Palantir Technologies UK Ltd has announced a landmark agreement with the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine (OPG), which will enable investigators on the ground and across Europe to share, integrate, and process all key data relating to more than 78,000 registered war crimes.
The announcement signals a deepening of Palantir’s support for Ukrainian resistance against Russian aggression, with the company already helping Ukraine militarily, and supporting the resettlement of refugees in the UK, Poland and in Lithuania.
The OPG’s war crimes register documents all recorded incidents of war crimes relating to the armed conflict in Ukraine. The majority relate to destruction of property, civil infrastructure, or residential apartments. Yet many entries on the register, which will be uploaded to Palantir’s software and fused with an array of case data, represent cases of willful killing, torture, rape, and deportation in locations such as Bucha, Irpin, Izium, across the Kharkiv region, and throughout many other parts of the country affected by the conflict.
The partnership represents a Europe-wide initiative spearheaded by Palantir employees based across Europe, which will support the OPG’s investigation into two ‘anchor’ cases - one centered on the crime of aggression, focusing on Russian senior leadership who made the critical decisions, and another on the crime of genocide, which will cover more widespread and systematic attacks on, and the deportation of, Ukrainian people due to their identity.
Among its capabilities and tasks, the software will enable:
- Integration of open-source intelligence and satellite imagery to construct a virtual map of war crimes evidence. Examples include: evidence confirming the presence of Russian equipment in the proximity of crime scenes, witness statements given by victims to officials at the borders of countries who are helping to resettle refugees or photographs, and videos uploaded to social media by Ukrainian citizens.
- Cataloguing by prosecutors of the vast quantity of data to support workflows for removing data duplication, helping establish source reliability, and identifying potential links across different sources of data in order to speed up the path to building compelling cases.
- Establishing attribution by providing prosecutors with the tools for building a clear picture of the chain of command for Russian forces in Ukraine, while mapping Russian military units to criminal activity.
- Ukrainian and international partners to securely and legally collate and share otherwise siloed information - ensuring proportional, tightly controlled, auditable access to data in order to protect witnesses, victims, and the integrity of prosecuted cases. It will also help to ensure chain of custody - protecting evidence from being tampered with - is preserved throughout the investigative process.
“The invasion of Ukraine represents one of the most significant challenges to the global balance of power. To that end, the crimes that are being committed in Ukraine must be prosecuted,” said Alexander C. Karp, co-founder and chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies Inc. and chairman of The Palantir Foundation for Defense Policy & International Affairs.
“Software is a product of the legal and moral order in which it is created, and plays a role in defending it. We have built platforms to navigate the vast amount of sensitive data required for the prosecution of war crimes, and we are proud that our software is now being deployed in Ukraine to defend the West.”
Prosecutor-General of Ukraine Andriy Kostin said:
“Our goal is to build a web of full and comprehensive accountability for international crimes. Individual responsibility of Russia's military and political leadership is an indispensable part of this. Our focus is on investigating and prosecuting the crimes of aggression and genocide.
“To prove these crimes, we have to analyze a vast amount of evidence. For example, when investigating the crime of genocide, we look for the genocidal elements in individual war crimes, and at the same time, we examine patterns of criminal actions of the Russian military wherever the occupying troops were stationed. We have registered more than 78,000 war crimes.
“Analyzing this amount of evidence would be virtually impossible without modern IT solutions. I highly appreciate the decision of Palantir Technologies to provide Ukrainian prosecutors with access to its best-in-class data analysis software.”
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