Last week marked the second anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The conflict has been marked by multiple reports that Russia may have committed war crimes by indiscriminately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. In the first winter of the conflict, Russia pursued a strategy that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described as “trying to freeze.” [Ukraine] It attacked the electricity infrastructure and forced the population into submission by cutting them off from heat and electricity.
Now, a new report from the Conflict Monitor, a U.S. government-backed initiative between the Yale Humanitarian Institute, the Smithsonian Cultural Relief Initiative, PlanetScape AI, and mapping software Esri, uses satellite imagery and open-source information to Provides clearer information. An image of the scale of this strategy. From October 1, 2022 to April 30, 2023, researchers discovered more than 200 incidents of damage to the nation's power infrastructure, with an estimated cost of more than $8 billion. Of his 223 cases identified in the report, researchers were able to confirm 66 of them with high confidence. This meant we were able to cross-reference damage across multiple trusted sources and data points.
“What we're seeing here is a pattern of bombings that hit frontline and non-frontline areas, and the scale of that must have had a civilian impact,” said Co-Leader of the Humanitarian Institute and Yale University Jackson School of Medicine. says Nathaniel Raymond, an instructor at Faculty of International Relations. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated at the time that attacks on Ukraine's power grid left “millions” of people without electricity across the country.
Researchers were able to discover, identify, and verify damage to power infrastructure in 17 of the country's 24 states or administrative units.
Documenting specific instances of damage to power infrastructure has been particularly difficult for researchers and investigators. The Ukrainian government had sought to limit public information about which sites were affected and which remained operational to prevent further attacks. (For this reason, the report itself avoids getting too specific about the locations analyzed or the extent of the destruction.) However, it does not allow for the collection, verification, and construction of the data needed to prove violations of international law. may become difficult.
Raymond hopes that making the methodology public will enable further research. “Having a common standard against a common data set is a prerequisite for accountability,” he says.