Palantir Partners with Ukraine Prosecutor to Process War Crimes Evidence Using AI

On April 22, 2023, Palantir Technologies announced a partnership with Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office to process massive volumes of war crimes evidence using artificial intelligence and data analytics. At the time of the announcement, Ukraine had registered more than 78,000 alleged war crimes, generating vast quantities of digital evidence including drone footage, satellite imagery, timestamped social media posts, intercepted communications, and witness testimonies. Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin stated that “analyzing this amount of evidence would be virtually impossible without modern IT solutions.”

Mass Surveillance Infrastructure as Evidence Processing

Palantir’s software combines intelligence and satellite imagery to build comprehensive maps of evidence, establishing proximity of Russian equipment to crime scenes, correlating photographs uploaded to social media, and aggregating data from multiple sources. The system processes drone footage of bombardments, timestamped Telegram posts, intercepted chatter, and satellite passes, helping investigators correlate, tag, and structure evidence for use in courts. The partnership enabled investigators across Europe to pool and process data related to allegations of unlawful killing, rape, torture, and destruction. Palantir provided the war crimes processing services free of charge, according to company spokespeople.

Normalizing Surveillance Systems Through Humanitarian Applications

The war crimes prosecution partnership represented a strategic pivot for Palantir, using humanitarian goals to normalize mass surveillance infrastructure that had faced widespread criticism when deployed against civilian populations. Human rights organizations including Amnesty International had previously condemned Palantir for creating an “intricate web of surveillance tools” used by governments to track asylum seekers and arrest individuals. By rebranding identical data fusion and analysis capabilities as tools for justice and accountability, Palantir demonstrated how surveillance companies could rehabilitate their public image while expanding their technological reach and creating dependencies in vulnerable societies.

Creating Post-War Surveillance Infrastructure

The partnership extended far beyond temporary war crimes documentation. By integrating Palantir’s systems deeply into Ukraine’s prosecutorial infrastructure during a crisis, the company established technical dependencies and institutional relationships that would persist after the conflict ended. The massive investment in training prosecutors, standardizing evidence workflows around Palantir’s platforms, and integrating the technology with European justice systems created path dependencies that would make it difficult for Ukraine to restrict or abandon Palantir’s surveillance tools once emergency conditions subsided. This pattern mirrored how “temporary” surveillance measures introduced during crises become permanent fixtures of government infrastructure.

Significance

The Palantir war crimes partnership revealed how surveillance companies exploit humanitarian crises to normalize and expand mass data collection systems. By offering “free” services during emergencies, these companies create technical dependencies, train government personnel on their platforms, and establish themselves as indispensable infrastructure before democratic oversight can be applied. The partnership also demonstrated how identical technologies deployed for military targeting and mass surveillance could be rebranded as tools for justice and accountability, making it politically difficult to challenge their expansion. Most critically, the initiative showed how war zones serve as testing and deployment environments for surveillance systems that would face legal and ethical scrutiny in democratic peacetime contexts, with the technologies and institutional relationships established during conflicts forming the foundation for permanent domestic surveillance infrastructure.