We need to know where the Chechen security services have operated if we want to make reliable assessments of the scale and significance of their activities. Yet the question of where is much harder to answer than it often appears. In this week’s newsletter, I want to reflect on some of the challenges that hinder efforts to track security service operations on the ground. Mitigating these challenges is, after all, important if I want to add a robust database of their Chechen activity in Ukraine in the early stages of the war to the Russian Security Research Lab (RSRL).
Here’s what you can expect this week:
- The importance of precision
- Why geolocation is so difficult
- The potential for finding a satisfactory solution
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The importance of precision
Read any article, journalist or academic, on the Chechen security services from the last few years and you’ll probably find mention of their involvement in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Perhaps the author will allude to the type of activities they’ve been involved in and the charges that they are further from the fighting than they claim. Then the author may move to deeper observations on what it all means or the Chechen regime’s motives in supporting the war.
Look a little closer, however, and you might notice another common feature to articles: They rarely specify exactly where the security services have operated, and when. Often, the geographic level is national: you’ll learn that they’re in Ukraine (an obviously small place) and nothing more. Sometimes, you might discover that they’re active in a general locale: Donetsk Oblast, perhaps, or maybe Mariupol. But if you wanted to know whether a specific unit was in a specific place at a specific time, most of the time you’ll be frustrated. Indeed, you’ll be lucky if you find even one of those pieces of information.
Yet this degree of specificity matters – and not just for making sure that analytic castles aren’t built on sand. Take, for example, the claims that Chechen forces were involved in the Bucha massacre in March 2022. Accountability hinges on our ability to prove exactly where the Chechen security services were operating at that time. And, while we might never be able to prove involvement from open sources, we might be able to substantially contribute to the evidence base.
Why geolocation is so difficult
Part of the reason that so many articles are frustratingly vague on the details lies with the authors’ goals. A degree of abstraction is often necessary to tell a meaningful story. If you want to talk about the Bucha massacre, you can take the analysis all the way down to Yablunska Street, where most of the killing happened. But if you want to talk about how Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov is using the war to strengthen his regime, that level of granularity is misplaced. So the absence of details is not always a failing on the part of the author. However, another reason that authors are frequently light on details is that such details are hard to come by – and it’s easier to gloss over knowledge gaps than admit them. The challenges of geolocation can be grouped into three categories: availability, ability, and resources.
Take availability first: Information has to be in the public domain for it to be verified. Or, put another way, there has to be something in a report or social media post that can actually be cross-referenced. In the early days of the war, Kadyrov claimed to visit Chechen troops first in Hostomel, near Kyiv, and then in Mariupol. Yet the only “proof” provided were videos showing Kadyrov being briefed by commanders in bunkers. There is no way of proving or disproving the specific claim because there is no locational information in those videos to verify. Even Ukrainian intelligence stumbled on this one: They cited the fact that his cellphone didn’t ping a Ukrainian tower as proof he wasn’t there – but this could also mean he has a basic understanding of operational security. In such cases, we can only make assessments on the balance of probabilities – reasonable, but not definitive.
Then there is ability: Geolocation is a skill, and it takes time to develop and hone. It requires combining multiple sources of information and different techniques and tools. Someone whose whole job is digital verification will, all things considered, be much better at geolocation that someone who only needs to do it once or twice a year. It’s an obvious point, but just because something can be done doesn’t mean that it’s easy or anyone can do it.
Finally, and not entirely separately, there is the question of resources. The most important resource is time: It takes a lot of it to geolocate just one video. It probably took me two to three hours to definitively confirm that one video was shot in Borodianka, for example. Unless you’re lucky, you might need to go through countless street views and pictures and wander down literal dead ends in pursuit of the location you’re looking for. Geolocation is always easier if you have a team or community engaged in the task. This loops back to the question of availability, because some places will be much better documented than others: It will always be easier to find something in Kyiv than in Borodianka. But access to other resources might also help: some locational data might be held in commercial databases.
The potential for finding a satisfactory solution
One of my goals is to produce a detailed dataset tracking Chechen security service involvement in Ukraine across the early days of the war. This aspires to provide the level of granularity that is currently missing from other sources, allowing us to say exactly which units and people were operating where at what time. The dataset will ultimately be uploaded as a resource for everyone to use in the RSRL.
To what degree is this goal achievable? I’m sceptical, based on the work I’ve done so far, that it’ll ever be possible to find the smoking gun and prove definitively that Chechen units were in Bucha in March 2022 – at least from open sources. This points to a limitation that will inevitably plague this and every dataset: There will always be gaps and unanswerable questions.
Yet I’m also confident that the dataset will produce a much more complete picture than we currently have. It is already possible, from the information gathered, to answer questions about when a particular commander or unit is first documented in an area or to find evidence to support claims about the nature of activities. It’s possible to identify windows of opportunity or disprove negatives, such as any effort to pretend that the Chechen security services were nowhere near Bucha at the time. Equally important, the gaps in our knowledge become much more transparent. By arranging all the pieces of the puzzle that are currently available, we can more easily see which are missing. And acknowledging what we don’t know or can’t yet provide necessarily precedes any efforts to rectify the issue.
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