Ukrainian prosecutors are drowning in evidence of suspected war crimes. Now they are learning to ‘map’ it and catch the men who gave the orders
Tom Watling
September 26, 2026
The Sunday Times
When Dusan Jovanovic arrived in the frontline city of Sumy two years into Russia’s war, he was hoping to solve a problem that had troubled him for two decades. The Serbian lawyer had lived through the Yugoslav wars. In their aftermath, international courts tried presidents and army chiefs for war crimes, while domestic courts pursued low-level perpetrators. But a “whole middle level” of commanders suspected of war crimes had escaped prosecution, he said. Jovanovic feared that, in Ukraine, history could repeat itself.
In the offices of the regional prosecutor in Sumy, a team of eight Ukrainian prosecutors was managing 12,000 proceedings. New investigations were being opened every day as the city endured constant aerial attack. Across Ukraine, prosecutors have registered more than 241,000 suspected war crimes since the full invasion of 2022. “There’s no justice system in the world that can deal with such a level of criminality,” Jovanovic said. The question was not simply how to investigate the crimes, but how to prosecute the commanders of the soldiers alleged to have directly committed them.
Jovanovic has pioneered a new “mapping” technique for navigating these enormous volumes of evidence at Global Rights Compliance (GRC), an international law foundation partly funded by the British government. It brings thousands of pieces of evidence together into a single analytical picture, allowing prosecutors to identify patterns, connect crimes to specific Russian units and find the commanders who may bear responsibility. The first round of the project has taken two years, finishing earlier this year.
Sumy, through which 30 per cent of Russian forces passed into Ukraine at the start of the war, was the first place GRC tested the methodology. It was a turning point, said Vitalii Dovhal, head of the war crimes department at the Sumy Regional Prosecutor’s Office. Before the war, he was investigating financial crime. By the end of last year, the mapping method had been adopted in eight other regions. National prosecutors have adopted a similar approach.
GRC is part of the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group established in 2022 by Britain, the United States and the European Union to co-ordinate support for Ukrainian prosecutors. The UK has committed more than £16 million. Anastasiia Moiseieva, a senior GRC legal adviser, described Britain as one of its “most committed donors”, saying its funding had been “extremely important” in assisting Ukrainian prosecutors and investigators.
Stephen Doughty, the Europe minister, said the programme was at the heart of British efforts to secure a just and lasting peace. “Those responsible for committing heinous war crimes must be held accountable,” he said.
Joseph Hollerhead, Ukraine programme director at GRC, spent more than a decade working on war crimes committed in Kosovo. “One lesson I took from that experience is that accountability cannot focus only on those who physically committed the crimes or just the people at the very top,” he said. “There is a crucial space in between — the commanders and other actors — who have connected policy and orders to what has happened on the ground.”
Ukrainian prosecutors are supported by “mobile justice teams” from GRC, who spend extensive time on the ground, often in frontline regions. Jovanovic heads one of them.
The first test of their new methodology was Trostianets, about twenty miles from the Russian border in the Sumy region. Russian forces occupied the town on the first day of the invasion and held it for 31 days. It suffered some of the worst brutality in the region, and investigators believe they have evidence of summary execution, torture, unlawful detention, enforced disappearance and looting. Sumy’s prosecutors, police and security service operatives had gathered more than 2,000 pieces of evidence by the time GRC started mapping it.
Jovanovic’s team built datasets charting victims, locations and suspected perpetrators, reconstructed the movements and command structures of Russian units and grouped seemingly separate killings and detentions to establish where the same formations or commanders appeared repeatedly.
They spent weeks at a time in Sumy, despite the considerable security risks. Their analysis gave prosecutors a clearer picture of the Russian forces that had entered the region and their hierarchies. This year Dovhal’s office issued a notice of suspicion against Lieutenant General Sergei Kisel, commander of Russia’s 1st Tank Army, whose forces invaded the Sumy region and established a headquarters in Trostianets. The allegation concerns the overarching crime of aggression, rather than simply individual war crimes.
Kisel was identified after GRC’s mapping method was applied, Dovhal said. His prosecutors are also building a case against another commander, whose subordinates are accused of torturing and detaining civilians in Trostianets. Jovanovic wrote in the Ukrainian media last year: “Accountability here would resonate far beyond Trostianets. It would signal that the responsibility of commanders is not theoretical, and that crimes committed under occupation do not simply dissolve into the fog of war.”
Prosecution is not the only purpose of the work, Jovanovic said. Turning thousands of files into a coherent picture can help record how the war was fought. “We know from history and from other wars that most perpetrators will never face any justice,” he said.
In Ukraine, there is hope that they will. Hollerhead pointed to the sentencing this month of Kosovo’s former president Hashim Thaci for war crimes committed in the 1990s. “It’s a reminder to me of something important. Justice can take an extraordinarily long time,” Hollerhead said. “But time itself does not necessarily put those responsible beyond its reach.” He added: “[It] demonstrates the importance of preserving evidence now, protecting witnesses now, and sustaining accountability efforts over the years. The work now truly determines what justice may be possible in the future.”
Tom Watling is a freelancer based in Ukraine. I was formerly a foreign affairs reporter at The Independent, covering news across the world with a special focus on the ongoing war in Ukraine. I have spoken on radio segments, including BBC Radio 5 Live and LBC’s Nick Ferrari morning show, about the conflict in Israel/Gaza and the war in Ukraine. I have previously worked for the Daily Express and Daily Mail+, a subscription platform for the newspaper, as well as South London Press, a local outfit reporting on issues in the capital. I began working during the pandemic while undergoing my Newspaper Journalism MA at City, University of London. His work appears in The Sunday Times, The Independent and The Spectator. Appearances on Sky, BBC and TimesRadio. He is Winner of Chalk Circle Short Story Award