Satellite images have revealed 210 Russian re-education and military training camps where children kidnapped from Ukraine have been transferred since 2022, according to a Yale University laboratory that undertook the task of locating these facilities.
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As the laboratory director told AFP, the study was conducted at the request of the U.S. State Department that year. The Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) was called upon to estimate the number of children forcibly transferred by Russian authorities and assess the scope of the phenomenon, explained Nathaniel Raymond, who was in Stockholm on Monday for a seminar at the Swedish Parliament dedicated to this issue.
Initially, he had considered such a project almost impossible to accomplish.
Betrayed by selfies – “They forgot to disable their phone’s location tracking”
“How can we find children who are hidden and protected by Russian security services? In a kidnapping case where we only have the internet and satellite images?” he wondered. The solution emerged thanks to a mistake made by the Russians: Selfies taken by local Russian officials with children from Ukraine.
“Local officials, seeking to gain favor with the Kremlin, were taking photos of themselves with the children inside buses,” says Raymond.
“The funniest part of this story,” he recounts, “is that they had forgotten to disable their phone’s location tracking.”
“So we were able to extract the latitude and longitude coordinates of these officials’ positions and then saw in the photos that we could identify the devices, including their Apple Watches. We started searching,” he explains.
The information is shared with Ukrainian authorities.
Since then, by analyzing other available data, including official photographs published by Russian authorities, the HRL was able to identify 210 re-education and military camps throughout Russia where some of the children from Ukraine are being held.
The laboratory estimates their total number at 36,000. After the 2023 International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, Russian authorities stopped publishing this type of information online: “They’re starting to clean up the crime scene, moving the children.”
The fate of these children must be an absolute priority in current negotiations, Raymond concludes.
