OTTAWA — Some of the most compelling elements in Ukraine’s digital-savvy PR campaign against Russia’s invasion are apparent violations of the Geneva Conventions, war-crimes experts tell The Logic.

Ukrainians have been trying to rally support for their fight with the help of videos and memes. Some showcase Ukrainians’ doughty resistance, from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s demonstrations that he hasn’t left Kyiv to a musical tribute to Bayraktar attack drones. Sunflower-Seed Baba became an icon. Red Pants Guy’s fearlessness in the face of Russian gunfire is amazing.

More darkly, the authorities show what Russian attacks are doing to their cities.

And then there are the prisoner videos.

Some show Russian troops phoning home—telling their mothers they are alive and being treated decently and that the Ukrainian people don’t believe they need Russia to liberate them. Others show soldiers being interrogated. They come from individuals, but also from institutions like the Ukrainian military’s general staff.

With one exception below, The Logic is choosing not to link to them, because of what the Geneva Conventions say about them.

What are the Geneva Conventions, exactly? A set of agreements, negotiated over decades, on how warring states are to conduct themselves. They got their last major revision in 1949, after the Second World War, “owing to the changes that had occurred in the conduct of warfare and the consequences thereof, as well as in the living condition of peoples” since the previous versions had been agreed to in 1929. They lay out how combatants are to treat each other’s wounded, prisoners and civilians.

What they say about prisoners: The International Committee of the Red Cross is “the definitive word” on the conventions, said Nicole Barrett, a law professor at the University of British Columbia who has been a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and a defence advisor for detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

The Red Cross has tweeted summaries of the conventions as they apply to the war in Ukraine, including one that flatly says prisoners “must be treated with dignity, and not exposed to public curiosity—like circulating images on social media.”

The text of the convention on the treatment of prisoners of war says they must be protected “particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity,” and they are “entitled in all circumstances to respect for their persons and their honour.”

An official commentary on the convention says this language arose from practices dating back to ancient Rome, but repeated in the first and second world wars: warring states would parade prisoners in public to humiliate them and intimidate enemy civilians or boost morale at home, depending where the display was.

“In modern conflicts, the prohibition also covers … the disclosure of photographic and video images, recordings of interrogations or private conversations or personal correspondence or any other private data, irrespective of which public communication channel is used, including the internet,” the commentary says.

“When a new situation arises, you go back to the ethos of the rules,” Barrett said.

Who’s responsible: The Geneva Conventions apply to “High Contracting Parties” and their agents. Countries, in other words (including both Russia and Ukraine). They are responsible for troops and other officials who answer to their governments.

But civilians are not bound by the same rules.

“Civilians have some individual obligations under international humanitarian law, e.g. not to mistreat prisoners of war,” René Provost, a law professor and founding director of McGill University’s Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, told The Logic by email. “It is not clear that posting a video would be a breach of this obligation.”

So if a squad of Russian soldiers surrenders to Ukrainian soldiers (even if they’re just lightly trained militia members), the Ukrainians definitely should not post videos of those Russians. If they surrender to civilians, however, videos from those civilians would at least not obviously violate the Geneva Conventions.

The conventions apply to Russia and Ukraine equally: The conventions make no distinction between invader and invaded, Barrett said.

“It is challenging to recommend that the underdog follow all the laws of war,” Barrett acknowledged, particularly in the face of evidence that Russia has deliberately attacked civilians.

The conventions do create a special category of “grave breaches,” such as killing civilians or prisoners, destroying property without military justification and taking hostages. Treating prisoners with indignity is not a grave breach.

If I retweet one of these videos, am I committing a war crime? Because the obligations under the conventions land on warring parties and their agents, if you’re at home in Canada with a laptop, no. But if you spread material that should never have been posted, you might be aggravating one. That’s a moral question more than a legal one.

How the social media platforms are reacting: At Google, which operates YouTube, “our teams are working quickly to remove content that violates our policies and connect people to authoritative news sources,” spokesperson Lauren Skelly said by email.

The company has removed 1,000 channels and 15,000 videos for violating community standards, she said, but that covers all grounds—misinformation, hate speech and graphic content. She did not directly answer The Logic’s question about violations of the Geneva Conventions.

“We don’t have anything to share on this,” wrote Lisa Laventure of Meta, the parent of Facebook. She referred to an extensive post about Meta’s response to the war in Ukraine, though it doesn’t address anything related to prisoner videos.

Twitter did not respond to The Logic’s inquiry.

Another grey area: Captured soldiers have the right not to be paraded before the public, even digitally, but Barrett pointed out they also have other basic human rights, including the right to free expression.

In one extraordinary video, three apparent prisoners who identify themselves as police officers sent to Ukraine in the invasion give a press conference before the backdrop of a Ukrainian news agency. One who does most of the talking says he’s a lieutenant-colonel in a federal Russian force, insists he’s speaking freely, takes questions calmly, and says the people of Russia are brainwashed. He’s seen the truth, he says, and wants to do what he can to share it with Russians, including by imploring Ukraine to spare Russian troops and let them go home to tell people the reality of the war.

Police officers sent into another country as part of an invasion count as combatants, Barrett said. Under international law, Ukraine has to treat them like soldiers—so they can legally be killed if they’re fighting, but must be protected like other prisoners if they surrender or are captured.

If these three were compelled to speak by the Ukrainians, that would be a violation, she said. But allowing prisoners to give a press conference could be OK if “it was something the prisoners actually wanted to do.”