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Ep. 34: Ukraine’s mass graves have stories to tell

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Mass graves offend something deep in the human conscience. I think it
is because they fly in the face of our instinct to honor the dead.

Years ago, I wrote a book about a war crimes trial in Rwanda and I always assumed mass
graves were the work of perpetrators, a ham-handed effort to cover up unspeakable crimes.
But in Ukraine, that’s only half the story.

MYKHAILYNA SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: In Bucha we have a different kind of mass graves.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska, the deputy mayor of Bucha, a leafy

bedroom community just 15 miles from Kiev. And she says that in many of the Russian
occupied cities in Ukraine, local people dug the mass graves themselves — to prevent disease
or to stop stray dogs from desecrating the bodies.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: The biggest mass grave near St Andrew church

TEMPLE-RASTON: Church of St. Andrew, in the center of Bucha. That mass grave was the work
of municipal and hospital employees. Bucha was still under Russian occupation when they
began to dig.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: Russians allow them to do temporary cemetery, so they digged a big

trench and put like, they are saying… about 67 bodies.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Eventually there would be hundreds of bodies, which means someone has to
put a name to a face, and then a body. And it is a huge logistical challenge.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: You have to bury people even without the documentation. And when you
did it without the documents, you have to dig them out.

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TEMPLE-RASTON: You have to exhume a neighbor, in order to identify them. In a sense, Bucha’s
dead were only put in the ground for safe-keeping – and to preserve evidence.

And then there is the second kind of mass grave, the kind that Ukrainians actually stumble
upon unexpectedly, in the forest or on the outskirts of town. Those mass graves are crime
scenes.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: There was mass graves where Russians executed people, digged the
holes in the graves…and hid them.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Human Rights Watch researchers, who traveled to Bucha just days after
Russian forces withdrew, found evidence of summary executions, signs of torture, indications of
forced disappearances — all of which constitute war crimes and potential crimes against
humanity.

Which for the deputy mayor of Bucha is a little surreal.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: Nobody in Bucha expected, uh, to become a place of tragedy. A Bucha

tragedy.

TEMPLE-RASTON: No one would have expected their beautiful little city to be the victim of war
crimes.

(THEME MUSIC)

TEMPLE-RASTON: I’m Dina Temple-Raston, and this is Click Here, a podcast about all things
cyber and intelligence.

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Today, one town’s effort to identify hundreds of its citizens and give them a proper burial and
how a deputy mayor is bringing order to a post-apocalyptic scene. As forensic pathologists,
ballistics experts, and international authorities descend on the city of Bucha, Mykhailyna
Skoryk-Shkarivska is giving them a place to start.

TEMPLE-RASTON: What do you think justice will look like?

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA:: Putin in jail — and every killer in every case. Very simple.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Putin in jail. And every killer in every case. She says, very simple. But
actually…not so simple.

Stay with us.

[BREAK]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Can you help me pronounce your name?

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: Officially, I'm Mykhailyan Skoryk-Shkarivska, but for my foreign friends I

usually ask to call me Mykha. I think it is easier, no?

TEMPLE-RASTON: (laughs) Much easier. Thank you. Mykha.

Before the war, Mykha worked for the city of Bucha. She was in charge of digital innovation,
which sounds like a sexy tech job, but is more mundane than that. She was getting city data on
computers or looking for ways to automate tax collection or parking tickets.

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Life as she had known it changed on a Thursday, announced by black smoke. Mika’s first
glimpse of what was to come was out near the airport. She was driving to get some gas in her
car when she saw Russian aircraft flying low. The Ukrainian helicopters parked on the tarmac
were already on fire.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: I saw helicopters. I heard, um, heavy battles very close.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That was the starting gun, and things got worse from there.

PBS: Global outrage grew today as more horrific revelations surfaced from Bucha, Ukraine…
ABC: …who describe brutal killings carried out by Russian forces…
CBS: …forces left behind a, quote, ‘scene from a horror movie’ as they withdrew from areas
near Kyiv…

TEMPLE-RASTON: To keep track of hundreds of DNA samples, establish cause of death, and
gather evidence of possible war crimes someone has to organize millions of little digital clues.
And it fell to Mykha, one-time digital innovator for Bucha, to build a system to modernize
something she’d never expected to modernize: A way to account for the dead.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: Our system, uh, was not able to manage such a big amount of requests
looking for the bodies or looking for the disappeared people and of course to recognize the
corpses.

(MUSIC)

TEMPLE-RASTON: The Russians entered Bucha on March 3. And when Mykha returned in mid
April, it was to an empty city. There were no cars on the road. No people in the streets. Videos
posted on social media began to tell the story.

(VIDEO FROM EARLY APRIL)

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TEMPLE-RASTON: This is one post from early April. People are unwittingly documenting crimes,
recording the scene through the windshield of a car. There’s a deserted street, burnt out
vehicles. Buildings seemingly frozen in mid-collapse.

And bodies everywhere: Some appeared to be shot off bicycles, others were still clutching
shopping bags, all shrouded in the silence of a city still in shock.

By the time Mykha returned, and satellite communications and electricity had resumed, she
had already mapped out what she would do next.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: We asked our colleagues to provide us some smartphones and one iPad.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Smartphones and an iPad were all she needed to start collecting data on the
dead.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: We had lots of imprisoned people. We had lots of killed people.

TEMPLE-RASTON: They had police databases, missing persons reports, photographs of the
disappeared. The problem was, all these little clues were siloed. There was no central
repository, no single database to search.

Mykha came to find out that even Ukraine’s morgues were mostly pen and paper operations.
Digitizing their records was something they had always intended to do – but never got around
to. Mykha decided it was time to change all that.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: We received data from five morgues and we created the primary
database.

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TEMPLE-RASTON: The primary database ingested everything the five morgues in and around
Bucha knew about the 400 bodies they had examined but didn’t have room to keep. Not just
sex, and approximate age, and hair color, but a collection of details that might help families
find their loved ones: tattoos, birthmarks, scars.

Mykha then helped families to use that information to cross reference special Telegram
channels and police databases that laid out who went into which mass grave and where. So
when families arrived with details about their missing relatives, Mykha knew exactly where to
look.

Her system allows families to honor the dead, to hold real funerals and proper burials. But
knowing precisely what happened to each of these people,– before they came to the mass
graves of Bucha — Mykha says it will take a while.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: I think that in one year in two year, maybe three years’ time, we will
have not only the names and the dates from the morgue, but also the results of the
investigations.

TEMPLE-RASTON: It will be a painstaking forensic endeavor that will unfold in slow, incremental
steps.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: So it's a big tragedy for Ukrainian families to have this situation.

TEMPLE-RASTON: But, the database helps anchor things. It offers some semblance of order,
and closure.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: We are still, uh, helping families to recognize their killed relatives.

(MUSIC)

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TEMPLE-RASTON: When we come back, knitting millions of digital clues together to hold the
guilty accountable.

STEPHEN RAPP: There's no question that the digital means and satellite imagery — often with
other documentary information or witness testimony — really, I think, makes a number of these
situations much, much easier to prove.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Stay with us.

(MUSIC)

[BREAK]

RAPP: Building a war crimes case is quite different than building a normal violent crime case.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s Ambassador Stephen Rapp. I first met him nearly twenty years ago
when he was the chief prosecutor of a Rwandan war crimes trial. In the intervening years he’s
been involved in war crimes prosecutions in Sierra Leone and Syria, and then became an
Ambassador-at-Large focused on war crimes at the State Department. So he is intimately
familiar with what it takes to build these kinds of cases.

RAPP: Most violent crimes may involve some planning, but they are over and done with in a few
minutes. And you can control the crime scene and you can take advantage of video cameras…

TEMPLE-RASTON: In Bucha, crimes were committed over 32 days. All over the city.

And while social media posts, and CCTV, and secret iphone videos recorded by witnesses can all
help connect perpetrators to the crime, finding those witnesses in a city of 30,000 — at a time

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of war — so they can testify at a trial many years later…only begins to explain why trials for war
crimes are so complicated.

Rapp says the bodies themselves provide clues as to what happened.

RAPP: You have mass graves, bodies left on the street for three or four weeks with hands tied
behind their back with bullets in the back of heads. Those are situations in which there are war
crimes without question.

TEMPLE-RASTON: But they can’t tell the whole story.

RAPP: But then there’s the issue of who committed those crimes? Who's really responsible?
Were they rogue units, uh, scared young soldiers who just, you know, acted out their own
impulses? Or was that part of a strategy in which the military command really looked to
intimidate the population?

TEMPLE-RASTON: Before 2014, answering those kinds of questions was nearly impossible. Then
two things happened: Surveillance went from something only governments had to becoming
open-source. And then a collective of citizen investigative journalists working for Bellingcat
found a game changing way to leverage digital information.

BELLINGCAT DOCUMENTARY TRAILER: I’d like to talk about a very new way of investigating…

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s from a documentary about Bellingcat called Truth in a Post Truth World.
The new way of investigating is all about following digital trails and leveraging information that
is just out there for the taking, if you know where to look.

TRAILER: Like a time machine, we can go back to the day of the shootdown on Google earth…

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TEMPLE-RASTON: Bellingcat has been behind a number of remarkable investigations but the
one that put it on the map was the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which just
disappeared from the radar over Ukrainian airspace in 2014. Bellingcat made clear there was a
lot to discover with just a computer, a keyboard, and the will to find the truth.

CBS NEWS: American officials believe that the Boeing triple-seven was brought down by a
surface-to-air missile…

TEMPLE-RASTON: All 298 people aboard were killed. Bellingcat began looking through social
media posts around eastern Ukraine, the area where the airplane went down. They managed to
uncover the actual video of the Russian BUK surface-to-air missile launcher not just coming into
Ukraine shortly before the crash…

(SOUND OF LAUNCHER VIDEO)

TEMPLE-RASTON: …but actually heading back to Russia the very next day carrying just three
missiles instead of four…

(SECOND LAUNCHER VIDEO)

TEMPLE-RASTON: Then Dutch investigators were able to find intercepted calls from that same
period. And what they heard was confusion after rebels realized they may have just downed a
commercial plane, arguments about how to whisk the missile launcher back to Russia. In the
end, four men — three Russians and a Ukrainian — were charged for the murder of all 298
people, in absentia.

The story would have had a satisfying ending but for one thing – eight years later, there’s still
no verdict in the case.

RAPP: And so it can take a very long time.

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(MUSIC)

TEMPLE-RASTON: Ambassador Rapp says war crimes are really committed by organizations,
not individuals.

RAPP: And then you have to figure out how to attribute criminal responsibility across that
organization and prove the responsibility of people who really made the crime happen.

TEMPLE-RASTON: People up the chain. People like Russian president Vladimir Putin. People who
ordered the bombardment of civilian targets in Ukraine. People who told soldiers to show “no
mercy” to the residents of occupied cities.

ANDRIY KOSTIN: Of course, it's not an easy way to prove this system of command responsibility
from the highest level.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Andriy Kostin, from a recent
appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation.

KOSTIN: We know who is responsible for it. Because the crime of aggression is the mother of all
of these crimes: of war crimes, genocide, because without aggression, there will be no other
war crimes. And for that reason, for the crime of aggression, the highest political and military
leadership should be prosecuted and should be punished.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Ambassador Rapp is advising the Ukrainian government on how it might

organize those trials. He says they need to be structured and systematic to bring speedier
justice.

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In the meantime, he says Putin isn’t doing himself any favors. By not having court martials or
investigations when news of fresh atrocities surface, he makes it easier to follow them up the
chain.

RAPP: Indeed, Putin giving awards to at least one of the major units involved, there is sort of
heroes of the — and defenders of the — fatherland. You know that you can, in fact, impute
responsibility all the way up to him, potentially.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Which is what Mykha wants: Putin behind bars. She says everyone who might
have been responsible for what happened in Bucha needs to be held to account. In the
meantime, it is hard to shake the feeling that Bucha is prelude. Last week, Putin announced
that he was calling up some 300,000 military reservists to join the fight. And he’s preparing to
declare that some enclaves in eastern and southern Ukraine are now part of Russia.

Mykha, for her part, says while she’s worried about what Putin might do next, her life in Bucha
has to go on. So she’s making those accommodations you have to make when you’re at war.

She carries her smartphone everywhere now because Bucha has instituted a new missile
warning system. It sounds like one of those amber alerts we get on our phones here.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: So that's the signal that you should hide from another possible attack.
My little son, he's seven years old. He's all the time talking about killing Putin about, uh,
Russians as enemies.

TEMPLE-RASTON: He’s back in school but…

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: Sometimes he has to spend time in the basement because of rocket

attack warning…

TEMPLE-RASTON: Which, she said, is a new reality she’s having to get used to.

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SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: The position that every minute you have to stop, what are you doing and
hide from the air attack.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And it wears on her, and she sees its effect on her son. He builds pillow forts
to protect them both now, and has taken to singing Ukrainian patriotic songs.

Sometimes they sing them together.

(SINGING NATIONAL ANTHEM TOGETHER)

TEMPLE-RASTON: Neither the glory nor the will of Ukraine has died yet, they sing. We will give body
and soul for our freedom.

(SINGING)

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Click Here.

(B SEGMENT MUSIC)

TEMPLE-RASTON: Cybersecurity and high-stakes chess have a lot in common. In both case you
have to outsmart an opponent, leverage weakness in a strategic way, and think two steps
ahead of the person on the other side.

So we couldn’t help but notice a recent dust up in the world of elite chess. It involved a five-time
world chess champion, a cocky American teenager, and allegations of cheating.

Our producer Will Jarvis has the story.

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WILL JARVIS: So, there are these things called chess engines. They’re computer programs that
analyze a chess game and then generate the strongest possible moves. They can help players
develop better openings or learn how to exploit their opponents' weaknesses.

The most powerful of the publicly available chess engines is a program called Stockfish.

STOCKFISH ROBOT: Chess friends, have you ever wondered if Stockfish is a boy or girl. I am
neither boy nor girl. I am a robot with some consciousness…

JARVIS: That’s its voice on YouTube. And these engines are built not just to beat humans at
chess, but actually destroy them.

SUSAN POLGAR: I wouldn’t quite say that it’s like a car driving, you know, compared to a
person running. But it’s not that far off.

JARVIS: That’s grandmaster Susan Polgar, a former world champion.

And we were talking about chess engines because of this crazy thing that happened earlier this
month, at a tournament in St. Louis: the Sinquefield Cup

LIVE STREAM: A3, G3, Bishop G2…

JARVIS: Let me set the scene: Magnus Carlsen, 31, and American Hans Niemann who is just 19,
were facing off. Magnus Carlsen is the biggest name in chess since Bobby Fisher.
The kind of guy who actually has a chess engine modeled after his game. It’s called Sesse.

Niemann, for his part, looks 19. Shaggy hair and super confident. The game begins.

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LIVE STREAM: With the move Knight C3. Not Catalans and an invitation, let’s dance…

JARVIS: Eventually, everyone is surprised to see the reigning world champion down to just his
king and a bishop. Magnus keeps staring at the board. Seeing no way out, he resigns.

LIVE STREAM: there. We have it. Handshake. Wow. Whatever result, what a result guys. Truly.
Wow.

JARVIS: That’s what passes for gobsmacked in the chess world. And shortly after, Magnus quit
the whole tournament. This week, he outright accused Hans of cheating, though he doesn’t say
how.

Truth be told, tongues have been wagging ever since the upset. Some said the young American
somehow knew Magnus’ opening moves. Others said Hans was cheating – using a chess engine.

Which is what prompted my call to grandmaster Polgar. She was amazed by how out of control
it all got.

(MUSIC)

POLGAR: you know, it just became a snowball rolling, you know, (laughs).

MONTAGE: Welcome to what is most likely the biggest chess scandal in history.
MONTAGE: Does body language prove that Hans Neman cheated to beat the reigning chess
champion?
MONTAGE: There’s nothing like nothing is proven, but there is a lot of suspicion. There is a lot of
suspicion…

JARVIS: The next day, the tournament had some pretty tight security measures.

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LIVE STREAM: As we see Hans getting nicely wanded…

JARVIS: This guard gave him more than the once-over. It was more like a second screening from
the TSA. Of course the one thing that was missing from all of this was any evidence that Hans
Niemann…actually cheated.

I mean how would you do that if you are sitting across from your opponent?

POLGAR: Yeah, it sadly does happen from time to time.

JARVIS: Like back in 2010, at the Chess Olympiad. In that case it was a three man operation:
The first guy was watching the tournament somewhere else, plugging moves into a chess
engine. The second guy was in the room getting the engine’s suggested moves.

POLGAR: And then that person would signal to the actual player.

JARVIS: The actual player, the third guy. He was able to determine the chess engine suggested
move by where in the room the second guy was standing.

But…I wanted to talk to someone with a little more firsthand chess-cheating knowledge. So I
went to this guy.

JAMES STANLEY: I’d go with ‘amateur.’ I definitely wouldn’t call myself a good chess player.

JARVIS: That’s James Stanley.

STANLEY: I live in the United Kingdom and I’m a computer programmer.

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JARVIS: He also runs a blog. And about a month before the scandal broke at the Sinquefield
Cup, James laid out how someone might be able to cheat at in-person chess — not with three
people but solo.

(MUSIC)

JARVIS: His story starts with a pub, a few pints, and his chess board.
James sits down to play a friend. But…

STANLEY: There's a computer in my pocket. The computer is running Stockfish.

JARVIS: Yes, that Stockfish, the chess engine.

STANLEY: Connected to the computer is some cables that run down my trouser legs. So there’s
a hole in the inside of my cargo pocket. The cables run through the hole, down the trouser legs,
into these 3D-printed inserts that go in my shoes.

JARVIS: Stay with me here. Cables running into inserts in his shoes. Those inserts have buttons
for his toes — buttons that would essentially allow him to tap the opponents’ chess moves –
morse code style – and send them to the computer loaded up with Stockfish in his pocket.

STANLEY:. Stock fish would work out what response it wants to play, and the computer would
then send the vibrations to my feet down the cables.

JARVIS: He interprets the vibrations, plays the suggested move…

STANLEY: And then we just repeat every turn.

JARVIS: James calls it Sockfish. Sock…like, for your feet.

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(MUSIC)

JARVIS: His friend, he claims, had no idea.

STANLEY: After I played my friend in the pub, I told him I was planning to use the shoes to find
a player who’s plausibly, good enough to win the world championship, have him use the shoes,
win the world championship, win the money. But as a joke, obviously. So it’s quite funny to me
that there’s a controversy at the Sinquefield cup where someone is accused of having cheated.

JARVIS: James says there’s outside interest in his invention. But, like a great chess player — or,
dare I say it, cybersecurity professional — he’s thinking a few steps ahead.
STANLEY: One person emailed me trying to buy the shoes. I worked out that there isn’t a price
that would be worth me selling them. And that would also be worth paying by someone who
isn’t planning to use it to defraud a major tournament. So I can’t sell them.

(MUSIC)

JARVIS: Hans Niemann, by the way, would finish sixth in the Sinquefield Cup.

I’m Will Jarvis and this is Click Here.

(HEADLINES MUSIC)

TEMPLE-RASTON: And here are the big cyber and intelligence headlines from the past week.

The cybersecurity firm CheckPoint has discovered a seven-year-old campaign using

Android-based malware targeting the Uyghur community inside and outside of China. They said
the scale and persistence of the campaign is remarkable. A spyware loaded on the phone called
MobileOrder was able to do call and surround recording — real-time geolocation — and even
had the ability to place calls and send SMS messages from the victim’s phone.

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CheckPoint said Scarlet Mimic is thought to be behind the campaign. The group hasn’t been
directly linked to the Chinese government, but its motivations appear to overlap with Beijing’s.

Officials in Iran appear to be limiting access to mobile networks and communication platforms
like Instagram and WhatsApp as protests continue over the alleged police killing of a
22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini.

Several internet access watchdogs reported nationwide outages for people using MCI, Iran’s
leading mobile operator, and spotty coverage among other smaller carriers. There is also a ban
on Instagram and WhatsApp. The director of NetBlocks, Alp Toker, which tracks this sort of
thing, told The Record that they’d seen a rapid escalation of internet restrictions as unrest grew
over the past week in the wake of Amini’s death. She is alleged to have died at the hands of
police after they arrested her for not wearing her headscarf properly.

And finally The U.S. Department of Treasury said it is carving out an exemption from its Iran
sanctions regime for technology companies providing internet access during the protests.

The sanctions issued by the U.S. government against Iran make it difficult for U.S. businesses to
operate in the country. But in the wake of Iran’s decision to pull the plug on part of its network,
the Treasury Department issued a new license allowing technology companies to offer the
iranian people more options.

ALIMARDANI: It definitely came too late, but obviously better late than never.

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TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Mahsa Alimardani, a senior Iran Researcher at Article 19, a freedom of
expression group.

ALIMARDANI: It will have some positive impact obviously, but I can't deny that the harm has
been done, um, in the past few years, by the fact that this license was not given.

TEMPLE-RASTON: She says leaders of the regime used the sanctions as cover to build a network
that they control and that’s showing up in the latest protests as they beef up surveillance.

(CREDITS MUSIC)

TEMPLE-RASTON: Click Here is a production of The Record by Recorded Future. I’m Dina
Temple-Raston, your host, writer and executive producer.

Sean Powers is our senior producer and marketing director, and Will Jarvis is our producer and
helps with writing. Karen Duffin and Lu Olkowski are our editors. Darren Ankrom is our fact
checker. Ben Levingston composes our theme, and Kendra Hanna is our intern.

And we want to hear from you. Please leave us a review and rating wherever you get your
podcasts, and connect with us by email: Click Here [at] Recorded Future [dot] com or on our
website at ClickHereshow [dot] com.

We’ll be back on Tuesday..

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