the Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) was tasked with estimating how many children had been forcibly transferred by Russian authorities, and the scale of the operation, explained its director Nathaniel Raymond, who was in Stockholm on Monday for a seminar on the issue at the Swedish parliament.
At first, he viewed the task as almost impossible.
“How do we find children hidden and shielded by Russian security services? In a kidnapping case where all we have is the internet and satellite images?” he said.
The breakthrough came thanks to a mistake made by Russian officials: selfies taken by local Russian authorities with Ukrainian children.
“Local officials, looking to win favour with the Kremlin, took photos of themselves with the children on buses,” Raymond said.
“The amusing part,” he added, “is that they forgot to turn off their phone location data.”
“We were able to extract the latitude and longitude of where those officials were standing, and from the photos we could identify their devices, including their Apple Watches. That’s when we started digging,” he said.
The information is shared with the Ukrainian authorities.
By analysing additional available data, including official images published by Russian authorities, the HRL has since identified 210 reformation and military camps across Russia where some of the abducted Ukrainian children are being held.
The lab estimates the total number of children at 36,000. After the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin in 2023, Russian authorities stopped publishing this type of material online: “They’re starting to clean up the crime scene, moving the children,” Raymond warned.
The fate of these children must be an absolute priority in ongoing negotiations, he concluded.
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