There will be retribution for Bucha, Ukrainians promised after mass graves and bound corpses were found after the retreat of the Russian army from the northern outskirts of Kyiv.

" We have a very clear task,” said Oleksii Arestovich, adviser to the Ukrainian President.

He even went as far as comparing the hunt for the killers of Bucha residents to the Mossad operation against the Black September terrorists who killed Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics..

" No one will leave,” he was quoted as saying by Politico.

But in reality, the path to engaging Vladimir Putin or other Russian officials will be very different.. It will be a slow and complex forensic process under full international control.. And the prospect of immediate indictment is very slim.. In the court of public opinion, Putin has already been accused. " Satellite images from private companies have also been used to refute Moscow's stories that Ukrainians allegedly laid out corpses on the streets of Bucha as Russian soldiers retreated..

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Experts say Ukraine, where 70% of the population had Internet access before the invasion, will be a 'test case' for evidence collected by users. Prosecutors of the International Criminal Court have been working in Ukraine for more than a month, investigating war crimes eight years ago. They also investigate real-time cases documented on victims' smartphones.. However, social media posts will not replace the traditional forensics, intelligence and documents needed to prove crimes on the battlefield.. In theory, investigators could check the metadata and say that the video is exactly what they say.. That footage of a soldier shooting civilians was filmed in Kharkiv in 2022, and not in Palmyra in March 2016. However, using this information in court is another matter entirely.. And when it comes to the persecution of high-ranking figures, such images rarely give an indication of who really gives orders..

The process of uniting soldiers on the ground with leaders “could stretch up the chain of command to the level of ministries, to top-level generals and even to President Putin,” said U.S. war crimes prosecutor Clint Williamson.. He now leads a joint EU-US team investigating Ukraine.. According to him, the structure of direct command and control in the Russian army can theoretically simplify the task. But “the whole process of filling out paperwork and getting people involved in court can be very, very lengthy.”.

For weeks, activists have known that something terrible is happening in Bucha.. A Human Rights Watch report released on Sunday documented at least one killing of Ukrainian civilians on March 4, citing eyewitness testimony.. But the full story only came to light last week, when Russian soldiers left Bucha and foreign observers were able to enter the town to begin the " He explained that in the event that an obvious mass grave is discovered, as in Bucha, the main thing is to save the site so that forensic experts can “examine these remains fragment by fragment.”. They have to establish how people died, whether it happened due to the same reasons and at the same time or not.. Investigators need to overcome the chaos of the war, as well as pressure from families who want to bury their dead relatives..

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“In our case, we are talking about slow and steady work. It means collecting evidence that will stand scrutiny in national and other courts,” Stroelain said..

In the past, victims of war crimes have also documented their own suffering with the technology available to them.. Videos smuggled from Kosovo to Albania "

Back then people had creaking VHS cameras. Now everyone uses smartphones and can actually do the same,” he explained..

However, investigators have not yet figured out how to use the full potential of evidence collected by witnesses.. According to the director of the eyeWitness project at the International Bar Association, Wendy Betts, the war in Syria was one of the first to be digitally documented.. Social media has helped “close the investigation gaps that always arise between immediate events and the ability of professional investigators to figure out all the circumstances”. At the same time, such frames are easy to manipulate. And that's why, according to Betts, they're hard to use in court.. Syrian Archive data from social media videos can confirm how difficult it is for a laboratory to verify certain footage. Of the 3.6 million videos, only 650 thousand were analyzed. At the same time, the authenticity was confirmed only in the case of 8249 of them.. Betts says Ukrainians are also generating 'a powerful layer of video, which is good'.

“But as we know, each of these videos needs to be verified before it can play a role in lawsuits,” the expert explained..

Recall that when, after the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Kiev region, the first photos of the bodies of dead civilians that lay on the streets of Bucha appeared - someone with their hands tied, someone with gunshot wounds to the head - the Russian Ministry of Defense denied responsibility.

Russia said the images were "