In a village in the Chernihiv region of northern Ukraine, activists documenting evidence of potential war crimes in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year interviewed a witness whose relative went missing during the early days of the war. The relative’s phone had ended up in the hands of the Russian military, who forgot to deactivate the owner’s Google Photos account.
Russian soldiers then used the phone to take photos of their weapons and equipment, the belongings of Ukrainian civilians that had likely been stolen, and Russian military positions in the area. These were then uploaded to the phone owner’s cloud storage, allowing the Ukrainian war crimes trackers to access them.
