Ukraine uses facial recognition to identify Russian soldiers killed in war

The technology is helping trace and message family members of battle casualties

A Ukrainian soldier on the front line against Russia. EPA

Ukraine is using facial recognition software to identify Russian soldiers who have been killed in combat so that their families can be informed.

Vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov said the software was being used to check social media profiles for their faces.

Ukraine's Ministry of Defence began using technology from Clearview AI earlier this month. The New York-based facial recognition provider finds images on the web that match faces from uploaded photos.

Mr Fedorov, who runs the Ministry of Digital Transformation, said once a person had been identified, the authorities would message relatives to make arrangements to repatriate their body.

“As a courtesy to the mothers of those soldiers, we are disseminating this information over social media to at least let families know that they've lost their sons and to then enable them to come to collect their bodies,” he said.

Ukraine has not disclosed the number of people identified through the software, but said the figure was “high".

Ukraine's military has said more than 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since the invasion began last month.

Russia has not updated its casualty figures since March 2, when it said 498 soldiers had been killed in what it describes as a “special military operation” to demilitarise Ukraine.

The Kremlin said it was unaware of the initiative.

“We have no knowledge of this. There are too many fakes coming out of Ukraine,” a spokesman said.

Concerns have been raised by critics of the technology, who say there is a risk of misidentification.

Richard Bassed, head of the forensic medicine department at Monash University in Australia, said fingerprints, dental records and DNA were still the most common ways of confirming someone's identity.

Clearview, which offered its service free of charge to Ukraine after the Russian invasion, says its search engine includes more than 2 billion images from VKontakte, a popular Russian social media service.

The firm is fighting a lawsuit in the US under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. The case concerns whether the company's gathering of images from the internet breaches privacy laws.

Clearview says its actions have been legal. It says its face matches should only be a starting point in investigations.