General search for information About the situation of children forcibly transferred by Russia, for example, from popular social media channels in Russia, Telegram and VKontakte.
The search was done mechanically by using search words that Russia uses for kidnapped Ukrainian children. Russia calls them, among other things, “rescued” and “evacuees”. We found about 500 such posts on public accounts.
publishes material from Russian social media platforms because Russia’s abduction of Ukrainian children is a significant social grievance. uses public messages from Russian social media channels because information on the matter is otherwise not widely available.
obtained information about the children’s hometown also with the help of the facial recognition method. Several probable earlier pictures of the persons taken to Russia were found, in which the same persons appear, for example, in their hometown in Ukraine.
used publicly available facial recognition tools. They use large amounts of photos posted online for identification. The tools provide an estimate of the probability that the photos show the same object.
Facial recognition reinforces the image that the children appearing in Russian propaganda are really Ukrainian.
has seen documents and medical certificates, which support Meževoi’s narrative. Among them is a document from the occupation administration of Donetsk, which lists the children taken to Moscow. The list contained the names of Meževoi’s three children.
Security camera footage and the interview with the director of the children’s home was obtained by ‘s reporter Antti Kuronen in the village of Stepanivka in Ukraine.
Information acquisition from Ukrainian sources did Anastasya Ivanova.