honeys and countries rethinking everything and making later changes google milam for cuba if a massive cyber attack or something like that happens and we can all, he boot our country from the outside when a, it's our future after all. and if we don't do something, our children won't be able to enjoy fresh air will be what is the only 3 the route this week, and d, w ah, if you really want to know about war, who's murdering and torturing, who's giving the orders and which weapons are being used much of it is out there on the internet. and eliot higgins british founder of the group belling cat, has been mining that raw data and incriminating the brutal and powerful in ukraine . his investigators are pouring over evidence of russian war crimes. but he's not

averse to looking at western actions elsewhere. we have written about, you know, u. s. air strikes in syria, that's kill civilians with written bath, janice down and other topics where the u. s. and other western states are involved . it's just rushes up to a lot really bad stuff. higgins doesn't flinch from naming names, but he fights on an information battlefield where facts, however detailed, are routinely contested and dismissed as fake news is truth already a devalued currency. ah, elliot higgins, welcome to conflict zone. thanks have me on naming kilo's going after war criminals . you've poked some extremely powerful bears in painful places to worry about what kind of danger they might post to you. well, it's something this always constant concern both to myself and belling has an organization really since 2015 on which we've been talked in various ways. first

off and with this information campaigns from the russian media, then cyber attacks have really been a constant feature of our lives really at belling cats. and of course now as we're looking more, more into the behavior of the russian intelligence services this year, increasing security issues that we have to be concerned about. in july, the russian prosecutor general designated you as an undesirable organization, presenting what they called a threat to russia is constitutional order and security. did you treat that as a warning you suddenly got under the skin? or do you see that of the badge of honor? and really, both i real concern is that we continue to be kind of escalated from really just trouble making the eyes of the russian federation to the survey stakes is where, where he actually does next is a terrorist organization because that has a huge impact on not just us, but also those people who woke up this and supporters so, you know,

they're really happy in an escalation for the years from russia starting with, you know, just just information all the way. now. it's being declared undesirable. you wrote in your book the whilst you couldn't do little to stop and attack our opponents. you said can do nothing to stop what we're becoming. what are you becoming? well, i mean, we're growing in a whole range of different ways. we're doing an increasing amount of work on justice and accountability, really examining how the console investigation can be used in legal processes. and that's of it. we've been very successful with at the moment, especially with the conflicts and ukraine. i want to come on to ukraine a little later if i may, but the information world as such, has become a pretty nasty place, not least in the court, hasn't it? one of put in closest allies of gainey. pre gordon sued you for defamation of a claims that he was the boss of the mercenary group wagner. but the lawsuit was dropped. you though, went off to his british lawyers and filed

a complaint against them with regulators in the u. k. and said what they done had been possibly an abuse of process. why? well, if you have, we have lots of issues with slap cases. so slap is strategic lawsuit against public participation effectively. yeah. so this was a very clear case of that. i mean, we now know that he's admitted he was behind baltimore, long like he pulled his mask off of his face behind it all the time that we really knew that and is effectively admitted that the legal cases are to attack his critics. all the press and muzzle of the press. this was the yeah. and was actually reporting in the, in set based of emails that were hats that belong to russian boys where they were communications back and forth between the boys in russia, avenue k ad there. it was very clear that the reason he went after me was because i

was cited in the paperwork relating to sanctions against them. so it's a reaction to that trans where it's hackers and mine are work. i'm really undermined the sanctions against him. so how important was it to win this battle? well, i mean, there was, i went away one by default because his boys pulled out the case and then he didn't really respond correctly to the court. have you've actually got his act together. it could've cost us hundreds of thousands of pounds and you know, bending has no massive organizations that kind of budget. and i was very lucky that funding count was paying my legal bills because robin don't have the balance. he went to me personally basis and tweets. i put out linking to articles that he said had defamatory content in it. keep in mind he had to get sanctions relief relief in the u. k. to be able to pay lawyers to sue me for saying the thing that he was sanctioned for. so i found myself in this very bizarre situation where affecting the treasury was giving him permission to sue me for the thing he was sanctioned

for. so i, it was a very difficult situation for me to talk about ukraine. if we may, you've had an office in the hague for some time, and you assist the international criminal court in shining whatever lights you can on war crimes and those who commit them. how's that work going in ukraine? well, he crane. we're currently using a process. we've developed recently examining saudi strikes and yemen to investigate conflicts, incidents using open source evidence. i. when i started doing this work and i found the can see $1014.00, i thought of the team of people would do that, that they figure out the processes. but what we've actually found is we've actually been leading those processes. so we've been working international lawyers and everyone is ations to about this really robust processor investigation. and effect me this means we can create case files that we can pass on various bodies, for example, an itc or something like that. i'd like to talk about

a particular case in april. you look to, to reports of massive human rights violations in the town of butcher, near t f. when it was under russian occupation. the russians said your claims were false . they always say that, but how far were you able to challenge them rebuttals? well, i mean, really, russian disinformation around incidents like has really been quite prophetic. i mean, only last week the russian social media accounts of the various embassies were sharing a video about various denials that were making. and one of those denials was effectively based off the kind of random french guy who made these very kind of exaggerated claims claiming he was that. and he watched the adults battalion and placing bodies on the ground, just boss of a gentleness. we're watching it happen, which is absolute nonsense. we have drone imagery, satellite imagery, and other sources from before you creating forces and from the town that shows those same bodies in place. the weeks before they arrived, we now have of course,

the work of many organizations you've been on the ground talking to witnesses as being able to verify why those bodies were there in the 1st place. you know, execution by russian forces. you know, even one person who was part of a group of men who led away all the shots and he played dads and he was the only survivor, but also very crucial witness this cctv footage of the men being that way. and then photograph of the corpses of the men where they were shot. so there really is a huge wealth of evidence for me. what's being really interesting is with the conflict in syria, which is something i felt for a very long time. there was a constant frustration that no matter how well good an investigation did, no matter the evidence. there really wasn't any chance for accountability because obviously the syrian government wasn't gonna look into it some more crimes. but with you, craig, a very different situation because you have a government who wants to investigate the war crimes happening in its own country. and you also have a big global movement, the coalition of organisation supporting that kind of work. so i think in all the

recent more than conflicts, we're looking for accountability for the source of crimes. ukraine really is the best hope of that. and that there isn't any accountability. we really have to look at how asked systems for counselors who work because it really is the best possible circumstances for that to happen. on the subject of accountability. to what extent has it been possible to match individual atrocities, to people who carried them out it's, it's difficult work, but fortunately because russian operations research is very, very poor, they use open communication lines. they walk into their communications. you don't have to hack into them. i mean, they use open radio networks that very are the only conflict. for example, you could go to a website where people are set to live streams of russian radio communications and you would have been talking back and forth. you also have the fact that the ukrainian government and the intelligence services ukraine,

are master recording every possible intercepted call that they can find. and you see a lot of these calls being published. we have russian soldiers talked to the family at home about the situation. so they really, i think they such a huge amounts of evidence that it's not an issue of the lack of evidence. it's an issue of being able to piece together cases and prosecutions from the wealth of evidence that exists at the moment. in august you reported on your efforts to track the killers who mutilated and executed a ukrainian prisoner. you started with 3 horrifying videos on a russian telegram channel, and you ended up with the actual phone number of a suspect, who spoke to you knowing that you were journalists, but he denied the key accusations. do you think you got the right person here? i think so, yeah, i, when you're doing this kind of work, there are alternative scenarios. you can explore this like, okay, what if this is, you know, if you want, it appears to be what circumstances could that really come around. and given the

information that we had, we knew where they were, we have the same person or another video at the same location. we could see he was wearing the same clothes, the vehicles in the videos that were visible in the years that he feature then it's really hard to imagine any of the scenario literally involves someone else dressing up in all his clothes, where he's saying and jewelry and other details and pretending to be him for the purpose of making this video and also having the collaboration of russians to do that. so often with this work you're looking at really the percentage property of something being true. and it becomes vanishingly small at some point, but it could be any of the scenario from the bonds that we've explored. you talk about his clothes, you talk about the bracelet that he was wearing the hat he was wearing even down to the skin tones. this is a phenomenal amount of detail, isn't it? how many hundreds, maybe thousands of eyes went into this. and it wasn't that complex. i mean,

the help that we had a very small amount of kind of material to examine. the really tricky part was trying to find a reference material for the site that they will ring you have is very blurry, low quality video. and what we're trying to establish is exactly where this video was filmed. but for see frank city kind of group effort that we had pouring through this content, we have to find very small details in the videos that thing to be matched. the other footage that one of the key pieces footage was the youtube video. some people writing, i think it was dirt bikes for the same area, filming, if they went go pro cameras, devices, lots of really useful footage from the ground where we were able to match very small details to what was in the video show the mutilation happening. where did the motivation come for you to, to do this kind of work? you had a clerical job in the city of less that you played a lot of computer games. how did you get the motivation that led to the start of

bell in cat and to try to hold criminals responsible and accountable for the crimes they commit? how did you get to there is quite gradual. i, when i started doing this, i was really just, you know, so you're spending a lot of time on the internet forums. i've been interesting politics and what was happening with the spring. and i was very much kind of part of online culture where you kind of all the people names and that about this not. and i found it a bit frustrating that you had coverage of libya way to have the mainstream newspapers. right. and what was happening based off their reporters. but you then had this wealth of information that came from sources on the ground people filming stuff, sharing on social media and other platforms. and it was largely being ignored. and really the only people who were taking it seriously were conspiracy affairs to jesus as evidence to support whichever very they have about, you know, the cia being involved to whistle that by realize there was somebody you can actually do. the actually gave them much deeper understanding and the more granular

understanding of the conflict. but it became increasingly clear that i was finding stuff that no one else was finding. and i think it really came to a head in 2000. and because they weren't looking that you found it, i think part of it was that they didn't know how to verify the content on social media that had been some scandals in the past. like in 2012, there was a blocker called gabriel in damascus. he was widely cited in lot of west media, he turned out to be a white guy in america, just pretending to be that person. and i think a lot people found that very embarrassing and it made it hardest trust social media . but i developed processes for verification of things like the location, something was filmed, and really over the years i built kind of more more methodology is drawing the experience of people into well to really have a, almost a complete suite of investigative methodologies that could produce evidence of a high standard and a verifiable standard as well. and i think this really changed dramatically when we started investigating what happened to i make 17 in eastern ukraine. the malaysian

at atlanta that was shot into us. right. because bank was launched just for make sure that he was shot down at that time banding. camp would be just 3 days before wasn't it is 3 days before. yeah. nice south of all, several conspiracy fairies about you know why we're suddenly lost. and so interested in it, but so we're looking at the conspiracy theories. do you have any kind of relationship with western security services? this is some of the things that said about you. there's many people who believe we are for to the cia and my 5. i think that everyone on a regular basis was funded by them. and even the russians have made that is ation and i get the feeling they genuinely believe this point. but that's not true. and we take a lot of steps to, you know, be transparent in our sources and our evidence. we are transparent, our funding, we charities away independently, all the states. so we try to be as transparent as possible, but always going to have people who, you know, believe in conspiracy theory, that's just the nature of the internet in several investigations. you and your

partners have identified a number of individual assassins employed by the russian states. you've tracked their movements, their phone calls, their homes, that car registrations are internal documents. even the numbers on the tickets say to say, isn't that none of these people are likely to face trial for what they've done. so what's the best you can hopeful we talked earlier about accountability, you want to put them as individuals out of business, deter other people from doing the same kind of things. that sort of thing. while i was certainly already seen, the reporting has made it difficult for certain rough and spice to operate. there was one case we are looking into publish recently about a woman called maria della, who was a socialite in naples. he had a fashion shop. she kind of went to lots of parties and she was part of a club, the local nato's native bass ram, the lions club. and it turned out she was actually a russian spy. because what we discovered is russians have been using sequential

passport numbers for their fake identity documents for their spies. and she was in one of those sequences of numbers and without pretty sloppy on there. but on, on that part, wasn't it that go away it for a long time. so why would they change the way they operate? and we only found this out, especially because rushes crap from top to bottom. a lot of the work we've done exposing spies is based off using data that we acquire from the data markets in russia and russia. everyone is basically every level of government is on the take in some way or another, and a lot of data. so public on public markets is supposed to be illegal, but nobody cares because you never get cool and you can make, you know, weeks wage and one transaction. so we're buying things like phone records, flight recalls, ticket, passport documents, really great information. and the thing is russia effectively a police state, so they collect a huge amount of information on my systems,

even their own spice. so we get phone records out as to establish not only who they are calling, but thanks for the connection to cell phone towers. their movements and we've done this with the scripture case, the bonding poisoning and many other cases. this is infected, a huge humiliation in a way on the russian state. hasn't it? because you're identifying the people they use to assassinate their political opponents. do you have any idea how this went down with russia, security services? how they reacted to your revelations with which han saw sacking? how, how did they react? well, for the actual people identify, i mean, in many cases they kind of being part of the desktops. now, you know, they can't operate in the field anymore, so you know, it's not just about the spice we publish about, but also the ones who associates with them. they don't know what we know about their spice at the moment. they also, i think, are pretty convinced that we're probably intelligent services because in russia, if an organization like banding existed, looking at the west,

it would definitely be involved. the intelligence says we had the head of the se, offer example, the russian domestic intelligence service, doing an interview where he went out his way to route belling kept being part of the intelligence services. so they definitely know who we are. i'm sure they're actually convinced that we're working for the housing services. but so far they've not really have much of an effective counted to what we're doing because a lot of our work on identifying the spies is based on the fact that the entire russian system is corrupt. and that will to access data that really isn't possible to access and countries. we've talked a bit about what you are prepared to do. you buy material on the, i suppose you could call it the and internet black market. this is the doc web, isn't it? you do online investigations, is anyone you won't investigate? i mean, for instance, british or american troops that been accusations of war crimes and i've got to stand, for instance, would you investigate those? yeah, absolutely. i mean, we are more interesting issues around accountability,

so we wouldn't be looking into celebrities and what they're up to because that's really, you know, just happily nonsense really. but if there's a war crime, some violation, then that's something we look into. and while i think we do have reputation for really focusing a lot of russia, we have written about us as strikes and syria that killed civilians. we've written bath ganna, some of the topics where the u. s. and of a western states are involved. it's just rushes up to a lot of really bad stuff. so it gives us a lot more to write about. plus, they're very bad information security. so it really opens up a lot of opportunities for investigation in russia, looking ahead you've, you've spoken out against what you call sy, but miserable. isn't this tendency to dismiss the internet as a wrecking ball destroying journalism and politics. and you put it this way. you said the marvels of the internet can still have an impact for the better. but those marvels being steadily eroded don't they?

this year, freedom house war, the governments were what they called breaking apart the global internet to create more controllable online spaces, global internet freedom. according to freedom houses declined for the 12 consecutive year. this must make the environment in which you operate much more difficult, doesn't on the innocence doesn't. because at the same time, we are actually having more communities coming together who are pushing against that in different ways. if you look at the current conflict in ukraine, for example, from the very early days of the conflict, even before the concert began, had online communities who came together and we're effectively gathering and processing information is very ad hoc way. so for example, prior to the invasion, you had a lot of people who were looking at russian tick tock, accounts, who were filming convoys just because it was an interesting thing that was happening in their lives. but by piecing all the information together, it was very clear that the truth builds up on the board was not the training exercise the russians claims, but was in fact,

previous to the invasion. you then had just property invasion. this information being put out by people evans, and the people's republic that was almost instantaneously been debunked. as soon as it was being published by online communities who would come together. after that, you had no organizations who are working on legal accountability. activism on human rights issues really rapidly coming together and really enabled by the internet and partly by open source evidence being available in a something that anyone could examine. and i think really what we've seen over the past 8 years or so for the existence of banning cat is the groundwork being put in the building. she sees and build these networks and also help people understand the value of open source evidence when it comes to investigating conflicts. and i think ukraine is really the 1st time i've seen. meet your organizations, n g o, a counselors, your organizations, and online communities really seen the value of consult investigation. i think at

this point, if you want using open source evidence to understand what's happening in ukraine, then you don't really understand you aren't really doing the most that you can understand. the conflict isn't the biggest problem for people like you who deal in evidence and proof that facts too often negated by beliefs. you take donald trump's claim, for instance, that job and stole his election. not a single fact to prove that, but tens of millions of americans believe that facts of the kind that you offer minute li research, but exact names, dates, locations attached. there are devalued currency they. if people don't accept them, it depends how you want to use that evidence. one reason why we're focusing on justice and accountability is because, you know, it's one sense. a course of law is the best place you can present this evidence, especially when the other side is preventing this information and kind of alternative facts. but on the other side, you have this kind of community growing up and developing on line who are kind of

flea goes in this information. but it's not because the people join those communities want this information. they see themselves truth seekers against the mainstream orthodoxy. and often a big motivating factor for those people to find those communities is a distrust in traditional sources of a 40 b. they governments or be a medical profession. alls in the sense of covert and often that comes from a sense of betrayal. now if you look at, for example, the kind of accounts of actual community that's formed around temper weapon use and syria, for example, where they think all the chemical weapon attacks are fakes. and the west is just trying to find an excuse to invite by syria, a lot of them psych, the invasion of iraq in 2003 is a kind of key moment in their understanding of how the world works. and i think in a sense, you have this kind of traumatic mall injury happening, where they're so offended morally by what happened. they see the entire world through that lens. and that means the us in the west always has to be the bad guy. and whoever opposes them has to be the good guy. and you see this pattern repeated

time and time again, and whole range of different fields and subjects. you know, if you look at corona virus and conspiracy fear phase around that. again, this is the prove to distrust and government program, or it might be a distrust in medical professionals. and that's because often they usually, you know, the individuals have had some moral injury or trauma. because of that, i think what the internet allows us to do is find like minded people. we've effectively kind of reinforced that trauma at moral injury and create media ecosystems where you can feel that you are actually a true seeker, you possibly community that's happening in impact, but really you'll be giving a false sense of empowerment. and really what we're trying to do with banning show people actually you can have a positive impact. even if you do feel that, you know, the government isn't telling you the truth. there's a way to find that truth and it's far more effective and just finding people who will just kind of tell you what you want to believe and just think you are powerful

because you're upsetting other people on the internet. all right, it's, we could have gone on much longer. thanks very much for being on conflicts and thank you for your time. thank you. with

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ah, ah ah, this is dw news live from berlin, a setback for russia, and it's war and ukraine. moscow concerns its troops all withdrawing from the key city of hassan. so what does this mean for the future of the conflict? also on the program, us president joe biden praises his policy is strong showing. and tuesday is that mid term elect.