CNN Video Used by Ukrainian Prosecutors to Identify Russian Soldier Accused of War Crimes in Bucha
A video captured by CNN was used by Ukrainian prosecutors to identify a Russian soldier accused of committing war crimes in Bucha.
CNN Newsroom anchor Jim Acosta showed a clip of the video, which he described as “one of the most brutal war crimes in Ukraine captured on camera,” on Sunday with reporting by Sara Sidner.
Earlier this year, Ukrainian forces successfully liberated the town of Bucha, a suburb of the capital city Kyiv, but as the Russians withdrew, reports began mounting of horrific war crimes committed by Russian troops, including the murder of unarmed civilians.
“Ukrainian prosecutors say this is the moment an undeniable war crime was carried out by Russian soldiers,” Sidner narrated over the clip, being shown to the public for the first time. The video showed Russian soldiers “firing at something alongside a business they had just overtaken on the outskirts of Kyiv, but it “turns out their target is two unsuspecting and unarmed Ukrainian civilians, who they shoot in the back.”
CNN had initially reported on another clip from the video in May, Sidner said, showing the business owner dying where he fell and the guard surviving long enough to make it back to his guard shack but bleeding to death there. “Both men had just spent the last few minutes speaking calmly with the Russian soldiers, who appeared to let them go, but we now see two of the soldiers return and fire on them.”
The guard’s daughter, Yulia Plyats, speaking through a translator, told CNN “she wanted the world to know her father’s name and what the Russians did to him.”
Sidner asked her if she had seen the video, and Plyats replied that she couldn’t watch it but would save it for her children and grandchildren. “They should know about this crime and always remember who our neighbors are.”
“The prosecutor’s office says with the help of CNN’s story it has finally identified one of [the guard’s] executioners,” said Sidner, as photos of the alleged war criminal were shown on the screen.
Ukrainian officials “will not reveal exactly how they identified this particular soldier,” Sidner continued, but it was known that the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation had been using facial recognition technology to take images and load them into a program that “scrubs social media looking for a match,” and if they get a match to a soldier “dead or alive, they try to corroborate it with friends and family on the soldier’s social media sites.”
So far, this technology had been used in about 300 cases, Sidner reported.
“The identification of the latest suspect for war crimes was months in the making,” she concluded. “But it is at least one step toward justice for the families who have had something taken from them they can never get back — the life of someone they loved.”
Watch above via CNN.
