Bellingcat’s path to tracking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – 60 Minutes

The investigation of alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine is the most significant project in on the web knowledge detective group Bellingcat’s limited profession. Eliot Higgins commenced Bellingcat in 2014. 

“I was not someone with a experienced background. I was accomplishing this simply as a pastime,” Higgins informed Scott Pelley for a report this 7 days on 60 Minutes. “I was working for a enterprise that housed refugees in the U.K. I then labored for a firm that manufactured pipes. And then a firm that produced lingerie. So, I experienced a huge vary of experience but absolutely nothing that was right linked to conflict.”

On his off-hours, the conflict in Syria fascinated Higgins—especially how social media was exposing atrocities there. But his lookup for the real truth began with a fairytale. 

“Bellingcat comes from the name of a fable, Belling the Cat. And it’s about a team of mice who are pretty fearful of a quite huge cat,” Higgins stated. “So, they have a meeting, and they make your mind up to set a bell on the cat’s neck. But then they notice that no one understands how to do it, and no 1 is ready to volunteer to do it. So, what we’re training people to do is bell the cat.”

Higgins belled his initially predator in 2014, when Russia went to war in eastern Ukraine. Malaysian Airways Flight 17 was high about Ukraine on its way to Asia when a missile brought it down. 298 ended up killed. Every person denied responsibility, but Higgins noticed, in the hours prior to the shootdown, there had been numerous social media posts from bystanders who saw a missile launcher on a flatbed trailer touring in japanese Ukraine.

“We started discovering social media posts of individuals who had viewed the missile launcher getting transported,” Higgins reported. “And we also experienced social media posts from folks who claimed there is a rocket that’s just been shot up from this course. And we could really use their social media profiles to determine out the place they lived.”

Other posts were being published by Russian troopers homesick for relatives. Higgins found clues in every image—billboards, buildings, street signs—that allow him resolve the area and time of each and every submit. When he organized all of the social media into a timeline, he could operate the convoy backward to its starting up issue. 

“Using all those people video clips we were ready to trace it all the way back to the army brigade it came from, the 53rd Air Protection Brigade,” Higgins claimed. “In Russia. And we applied their social media profiles, the troopers, their household associates and everybody all around them to reconstruct basically their network on-line which meant we could get their names, their ranks, their photos, see who was in that convoy and who traveled to the border. So that authorized us to show that Russia offered the missile launcher that shot down MH-17.”

The Dutch governing administration would later indict 4 adult males, three Russians and a Ukrainian, for 298 counts of murder, basing some of its investigation on Bellingcat’s get the job done. 

Following Bellingcat printed its findings, Russia imposed a new law.

“The Russian authorities passed a unique legislation banning troopers from carrying– mobile gadgets for the duration of hostilities, which is dubbed in Russia ‘the Bellingcat legislation.'” Christo Grozev stated.

Grozev is govt director of Bellingcat, foremost its 30 entire-time scientists. His individual concentrate has been on Russian political assassinations. 

“What we have identified out is that none of these crimes could have been perpetrated devoid of Vladimir Putin staying– in the know, and not only conscious but approving of all of these crimes,” Grozev stated. “So, in a nutshell, what we located out was that Putin is working an industrial-scale assassination program on his own people today.”

Bellingcat’s next major venture, the Russian assassination software, commenced in 2018 right after a Russian defector and his daughter, living in Britain, were being poisoned with Novichok, a armed forces-quality nerve agent. The British had passport shots and bogus names of two suspects, but almost nothing else. Grozev understood that Russia’s government and commercial data are for sale on an online black sector. So, with the bogus names, he bought the suspect’s passport records. 

The numbers on the two passports ended up equivalent, apart from for the very last digit. Grozev said that meant the passports ended up evidently designed a single after the other.

Suspicious, Grozev started off details mining. Based mostly on official documents, it seemed as however each males were born at the age of 32. And there was an uncommon stamp on the passport documents.

“There was a major black stamp in the corner of their file which said, ‘Do not supply information and facts on this man or woman. In situation of a question, get in touch with this range,'” Grozev stated. “And confident enough, we termed that number, and it was the [Russian] Ministry of Protection.”

When the Ministry of Defense answered, Grozev knew the would-be assassins had been armed forces intelligence brokers. To match their faces to their true identities, he spent months combing yearbooks and photos from Russian armed service academies.

“The finish final result was that we have been equipped not only to discover the actual identities and the affiliation to the armed forces intelligence,” Grozev said. “We ended up equipped to uncover a 3rd and a fourth member of the exact eliminate team that the British did not even know about.”

More than months, Grozev uncovered a community of Russian hitmen, functioning all over Europe, armed with nerve agent from a governing administration lab. Afterwards, he uncovered a different community, soon after getting airline manifests and getting some of the assassins’ journey overlapped the marketing campaign stops of Alexei Navalny, the major political opponent of Vladimir Putin. 

“And we observed a total of 66 overlaps, way further than any statistical possibility for a coincidence,” Grozev mentioned. “They’d been shadowing him for four a long time. They started off shadowing him the moment he announced his presidential aspirations in 2017. Apparently currently being on standby for a probable assassination anytime they would get the sign.”

A signal arrived in 2020. On a marketing campaign vacation, Navalny was poisoned with that same nerve agent. He recovered in a German medical center, returned to oppose Putin, and is now in jail. Bellingcat’s investigation uncovered assassins also tailed other Putin opponents. 

“And we uncovered, for example, that the team that had poisoned Navalny had tailed at a minimal 12 other opposition figures, 3 of whom had been killed, in fact, poisoned,” Grozev explained.

Investigations like that are posted on Bellingcat’s web-site, which Russia blocked shortly after it invaded Ukraine. Bellingcat is a nonprofit basis which has trained a lot more than 4,000 journalists and war criminal offense investigators in its methods of geolocation, verification, and facts mining.