If live war reporting on television was one of the hallmarks of Operation Desert Storm, commonly known as the Gulf War, in 1991, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the first conflict in history to be followed, almost broadcast live, with near-real-time datasets. Thanks largely to Geoint and OSINT.
Satellite imagery did play a visible role in the Syrian conflict, and the war against ISIS in that region, or even in the Afghan conflict till recently, but this near-real-time explosion in publicly available data is the first time ever.
Rise in commercial satellite operators
And just as the number of private satellites in the orbits have gone up, so have the types of technologies and sensors. So, whether it’s high resolution imagery providing information 24×7, or synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites providing night-time images or at times with cloud cover, or satellites that can monitor radio frequency (RF) to uncover troop movements or GPS jamming, the intelligence fuelling the information war between Russia and the NATO is not coming from state actors alone, but from a cross section of private geospatial intelligence providers, Maxar Technologies and BlackSky being the prominent ones.
Image collected over Ivankiv, Ukraine on March 1 shows Russian military convoy passing through scorched greenbelt straddling the Teleriv river northwest of Kyiv. Image courtesy of BlackSky
Some of these private operators such as Capella Space, ICEYE and Satellogic are actively working with the Ukraine government. Ukraine’s Minister of Digital transformation had also made a public appeal seeking cooperation of the commercial satellite industry to help them respond to the Russian aggression.
In an interesting development last week, HawkEye 360, which operates a constellation of RF monitoring satellites, reported on March 4 that it detected massive GPS interferences along the Ukraine-Belarus border shortly before the Russian invasion started in February The activity was detected just north of Chernobyl, within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
ALSO READ: HawkEye 360 Detects GPS Jamming Along Ukraine Border Prior to Russian Invasion
OSINT putting the pieces together
Similarly, a growing army of open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysts are pouring through Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and other social media feeds to offer real-time analysis of the developments on ground. Through analysis of posted images and videos, and even Google Maps data, OSINT researchers are using to understand what is happening in and around Ukraine. Geolocation is just one of the methods, while others include further digging deep into the publicly available satellite datasets to locate movements of troops or refugees, or extent of attack on a particular area. In one interesting case, a Twitter user tracked automated air-traffic data to keep tabs on Russian oligarchs’ jets.
Over the past decade, OSINT has emerged as an important tool to track conflicts or disturbances, as smartphones in every pocket and growth in social media have led to an explosion in information from difficult-to-access war-zones – in the form of videos, photos, and other data. The OSINT community works in tandem with fellow researchers to verify the location of these images or videos, often overlaying them on real-time Google Maps or available data, satellite or otherwise, to piece together the details of a rapidly changing situation on the frontlines.
Admittedly, such real time information could prove to be detrimental too. Google temporarily disabled the live traffic features on Google Maps in Ukraine to protect users’ safety after OSINT users were found reporting on, albeit out of concern, unusual “traffic jams” at the Ukrainian border on Google Maps.
Increase in number of commercial satellites orbiting Earth, evolution in types of sensors, OSINT and the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Big Data Analytics, are changing the name of the intelligence game.
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“Vast new sources of publicly available information combined with Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) capabilities have revolutionized the way we think about data and insight. With the help of unclassified cloud capability, the intelligence community (IC) can reap the benefits of this revolution,” the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) said in a report released in January, barely weeks before Russia launched its attack on Ukraine.
However, the CSIS has also warned that the US intelligence community has been slow to embrace these advantages. “Treating these new forms of open-source intelligence as an afterthought, however, will blind the IC to critical information—information the United States’ adversaries have already embraced and employed,” it added.
