Sleuthing 101
Sleuthing 101
Online sleuths band together to find Russian scumbags.
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I’m sure everyone’s heard about the atrocities committed in Bucha and Irpin. It goes without saying that anyone with an operative moral compass wants to see the perpetrators of such war crimes held accountable, along with the kleptomaniac Ruskies ransacking homes and shipping the appropriated objects back to the fam in the motherland.
In order for that to happen though, you need to at least narrow down your pool of “suspects,” so to speak. Sure, it’d be nice if you could put the entire Russian Army on trial rather than a select few leaders, but a simple endeavor this is not. You need names. Identities. Faces.
Fortunately, we’ve got ourselves plenty of folks out there in the big wide world who’re genuine internet sleuths. People solve cold cases as a hobby nowadays. I’m not talking about retired law enforcement or criminal psychologists or Information Technology wonks; I’m talking about someone like your Aunt Margaret who loves herself a good true crime documentary and spends her free time “surfing the web” on the Inspiron 1545 laptop she bought off eBay in 2009 piecing together murder mysteries like you would a table puzzle.
Point being that over the last 48 hours or so there’ve been people of the same variety working to identify the Russian soldiers responsible for the unspeakable depravities discovered in liberated villages. The big guns have been in on this, too—Anonymous, the shadowy “hacktivist collective” that can basically find anything they want in the IT-sphere, along with Ukrainian government officials like Mykhailo Fedorov, Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine (quite the title).
Entrepreneurial State Of Mind
It turns out that when they weren't committing atrocities, the Russians occupying Bucha and Irpin (among the most wealthy suburbs in that region) were looting homes. Like, picking them clean in some cases.
As seen in major news coverage the past several days, Russian units have been “shifting” (in Putin-pidgin, this means retreating after getting absolutely throttled and thoroughly embarrassed) to the southeast — the Donbas — to consolidate forces and conduct what amounts to a tactical pause; but before picking up and leaving they made sure to load up their plunder so it could be mailed back home. Captured and KIA alike have been found carrying treasures on their person.
According to the Central Intelligence Agency of Ukraine, these Russian soldiers moonlighting as marauders during the intermittent periods when they haven't been raping and killing Ukrainian civilians have already opened up a market in Narovlya, Belarus where they’re selling these stolen items—washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators, jewelry, cars, bicycles, phones, motorcycles, dishes, carpets, art, children's toys, cosmetics, etc. Purportedly, some of these modern day barbarians even called the wifey and asked for “shopping lists.”
Sleuthing Sleuths
Welp, it didn’t take long for the online sleuths to do their sleuthing. For starters, they’ve managed to acquire the CCTV footage of dudes express shipping their goodies — more than two tons of shit — at the “Russian CDEK express delivery service on Kuibysheva street, 32 in Mazyr, Belarus.”
There’s over three hours of footage in this video alone:
Then the sleuths did some more superb sleuthing and discovered a list of the pillagers’ names, what they mailed, and even their phone numbers.
Not to be outdone, Anonymous somehow managed to acquire a roster of all the Russian soldiers — names, rank, passport details — who’d been occupying Bucha, which is where some of the worst atrocities occurred. The pool of suspects has been considerably narrowed.
And as previously covered in Euphoric Recall, the Russian comms fiasco and subsequent blithe use of stolen cell phones means there’ve been intercepted calls in which these sick fucks tell their families about the war crimes they’ve committed and the dogs they've been eating when they tire of MREs—you know, strictly casual stuff. And the families? They’re totally unfazed by it.
