Support us
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an unusual form of journalism has flourished on message boards, Telegram channels and open-source intelligence feeds. Volunteers in Kyiv, Tallinn, Berlin and Perth sift through phone footage and intercepted radio chatter to attach names to Russian soldiers killed in action. Some of that work is forensic. Some is reckless.
The volume is striking. Researchers working with groups such as Molfar have identified several thousand Russian service members by cross-referencing social media selfies, body-cam footage and burial records. A single misidentification can ruin a family and discredit the entire field.
For every verified name there is a misattributed photograph, a confused surname or a father publicly shamed for his son's alleged crimes. The practice sits in a moral fog that mainstream newsrooms in Australia and abroad have only just begun to navigate. There are no easy answers, only trade-offs between accountability, transparency and the dignity owed to the dead.
Ethics committees at outlets such as the ABC have long held that naming the deceased is justified when public interest demands it. The question now is whether that interest survives when the name is published by a volunteer running a Python script rather than a senior editor. Foreign policy debates over governance feel distant from this controversy, but the question of how nations handle battlefield accountability binds them together.
Open-source investigators typically start with one piece of footage: a drone strike near Bakhmut, a tank column crossing a ford, a burial in a Krasnodar village. The video is geolocated and faces are matched against VKontakte profiles and leaked personnel databases.
A confident match usually requires at least three independent identifiers — a tattoo, a uniform patch, a surname stitched into a kit bag. The threshold is published by groups like the Centre for Defence Strategies, but it is not policed outside those groups. In Australian terms, it is a fair dinkum industry that has long since outgrown the volunteers who started it.
There are no formal codes governing volunteer identification work, but a set of informal norms has hardened. Investigators tend to refuse naming anyone whose death has not been visually confirmed. They retain a chain of evidence. They publish their methods so mistakes can be challenged. None of that is binding.
A frenzied Telegram channel run by an anonymous amateur may post a name with nothing more than a blurry still and a hunch, and the post may travel before it is corrected — if it ever is. The norms hold among professionals and break among everyone else, and the public rarely sees the difference.
The strongest argument in favour of publication is accountability. Russian authorities routinely underreport losses, and the families of dead soldiers often learn of a death through a video posted by the other side. Independent verification limits the room for official denial.
It also gives historians, prosecutors and journalists the raw material needed to document war crimes. That kind of reporting is examined in dispatches from international trials by this foundation. Without names, the dead become statistics. With names, they become evidence.
A soldier who dies is not the same as the political leadership that sent him. Naming him exposes his mother, his children, his schoolmates to harassment and sometimes death threats, in towns that have nothing to do with the war. Volunteers have misidentified people because two soldiers shared a surname and a region, ruining innocent lives.
The same ethical tension plays out closer to home when police accountability efforts try to balance transparency with the privacy of officers named in misconduct files. The risk in Ukraine is that a single grotesque error hands Russian state media a propaganda trophy it would otherwise have to invent.
Australian publishers who lift names from open-source databases expose themselves to real legal risk. Defamation law here remains plaintiff-friendly, and a single national jurisdiction under the 2021 amendments means a single lawsuit can silence publication nationwide. News Corp, Nine and Seven have house rules around this; smaller outlets rarely do.
Reporting on conflict, even from a desk in Surry Hills, can become a courtroom matter in Moscow if the named soldier's family sues through the Russian legal system. Several outlets have quietly rewritten their style guides to require dual confirmation before naming anyone, even when a name has already circulated.
BBC Verify publishes names only after dual-source confirmation and discloses the basis for the identification. Reuters allows confirmation by a single trusted source but refuses to republish the underlying databases. Bellingcat treats its identification as court-grade evidence and keeps its methods open for audit.
Australian-funded broadcasters tend to rely on wire copy and rarely verify their own work, partly a matter of resources and partly a conservative approach inherited from Fleet Street that still colours newsrooms in Martin Place and Docklands. The market has long centralised production in Sydney and Melbourne, leaving smaller outlets in Cairns or Ballarat at the mercy of what the wire decides to print.
For Australian journalism educators, the fastest lesson is that verification can no longer be farmed out to anonymous Telegram channels. Newsrooms need trained OSINT desks, agreed editorial thresholds and accessible avenues for correction. The how our scholarship program supports journalism students displaced by the war initiative from this foundation helps displaced journalists study those methods in safety.
The deeper lesson is about who learns the craft. As with access to a good education, training in OSINT tends to land in well-funded newsrooms with lawyers and second-source culture already in place. Smaller outlets are locked out, leaving the identification trade to amateurs. Journalists in Brisbane and Fremantle should also ask how they would feel if a crowd in eastern Europe misidentified an Australian soldier.
