In many of the images, the corpses of soldiers can be seen burned, torn, confused into debris or abandoned in the snow; in some their faces are depicted in bloody close-ups frozen in pain.
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In others, prisoners were questioned by kidnappers about the invasion as they were shaken by emotion. Some of the men are sitting crumpled, their hands tied, their eyes blindfolded with duct tape.
The images are visible to anyone who has a web browser or smartphone and are widely shared on the Internet. The Telegram channel, where they are shown, has more than 580,000 subscribers.
Although not unprecedented – North Vietnam has shared photos and films of imprisoned US servicemen, including the late Senator John McCain, in hopes of fomenting anti-war sentiment in the United States – Ukraine’s efforts thanks to the Internet the war.
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Anyone can turn hundreds of faces of people whom the government claims were killed just hours earlier or who remain in captivity, and whose darkest moments are immortalized in videos that the world can watch. And because it’s in Telegram, viewers can receive notification and respond with emojis every time a new video is added.
Ukrainian authorities say the chilling images will warn Russians of devastating military efforts the Kremlin is trying to hide. In videos they shared with phone calls that allowed prisoners to work with their families, Ukrainians are heard urging soldiers to ask their parents to rally against Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop the bloodshed.
But the tactic can also be interpreted as a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which require governments to protect prisoners of war “at all times” from “insults and public curiosity.”
Such violations may seem insignificant compared to the evidence that Russian forces killed civilians and indiscriminately bombed residential neighborhoods, said Rachel E. VanLingham, a professor at Southwestern Law School who studied war crimes. But they could eliminate Ukraine’s ability to hold Russia accountable for violating international law.
“The law doesn’t allow them to do bad things, so we can,” VanLingham said. “They do not want to turn the international community against them. Here they must be straight and narrow. It is really dangerous for them in despair to do things that are clearly forbidden. “
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The campaign shows the extent to which Ukraine seeks to use all technological opportunities to undermine Russia’s military attack. Officials have created an online form in which parents of Russian soldiers can enter their children’s personal information to help identify or confirm the fates of young men.
They also told parents they could send their own DNA to help determine if their son had been killed in battle. There is a charge for the service, according to a YouTube video describing it.
The online form includes a government assessment of Russian losses. As of Wednesday, 5,840 Russian soldiers were said to have been killed and more than 200 held captive. Figures cannot be confirmed.
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Spokesmen for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and its embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.
The authenticity of campaign photos and videos cannot be verified independently. Ukrainian authorities say all the dead and captured are Russian soldiers, but this cannot be confirmed either.
The Kremlin has banned discussions on an invasion that has been mistakenly described in state propaganda as a limited military operation. Some members of the families of Russian soldiers contacted by Ukrainians told The Guardian that they did not even realize that the men had gone to war.
Attitudes toward troops have been a hotspot in Russia, as the brutality of the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya has helped fuel a parent-led movement that advocates for more visibility in military conditions.
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The Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia, a human rights group, said the young servicemen were forced to sign contracts and were taken to fight in the attack on Ukraine.
“Eight of the 10 calls we receive are for the same question: ‘Is my child alive?’ Where is he? “Andrei Kurochkin, the organization’s deputy chief, told The Washington Post in a recent interview.
Ukrainian officials said Russia had blocked the campaign’s website, but some people in the country could still access it on Wednesday. Russia has restricted access to Twitter, Facebook and other sites as part of a crackdown on what it calls disinformation.
The online campaign of Ukrainians is called roughly “Find your own”. The domain name on his website, 200rf.com, probably refers to Cargo 200, a Soviet military term for how soldiers’ bodies return from war.
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In addition to the Telegram channel, some of the recordings have been posted to a Twitter account and a YouTube channel, where the videos – some of which have been edited in short, TikTok-like videos – have been viewed more than 1.3 million times.
Ukrainians also launched a hotline and a Telegram channel with information on how Russian mothers can release their sons from prison by traveling to Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. The defense ministry said in a statement Wednesday that “Ukrainians, unlike Putin’s fascists, do not fight mothers and their captured children.”
In a YouTube video addressing Russian viewers directly, a man identified as an adviser to Ukraine’s interior ministry said the detainees were being treated humanely and that most could not call home otherwise because they did not have telephones. and that the Ukrainian government can help return the bodies of soldiers to their families.
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In another video, a Ukrainian gunman says that some of the dead Russian soldiers cannot be easily identified from the photos due to “the horrors of the war that your president caused”, but that they still published them in case viewers can recognize their loved ones by other means. Family members, he said, must do everything possible to prevent their husbands and sons from dying in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s top law enforcement agency, the Security Service of Ukraine, also posted videos of captured soldiers on its Facebook page, some showing men explaining that they did not realize they were fighting.
The videos say the men received medical treatment but will be held accountable for their actions. It could not be determined whether the soldiers spoke under duress.
Russia has a mandatory one-year military service for all men under the age of 27, and Russian regulations say recruits can be sent to a battle zone no earlier than four months after their training. But the group of soldiers’ mothers says it has received numerous calls from Russian parents, that some servicemen have been forced or misled into enlistment, or that they barely served two months before being sent unprepared to the battlefield.
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According to Kurochkin, some servicemen told their mothers they believed they were heading to the Ukrainian border for exercises, as Russia has been explaining its massive accumulation for weeks.
“Then they are told, ‘Now you are performers,'” he said. “And everyone’s phones are taken away while mothers cry and panic.”
The use of conscripts had become a problem before Russian troops invaded Ukraine when a local newspaper in the Belgorod region of Russia released photos of more than 100 soldiers sleeping on the floor of a small train station 40 miles from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. .
Russia’s Defense Ministry has denied sending conscripts to war zones.
Thousands of anti-war protesters have been arrested on the streets of Moscow and other Russian cities in the past week. The Russian military on Sunday, for the first time since the invasion began, admitted that some of their soldiers were dead or wounded.
Unverified videos showing what appears to be Russian soldiers have become viral on social media in recent days. One video shows a man drinking tea and talking through a video call to someone identified as his mother. Outside the camera, one can hear someone say, “Get up, woman, and take the whole world with you on foot.”
The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has been testing the boundaries of international law for years. In 2014, pro-Russian separatists demonstrated captured Ukrainian prisoners through Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, which human rights activists say violates the Geneva Conventions against “humiliating and degrading treatment.”
The “public curiosity” rule was cited in 2019 after the Pakistani Ministry of Information published and later deleted a video of a captured Indian pilot whose fighter jet was shot down on Pakistani-controlled land.
The United States officially protested when captured soldiers were shown on television days after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and a U.S. military commission convicted a German lieutenant general in 1946 of marching American prisoners on the streets of Rome during World War II. .
Most recently, the United States was accused of violating the law of war by showing photos of prisoners at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba.
Alex Horton contributed to this report.