Last week marked the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that has been marked by multiple reports that Russia may have committed war crimes by indiscriminately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. During the first winter of the conflict, Russia pursued a strategy that US secretary of state Antony Blinken described as trying to “freeze [Ukraine] into submission” by attacking its power infrastructure, shutting citizens off from heat and electricity.
Now, using satellite imagery and open source information, a new report from the Conflict Observatory, a US-government-backed initiative between Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, PlanetScape AI, and the mapping software Esri, offers a clearer picture of the scale of this strategy. Between October 1, 2022, and April 30, 2023, researchers found more than 200 instances of damage to the country’s power infrastructure, amounting to more than $8 billion in estimated destruction. Of the 223 instances identified in the report, researchers were able to confirm 66 of them with high confidence, meaning they were able to cross-reference the damage across multiple trustworthy sources and data points.
“What we see here is that there was a pattern of bombardment that hit front lines and non-frontline areas, at a scale that must have had civilian effect,” says Nathaniel Raymond, a coleader of the Humanitarian Research Lab and lecturer at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated at the time that attacks on Ukraine’s power grid had left “millions” of people without electricity throughout the country.
Researchers found and were able to identify and verify damage to power infrastructure in 17 of the country’s 24 oblasts, or administrative units.
Documenting specific instances of damage to power infrastructure has been particularly difficult for researchers and investigators, because the Ukrainian government has sought to limit public information about which sites have been damaged and which continue to be operational in an effort to prevent further attacks. (For this reason, the report itself avoids getting too specific about which locations it analyzed and the extent of the destruction.) But this can also make it difficult to collect, verify, and build upon the data necessary to prove violations of international law.
By making its methodology public, Raymond hopes that it will make further investigation possible. “Having common standards to a common dataset is a prerequisite for accountability,” he says.
International humanitarian law prohibits attacks on civilians or civilian infrastructure, like schools or hospitals. But Oona Hathaway, professor of international law at Yale University, says that power stations and infrastructure can present a trickier question, because it’s often difficult, if not impossible, to tell whether power is being distributed to the military or civilians (oftentimes it’s both). This can sometimes make targeting power infrastructure legitimate, says Hathaway, but combatants need to consider how something like a sustained power outage or an explosion at a power plant could impact civilians. Unleashing “dangerous forces” by, say, bombing or opening a dam could also be a war crime.
“That is a clear violation, even if part of its infrastructure might be supporting both civilian and military purposes,” says Hathaway.
Russia has not only sought to damage Ukraine’s power infrastructure through physical attacks. In October 2022, during the same time period covered by the report, hackers from Russia’s GRU military intelligence unit known as Sandworm plunged an unknown number of Ukrainian civilians into a blackout during a missile strike. It is the third time Sandworm has caused a blackout in Ukraine with a cyberattack since 2015.
While some of the attacks documented by the Conflict Observatory did indeed occur near the front lines, Raymond says that researchers found strikes as far away from the battlefield as the country’s westernmost city, Lviv. Of the strikes that Raymond and his team identified, 128 occurred in places that were not part of the conflict’s front lines at the times when they were attacked.
The report “indicates the attacks were deliberate and disproportionately harmed civilian populations, which, if true, would violate international humanitarian law and the laws of armed conflict,” says US state department spokesperson Russell Brooks. “Many of the affected areas are remote from the front lines of the war, calling into question whether the attacks served any justifiable military objective.”
Some Russian officials have claimed that Ukrainian infrastructure is a legitimate target. In December 2022, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, asserted that by attacking the country’s energy grid it was making it harder for Ukraine to access weapons provided by Western countries. In other instances, Russian officials indicated that its attacks on the country’s electricity supply were “strikes of retribution,” according to Russian politician Boris Chernyshov.
“The justifications that Russian officials provided varied from arguments that they were legitimate military objectives to statements that pointed more toward civilian harm and general retaliation not grounded in a concrete and direct military objective,” says Raymond. “It was important to capture this, because it can be indicative of intent, even though the statements alone are not in themselves indicative of an international legal violation.”
Hathway notes that several of the statements seem to indicate that Russia was intentionally targeting civilians as a way to pressure the Ukrainian government into conceding the conflict. “I think a lot of the comments are indicative of this unlawful purpose that Russia and certain Russian leaders and military officials may have had in the carrying out of these attacks,” she says.
Hathaway adds that while the report’s findings are not themselves evidence of war crimes, they provide a strong foundation for bodies like the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, whose work is still ongoing. “I would say it is kind of a roadmap for prosecutors.”
Update 3/5/2024, 10:45 am EST: On March 5, 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russia's commander of the Long-Range Aviation of the Aerospace Force, Sergei Ivanovich Kobylash, and Russian Navy admiral Viktor Nikolayevich Sokolov, on war crimes charges. The prosecution alleges that both men ordered a “campaign” of strikes on Ukraine’s electric infrastructure that caused “excessive incidental harms to civilians” between October 2022 and March 2023, roughly the same time period covered by the Conflict Observatory’s report.
