 Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. Happy New Year. This is Transitional Justice, and we have with us Paul Namias. He joins us from Stockholm, Sweden. He has come from Tallinn, Estonia. He is based in Istanbul, Turkey, and he is from Sydney, Australia. And you get all that? Write that down being a final example. And he is an international lawyer associated with Project Expedite Justice, and he does investigations of war crimes. Welcome to the show, Paul. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. So tell me what you do for Project Expedite Justice. Always interested in investigation of war crimes and how you do it and how effective it is? At the moment, the project entails partly capacity development and capacity supplement given the situation in Ukraine where every attack constitutes a crime scene. At any point, a country, even with the facilities, the capacity of Ukraine can be overwhelmed. So it's essentially trying to teach methodology in terms of documenting the scenes of crimes, amongst other things. That's the most important aspect because every attack, every hit needs to be documented properly if they're going to present evidence before a court, either domestically or internationally. And you need a lot more people than what the authorities can provide. Well, you know, investigation goes so slow. You wish that it would come to court, that it would result in some, you know, prosecutions, convictions. I want you to know, Paul, that I have volunteered and I do volunteer to serve on any jury they may want to select. I'll be there. I have a few sensibilities I would like to express about international tribunals and uses civil law. So they don't use juries. It's before judges, but we need witnesses, obviously, and expert witnesses to present the evidence and explain the evidence to the court, to the judges. So it takes a very long time because of the documentation process. It takes a very long time to build a case, let alone to hear a case, and then run it through to appeal until all avenues of appeal are exhausted. I don't envisage based on the history that we've seen with the tribunals for Rwanda and for Yugoslavia. I would imagine that this would go for about 20 to 25 years if the war to finish tomorrow. Oh, wow. Is the documentation you're talking about all in English? Largely. Well, for the International Criminal Court where I used to work, most of the cases are put together in English. There are Francophone countries, obviously, where investigations have been conducted, where the cases are put together in French. For Ukraine, there is a large effort to conduct it within Ukraine, before Ukrainian courts, because there's no international tribunal set up at the moment. Even though the International Criminal Court has jurisdiction, there are certain crimes for which the International Criminal Court does not have jurisdiction. The Rome Statute does not cover, for instance, the crime of aggression. So there's been a lot of talk of late in the international community to establish a special tribunal for aggression. And based in the Hague, most recent discussions have been that would be set up in the Hague, based on what's becoming the Dutch government. But I haven't really read too much detail into it yet. So you talk about other places where there had been war crimes in Africa, for example. Have you been involved? What is your experience in this area as an international lawyer? Crimes against humanity in the Cote d'Ivoire and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. That's my experience, yeah. So let's move to the news, you know, they say, first the news. So we have news today about an attack by the Ukrainians against a Russian group. And the Times reported that Russia said there were 60-some-out Russians killed in this attack. I guess it was in a school or college, and it blew up the building. That's where the Russians were housed. But better information, the Ukrainian said that there were several hundred, four hundred, was reported in the Times. What do you know about this? Essentially, what I read in the press and on the telegram channels that I subscribe to, and Twitter feeds that I subscribe to. But it's always the case where, in this case, the Ukrainian side would say it's a, the casualty level is a lot higher. The Russian side will try and minimize it. I think they've come out to say 60. But some of the chats on the Russian side, internal chats, as well as some comments made by some, let's say, more hard-line extremists in the current regime and criminal have indicated that it's in the several hundred mark. I would think that it would be higher, just practical experience of following these sorts of exchanges in the past and how it's actually turned out to be. So I would think it would be in the three to four hundred level, just based on what I've read so far. This is a significant attack. How do the Ukrainians do it? I know as much as you do in terms of what I've read, they use time hours and get it twice with the facility. And some of the speculation has been that munitions were stored in the same building, which would be interesting to say the least, but not surprising, which resulted in the devastation that's been visible in the videos and photos that have been online all day today. In a larger sense, what is this attack and this number of Russian troops killed? What does that mean? Who the war? What does it mean to the Russian media, to the Russian people? Well, yes, it's a blow. It's a success for the Ukrainians, I would argue. But if you're going to argue that this could change the outcome of the direction of the war, I wouldn't necessarily think so. They have a lot of mobilized personnel who've been dragged off the streets in various towns and cities. Russia has a very large manpower capacity. I don't think it would make that huge difference. It depends on the sorts of people who were there. Were they officers? Were they well trained? Were they special forces? I don't know. So I couldn't speculate either way. You know, one thing that occurs to me is with all the news about an investigation of war crimes and all the possibility that Russia will be tied up in war crimes trials for decades, is the intensity of war crimes being committed by the Russians changing in any way? Is it increasing, decreasing, or remaining the same? I don't think it's changed. I don't think that they're being either more careful or less careful than they were in the past. Again, speculative, there can be an incident which immediately makes one think, oh, it's a crime against humanity, this is a war crime, they've targeted a civilian piece of infrastructure or whatever it might be, and yet there's legitimate evidence that comes out. And I'm speculating here, I'm not going to refer to anything in Ukraine at the moment, but in other cases where it's come out to say, well, the other side was using that facility for a military purpose, etc, etc. So it can be a bit hazy, it can't be, it's never really as clear-cut as, let's say the viewer might think, looking at CNN coverage, say, oh, that's a look they've hit a school or they've hit a hospital. The other thing is, if they do it by mistake and they conduct an investigation and there's repercussions for those that were, let's say, reckless negligent or deliberately targeted a hospital or whatever it might be, then it's, well, the war crime is dealt with in their own jurisdiction. So you're not going to go up the chain of command. But where they try and go for a cover-up or deny an obfuscate and flood the space with disinformation, it makes it much more likely that there would be a large-scale investigation into it to look up the chain of command as to why it was done, how it was done. But again, this is all speculative. We're at the stage where the war is ongoing, the incidents continue to pile up and the crime scenes in each case need to be documented as best possible in very difficult circumstances by, in a lot of cases, people who aren't necessarily very well trained in doing it because there's just not enough capacity to do it. There's so many crime scenes and only so many detectives able to deploy. So you have to teach people how to do it. You do that? I do it. I have done it. It makes our lives easier when the documentation of a scene of a crime such as these is done in a way which is more useful to be presented as evidence. Random pictures that don't make it easy to understand where they were taken, when they were taken and by whom are very difficult. A lot of the time, we get open source material like this and we spend months, if not years, trying to verify and trying to trace back to the source of who took that picture and what time was it. We're about to be able to justify it. That's a lot of the time of our investigative work. It goes into that. How do you feel about this work, Paul? I mean, are you committed for the duration? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Great. So let's move on to the technology we were going to talk about. My very rudimentary understanding is that Ukrainians have an app, a smartphone app, which somehow tells them a winter Russian missile is heading their way. Tell us about that. There are several. There are many. Many of them are downloadable on iOS or Android app stores. Depending on your geographic location, for instance, with some of them, I had to create an iTunes account based in Ukraine to be able to download a few of them. There's one in particular which just got an update which has Mark Hamill's voice in it, telling you that there's an error alarm to go to the nearest shelter and take it seriously and the like, which was being promoted earlier last month. But that's not available outside of Ukraine. Now, these received information are from the Ministry of Defense and based on the region, the location in Ukraine, you can set it to the region that you're in. You can pick many regions, leave it on, and it receives the signal and the siren goes. Now, when I've, in times of what I've been in Ukraine, this has woken me up at five in the morning and I've gone straight down stairs as quick as possible in pajamas without any supplies. And after having the Ukraine since then, people have become more accustomed to how much time they have, as has been discussed in circles within Ukraine. When the message comes, we have about half an hour, as I was told in the last case where there was an error alarm at eight o'clock in the morning. It's okay, you got half an hour, you can grab a coffee, grab your stuff, 15 minutes, go down to the shelter. And we did and that was in early December and there was some 40-odd rockets, 40-odd missiles that were launched to the pier. Most, all of them, but three were intercepted by air defense and three hit various points of the electrical infrastructure and energy infrastructure of the city. On the day in the air raid lasted about four hours, but the confidence in which people who are living in Ukraine and working in Ukraine and Ukrainians that I deal with in terms of how to deal with these air alarms. Sorry, you don't have to run straight down. It's fine. Which app do you have? I've got this one and this one and this one. Oh, yeah, they're good. That's all right. You're good. I've got five of them on my phone at the moment. And when I leave Ukraine, sometimes I forget to turn them off and at three in the morning it wakes up myself and my wife and my wife is very upset. But it's actually, well, I actually make a point of leaving it on because it kind of brings it home. I don't stay in Ukraine for very long periods of time. We go for like a week to 10 days at a time that leave and then go back. And when I'm outside the country, it's easy to kind of lose the feel. So when the alert goes off and I'm out having dinner with friends and it makes me seem a bit weird, I think, okay, this is what everybody I work with and everybody I know and I give and everywhere else is dealing with right now. Some questions about how this works. So it's really remarkable that you would have half an hour's notice for incoming. That's quite amazing. I can't say that that's scientific. I can just tell you that that's what the people I've been working with and dealing with in Ukraine and Kiev in particular are told me. How does it work? How does the system get the data? Can you talk about it? How it gets, well, the data is provided by the Ministry of Defense. How the Ministry of Defense gets the information is in the realm of speculation. We could argue that they receive intelligence from their own sources and maybe other sources. Most of the time it's a case where planes have taken off at a Russian base or in Belarus or missiles have been launched from a ship in the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea. And that's what's always said. That's what shows up in the details of the app because in some of the apps you can look it up and say what it relates to is like, oh, there's people have been around reading it, some of it's in English, most of it's in Ukrainian. Missiles have been launched from three ships in the Caspian. Really? It's like, yeah, we've got about 20 minutes left now. But it's not all that geographic then. In other words, if you know the missile has been launched, you don't necessarily know where it's pointed. No, exactly. But the app actually highlights there's a map where different regions of Ukraine start to change color in terms of the intensity of the alert for particular regions. And sometimes it's weird because it's like regions across the country and then Kiev is just white or anything. Okay, so Kiev is okay. Oh, I'm not anymore. Then it changes. So it just slowly changes. As soon as the air raid hits, it's normally in multiple regions, not just one. And then it comes across and in most cases where I've been there and we've had an airline, it's been the whole country, it's just gone red. So they don't know necessarily where it's going to go. And more often than not, the drones or the missiles are aimed at various targets across the country. One of the apps here, which is only available in Ukraine is called Air Alert. So I had to set up an iTunes account in Ukraine to be able to download it. And recently they provided an update, which you can test the volume. If I press this here and I touch this. Attention, air raid alert. Proceed to the nearest shelter. Don't be careless. Your overconfidence is your weakness. And a very confident Mark Hamill in the English version, telling us what we should do. So is it the color changes depending on the level of the threat? Yeah, it does. There's like a light pink and then it goes deeper red and burgundy when it's forward. And there's also some indications where air defense has fired at something. So something's been seen. So you'll see this little icon show up in a particular region saying, yep, there's something that's confirmed here and confirmed there and confirmed there, depending on the app. Some apps are better than others, but I think people just have two or three that they use and that's it. Two or three. Can I use them all at the same time? If I turn them all on, four or five, whatever it may be, I'll be beeping and booping from five different apps. What has that? Believe it or not. Believe it or not, yes. But you do isolate it to a region. The ones I have let you pick the region that you're in. And that's a lot better. I don't want to have multiple regions. So if I'm in one part of Ukraine, I make sure that I've got the air alert region set to that. I go to bed. My phone's on the charger with the battery through the battery. So at least if there's no power, my phone will still be charged. Yes, the signal could go. I deal with Wi-Fi and I use 3G and then it gets the signal. And if my window is double glazed and I can't hear the siren outside, which happens most often with hotels in Kyiv, the phone will go within a minute of the sirens blaring in the city. The most recent one, I think, was December. It was December 12th to 13th. I could hear the sirens outside because I had the window open. And I thought, is this a test because my phone's not going yet? I started to get my stuff ready and then my phone started blaring. It took about 30 seconds. I was like, all right, I think I've got some time. I'll just grab hot water, pour in the coffee, grab all my stuff, go downstairs, go down to the bunker and take my computer and work there and people do. And they just roll with the punches. It's an incredible place to experience human resilience. You know, we've seen that increasingly and it's increasingly impressive to recognize that even when your infrastructure is being destroyed, where you're under constant threat, people are so resilient, so strong, so courageous. And can you talk about that as a phenomenon? Yeah, I can. I grew up learning history and reading about the Battle of Britain and the Blitz and how the British people were so resilient and it didn't matter how many buildings were destroyed in London or Coventry or Manchester or Birmingham or whatever it might be. The next day, they just get up and carry on. And you haven't seen, in larger cities of Kiev, the same level of devastation. It's not saturation bombing yet. I don't think the Russians had the capacity. If they did, they probably would do it. But you see the same kind of spirit. So, at the beginning, it might have been a shock. I wasn't there, but by the time I started traveling to Ukraine, all I see is a very resilient, courageous, tough-as-nails people. They are not going to give up. And you could just knock everything down around them. They will not give up. They roll with punches. It's touching. It really is touching. I feel almost embarrassed that I'm just there briefly and living through it with them, and I get to go home. And I just count down the days and then I go home. And yet, I go home and my alarm starts blaring because I forget to turn it off. And I think, oh, everyone is being pounded again now. It brings it home. Well, yeah, let's talk about that. So, if I go back to, I don't know, say Cincinnati, and I download one of these apps or a number of them, I'm going to be able to get the same signal that you would get in Kyiv, right? Yep. Absolutely. You set the region as Kyiv. And when there's an alarm for Kyiv, it'll go. And if you can download the one that you need Ukraine in store for, you'll have Mark Hamill's voice telling you in English, which is choose English to get down to the shelter, take it seriously, not to be laughed at. And they're becoming better and better. And the last trip to Kyiv that I did, it wasn't a case of, oh, it's only in their alarm. It should be okay. It's like, no, they're getting more and more accurate when it rings. Take it seriously. Yeah. Well, what about that? So, you go downstairs with your cup of coffee, what have you. And you're in the basement of a given building where you're working or living. How safe are you in the basement? Well, I like to think that we're very safe. It's all that there is. When we were working in the offices of a law firm, everybody had to walk down 12 flights, 15 flights of stairs down to the basement, and there were workstations set up. And it's like the bottom level of the basement car parking storage area. It's about three levels underground in that case. I felt safe. And if the whole building collapses on it, which would be okay, the likelihood of the whole building being struck and collapsing is pretty low. But I felt safe and everyone was just carrying on with business. For us, it was weird because it was new for us. But for them, they've been going for six months already. They've got their workstations out, there's internet. There's power and there's generators in most of these large buildings. So, I've been lucky. And for people living in the outskirts of the major cities in small parliament blocks, they don't have that facility. So, they're in much, much more difficult conditions. And I've barely experienced that. So, I really can't claim to say that everybody has it nice and luxurious in some of these buildings. We've been very, very well looked after because of where we've been. But it's not the same for people living in towns and villages across Ukraine, which hit just as much. It's extraordinary that the Ukrainians have found a way to do this. But of course, the Russians must know about it. The Russians are trying to somehow sabotage it. They're trying to use countermeasures of some kind. Not that I know of, not that I would think. It would be really to prevent civilians from made aware that there's incoming projectiles. I don't know if that would be the best use of their resources, to be frank. It's a defensive device is what it is. Yeah. And do you want to hit civilians by surprise? Let's say they're already committing some pretty grievous acts. There's not much they can do if it's reliant on a satellite nugger picking up airplanes, taking off from various air bases or missiles being launched from ships in the Caspian on the Black Sea or wherever it might be. That's going to be detected. If that information is detected, it's going to be passed on. The Ministry of Defense is going to send it out. And people are going to know. We don't know where it's going, but it's coming. Well, but you talk about cell phones. And I think you mentioned that even when you, and when you have the infrastructure being damaged, destroyed by Russian missiles, you still have a way to charge your cell phone. You still have a way to get cell signals and, for that matter, internet signals. How is it possible in a country that's under attack this way? Well, to a point, it suffered a lot. I mean, there's days when we'd been in Ukraine where we haven't had any signal because it was after that attack. It was on Friday. I couldn't call the driver to tell him that we were waiting outside in the snow to come and pick us up. The signal was just dead. We went to a meeting and our counterparts couldn't make it. Obviously, that was stuck in traffic. There was no communication. So that we went to their offices and nobody could tell us that they couldn't come, which was fine for us. We just wanted to stay committed to have the meeting with them. And then there was no way to notify the driver to come and pick us up. We've got to go and find the guy. He couldn't park in front. And that's, first of all, problems. These people are putting up with this day in, day out. And there are little stations here and there in the major cities. And we've seen them. You go and warm up a bit and you can charge your phones as generators running in some cafes in various places that have power and people can go in and charge their phones. You don't have to be a customer necessarily. And there's a great deal of solidarity there amongst Ukrainians. And it's wonderful to see. But I just keep thinking about how much more difficult it is in smaller regional areas, which don't have those resources. And people are coming together and you hear stories about it and they do what they can. They're not left out. But I mean, I've really only experienced it passing through and seeing the best of what they have. Yeah. Coming together is the operative term here. You have to collaborate to do this project in the first place between, you know, the intelligence and the civilian communication. And to have the cell phones working and to have the whole system working and to be able to charge them. There's a lot of people collaborating to make this happen. But you know, it does raise the question of how in the world did these apps get built in the first place? Who built them? Whose idea is it? Don't underestimate Ukrainian IT capacity. Just don't. I think the biggest mistake that we did, and I dare say I'm probably in there because I didn't know that much about Ukraine. I read about it. I knew their presidency. I knew a little bit about their politics back since the 90s. But it wasn't a country I visited. And I think I very, very heavily underestimated their capacity and what kind of country it is. It's no Russia. And this is a country with a massive capacity, very well educated population. My wife works for an American company. Their entire IT division is with Ukraine. Ukrainians work remotely in IT, I think in much, much higher numbers than any other country. It's not just isolated to that one company. So I'm not even surprised. I'm not even remotely surprised how advanced Ukraine is. That's extraordinary. But let me add that, you know, Think Tech Hawaii, the platform you're on right now, we use a lot of software. And we do have one company in Ukraine in Kiev that supplies us with certain software products, which I think is really incredible. And they have been, you know, from the time this all started until now, they've been functioning. And they're, you know, a player on the competitive global stage of their particular specialty. And you say, my goodness gracious, how do they do that? What is it in the culture? You spoke of education and you spoke of resilience. There's more than that though. It's kind of this is a clever thing happening here. Where does the culture take us? The people who will develop software like this and systems like this, even in the face of an invasion? I really don't know. In terms of like getting that technical expertise in that field, I can't say that I can attribute it to anything in particular. As far as the country go and those and its people and their resilience, they've had a very difficult history in the last 100 years and then some. I'm sure you're aware of the famine. Right? The Holodomor? Yes. So that's exactly. So that's in their psyche. I think they talk about this in relation to the Holocaust. A genetic memory is there's something in their national psyche to be able to withstand these kinds of difficulties and adversities and come together and now they've got their freedom. They've had their freedom for 30 years and they're not going to give it up for anything and they'll do whatever it takes. They never cease to astound me and I think it's because I underestimated the country before. I first went there and was just amazed. The average American didn't know either. He didn't know what was going on in Ukraine. Oh, I should now. So now, but the question I suppose is whether the Russians know what's going on in Ukraine. I was telling you that there was a 60 minutes segment a day or two ago talking about Radio Free Europe and it's not just radio, it's TV also. Broadcasting Western news and it's got an open editorial policy that's not controlled by any government feeding news into the Russian population and they have millions of viewers and listeners in Russia who are listening. So query, do the Russians get this? Do they understand what's happening? I mean, already talk about IT professionals. Well, a lot of IT professionals have left Russia, hundreds of thousands they say and the people inside Russia, maybe they don't get it yet, but certainly Radio Free Europe should be affecting public opinion. Does the average Russian understand what's going on? Well, I think what you've mentioned probably addresses part of it. I'm not sure what the audience for Radio Free Europe would be in Russia, but so many professional educated Russians have left and if you walk around my neighborhood in Istanbul, I never used to hear Russian and now that's all I hear and they are everywhere, everywhere, hundreds of thousands of them because there's only a few countries that Russians can go to without visas and one of them is Turkey, one of them is Dubai, Thailand to a point, Georgia, I'm not sure if Georgia is still accepting them, but they're still flooding into Turkey either on the way to Europe because there's no flights between Russia and Europe or to stop in Turkey because they can't go anywhere else and they're the people who read the foreign press, they're the people who speak foreign languages and can understand and maybe get a better inkling as to what's actually going on. Others within Russia, if they don't have the means, I would imagine that it's just easy and not to believe it and just to take the call away, even if they would know better and could know better and do know better, it's just easy to just go along with it because they've got to live there. You think that's changing? I don't think so. I don't think that people who expect that the Russian people will suddenly rise up, at least the Russian people who remain in Russia will rise up, it's not going to happen, but I hope to be proven wrong. If anything, it will be something within the internal hierarchy in the Kremlin, in regions, if some regions start to get a little bit edgy and certain governors of certain regions decide they want more autonomy on my independence and now's the time to break away and take advantage of the situation, then maybe it'll create a domino effect and we can only hope, well, what kind of instability will result from a breakup at the Russian Federation, I don't know. At the moment, I just want this water to finish and I want Ukraine to win and then we'll deal with Russia, but priority one is that. It's big for all of us, Paul. Paul Namies, Project Expedite Justice, talking to us from Stockholm, but that doesn't mean he's going, he's not going back to Ukraine anytime soon. He'll be back and he also spends time in Tallinn, Estonia, just sort of in the middle between Stockholm and Ukraine. Thank you very much, Paul, for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Aloha.