Satellite images showing bodies strewn across the streets of Bucha have provided a rebuttal to claims by the Russian state that Ukrainian forces placed dead people in the town in “staged provocation” after Russian forces had already withdrawn.
The corpses’ positions on the photos, taken in mid-March, match those from smartphone pictures published in early April, allowing the massacre to be precisely dated to before Russian forces evacuated the town.
The analysis of the images, published by the New York Times, is the latest example of the growing importance of satellite imagery to reporters, researchers and activists seeking to document the progression of the war in Ukraine and gather evidence of war crimes in the region. Along with cheap and accessible drone footage, the technology has revolutionised the practice of “open-source intelligence”, or OSINT, says Eliot Higgins, founder of OSINT journalism group Bellingcat.
“Syria was where everyone learned the value of satellite imagery when it came to this kind of stuff,” Higgins says. “But now, thanks to the work of companies like Planet Labs, we’re in a position where we can even task satellites a few times a month to certain locations. Lots of people are doing that at the moment, and they’re all focused on Ukraine, so what we’re getting is lots and lots of good resolution satellite imagery from all over the country.
“Often that’s accessible to people within hours. So you hear a report and, within a few hours, if you’re lucky and the clouds are good enough, you can get a nice high-resolution image of what you’re looking at.”
Many of the skills applied in documenting the Ukrainian battlefield were honed in investigations such as Bellingcat’s examination of the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 by Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014, and similar efforts documenting war crimes in the Syrian civil war. Matching an area of satellite footage with a single picture posted on social media is no mean feat, but the best OSINT investigators have developed an almost uncanny ability to find locations.
In the early days, though, researchers were limited by the satellite footage posted to Google Earth, which was often years out of date. Now, as imagery providers have got more used to custom from media and activists, they are eager to provide useful pictures.
But while satellite imagery is more widely available, and more responsive, the actual pictures have not changed. Consumer use of satellite imagery is legally capped at a resolution of 0.25 metre pixels (one-sixteenth of a square metre) regardless of the capability of the cameras in space; this has been so since 2014. “There’s better resolution imagery, we’re just not allowed to use it,” Higgins says. The world’s militaries, of course, have no such limits – as was conclusively proved in 2019 when Donald Trump tweeted out a classified image of an Iranian missile launchpad in ultra-high-res.
