The firms that helped document the Russian invasion of Ukraine are now finding imagery of atrocities.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — It’s an unlikely theme here at the largest annual gathering of space industry executives: how to help bring war criminals to justice.
The expanding constellations of commercial spy satellites that have been capturing high-resolution photos and radar images of Russian troop movements are now proving to be a game-changing tool for international authorities and human rights groups who are aggressively working to document Russia’s targeting of civilians in Ukraine.
And companies are stepping up their efforts to help build war crimes cases.
They are cueing their satellites to pinpoint mass graves, bombed-out hospitals and shattered schools. They are helping to identify military units that have targeted civilians. And their real-time data is being used to deploy investigators, such as those from the International Criminal Court and United Nations, to collect more physical evidence or personal testimony from witnesses on the ground in Ukraine.
“There is truth in imagery,” Steve Butow, director of the space portfolio at the Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley outpost, said in an interview at the Space Foundation’s National Space Symposium. “We know where the hospitals, schools and other things are and the analytics are showing these are exactly the things being targeted.”
“It is not propaganda from the West,” he added. “The global community is seeing this for what it is. They can show exactly what is happening on the ground.”
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While the technology has been used piecemeal in the past to illuminate Chinese human rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslims in China, genocide in Sudan and other human catastrophes, its role putting the war in Ukraine under the microscope is seen as revolutionary.
The commercial satellite constellations have grown dramatically in size and capability in recent years, providing higher resolution images and allowing much more frequent coverage over areas of interest. Dozens of companies and universities in the U.S. alone have government licenses to operate “remote sensing” technologies from orbit.
“We’re able to know in real-time,” said Ritwik Gupta, a research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California who is assisting U.S. European Command in Germany. “You want to see human rights violations in Bucha? We can get Maxar tasked and get imagery over that same exact region in a couple of minutes.”
Another company that has been working “around the clock” on the task is Planet Labs, which for years has coordinated with and supported human rights organizations. Now, international war crimes investigators are “spending enormous amounts of time using these tools to try to identify instances of the intentional targeting of civilians,” said Andrew Zolli, its chief impact officer.
Zolli also said what’s different in Ukraine than previous conflicts is that these investigations can now take place in real-time, in large part due to publicly available satellite data that was once the sole purview of secret government spy agencies.
“The satellites will guide the war crimes prosecutors to sites where they will collect ground evidence,” Zolli said. “And the combination of the ground evidence and satellite imagery and other digital sources of evidence will be collected for future prosecutions.”
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HawkEye 360 operates satellites that can track radio frequencies, such as those emitting from military units in confined areas — another possible line of investigation to pinpoint units or individuals responsible for atrocities.
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- Discussion
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Satellite companies that have been tracking Russia's movement in Ukraine are now using their technology to document war crimes.
They're cueing their satellites to pinpoint mass graves, bombed-out hospitals and shattered schools. https://t.co/HONvWiIxSU
— POLITICO (@politico) April 6, 2022
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