The smartphone war: Soldiers, civilians and satellites give the world a window onto Russian invasion

A month and a half into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we've become so used to the steady stream of videos and images coming from the front lines that it's easy to forget it's not the norm to have a ringside seat to war unless you're fighting in it.

Soldiers sharing cellphone video of missile attacks as they happen; residents posting footage of military units occupying their towns in real time and live streaming from bomb shelters; government officials tweeting drone video of destroyed tank columns and downed aircraft.

All amplified over thousands of Telegram channels, Twitter feeds and TikTok accounts around the world.

"People are basically acting as war reporters, but it's by the tens of thousands," said Samuel Bendett, a research analyst and Russia expert at the Center for Naval Analyses in Arlington, Va. "This war is playing out on our smartphones in ways that no other conflicts probably have so far." 

It's not that there hasn't been footage from active combat shared on social media before. In Syria and Iraq, for example, ISIS and other rebel groups made ample use of drones and cellphones to trumpet victories on social media. But the difference in this war is that much of the footage is coming from the military.

"Most times, professional militaries don't have their phones out filming in the middle of a gun fight," said Kyle Glen, one of a dedicated group of internet sleuths who have been sorting through the reams of video and images coming out of Ukraine and disseminating it for English-speaking audiences, primarily on Twitter.

"I am quite surprised at how much footage there is of the actual fighting."

Glen, 29, started tracking what's known as open source intelligence, or OSINT, when the war in Eastern Ukraine broke out in 2014 on his own Twitter feed and one he started with two other OSINT enthusiasts called Conflict News. He went on to follow the wars in Syria and Iraq.

Glen, who is based in Swansea, Wales, and fellow OSINTers put a lot of effort into sorting wheat from chaff. 

Verifying the provenance and veracity of footage often requires a hive-mind approach, with some contributing specialized expertise and others simply the doggedness to dissect and cross-reference sources. They often share insights on the messaging platform Discord before releasing the content elsewhere.

"There are people who are, you know, just absolute wizards at locating where a video was shot. So I will reach out to those people … if I need help confirming something," Glen said. "A lot of OSINT is just very collaborative." 

Earlier this week, for example, a Russian channel on the messaging platform Telegram, where the bulk of war news within Ukraine has been shared, posted what were purportedly Western-made rocket launchers seized from the Ukrainians by the Russian military.

"Another OSINT account realized that these were … one-shot rocket launchers that had been used and discarded," Glen said.  

Some OSINT sites, such as Bellingcat, have been around for years while others, such as Ukraine Weapons Tracker, sprang up to track specific aspects of this war.