The keyboard warriors on Ukraine’s digital front line

A few days ago, I received a message from a journalist friend. “In transit… just landing in Dublin,” he wrote, explaining that he was flying from Austria to North America. I felt a wave of relief. 

Under normal circumstances, Christo Grozev’s latest transatlantic journey would have been unremarkable. Since the Bulgarian-born Grozev works for investigative website Bellingcat, he often criss-crosses the globe for research. 

But these are not normal times. During the past year, Grozev and his colleagues have repeatedly exposed dark events in Ukraine and Russia using a digital-sleuthing technique called open-source intelligence analysis (Osint). That prompted Vladimir Putin’s regime to put Grozev, a 53-year-old computer nerd with a keen sense of humour, on a “most-wanted” list.

This month Grozev learnt that Russian assassins were actively chasing him in his home base of Vienna with the help of local collaborators. “Austrian authorities are of the opinion that I am not safe [there],” he told me. 

“My personal data has been accessed by a now ex-officer of [the] Austrian security service at the behest of Russian intelligence,” he went on. So, as his friends held their breath, Grozev fled to the safety of North America. 

Putin has put Grozev, a 53-year-old computer nerd with a keen sense of humour, on a ‘most-wanted’ list

As stories go, this is just one tiny thread in the ever-expanding tapestry of horror, fear and sacrifice created by Russia’s unprovoked invasion. But it is a potent reminder of the extraordinary courage that some journalists are displaying in their quest to expose the truth of Russia’s brutal war, both in Ukraine (where many reporters have been killed), Russia itself and its wider orbit (where opposition media have been jailed, silenced or exiled).

The fact that a Russian network of spies and assassins is operating in Austria should also be a sobering reminder — if we needed one — of Putin’s reach. European governments are trying to counter this: Austria expelled some Russian diplomats last week, and spies were reportedly detained elsewhere in Europe. But it is still far too little, too late. 

Grozev’s story also shows something more optimistic: one overlooked feature of the Ukrainian war is that it has accelerated the cause of forensic digital journalism in an extraordinary way. The reason Grozev is on the Kremlin’s blacklist is because Osint is creating once-unimaginable levels of transparency. Unsurprisingly, Putin’s henchmen hate this.

The technique, which has evolved dramatically during the past decade, essentially uses data scraped from open sources on the internet. The research methods are usually published in order to enable them to be verified externally. 

Eliot Higgins, a British investigative journalist, created the Bellingcat group in 2014 and it first shot to prominence in relation to the Syrian war. Higgins’s platform and others now use this open-source scraping extensively in relation to events in Russia and Ukraine. 

Last October, Bellingcat revealed the identities of the remote Russian missile programming team that is killing Ukrainians from the safety of its offices in Moscow. In line with Osint ideals, Grozev explained that he had identified the unit by cross-checking databases on food deliveries, cell phones, Russian army records and geolocated photographs.

More startling still, in 2020 Grozev identified the assassins who tried to kill Alexei Navalny, the now-imprisoned Russian opposition figure. This detective work can be watched, as it unfolded, in the 2022 documentary Navalny, which features a startling scene where Navalny directly confronts one of his would-be assassins on their cell phone. 

These efforts have inspired hordes of other journalists and citizen activists to attempt similar sleuthing. Most notably, local Osint teams in Ukraine are mining data gathered from cell phones, drones and many other sources. The result is a conflict that is arguably the most transparent in history.

Tragically, the scrutiny has not stopped Putin’s abuses of power. And Grozev, like many Russian opposition activists and Ukrainians, frets that there has long been “a reluctance in the west to be courageous” in standing up to Moscow. “That’s slowly changing now, after the war started… but too late,” he told me.

Grozev himself is not giving up this cyber fight, or his belief that digital investigation can “make a difference”. Don’t you have any regrets at getting involved in this? I asked.

He firmly shook his head. “We cannot afford to be scared of Putin, or else he wins.” 

Follow Gillian on Twitter @gilliantett and email her at [email protected]

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