Six months ago, the world watched in horror as Russia launched airstrikes on Ukraine.
Within hours, Hidenori Watanave, a professor of information design at the University of Tokyo, saw on Twitter an aerial shot of a site that had been attacked — the Chuhuiv air base in eastern Ukraine. The image was posted by another Japanese researcher, Taichi Furuhashi, accompanied by the message: “I have geo-referenced on Google Earth two images shot on Feb. 24 and released by (U.S. satellite imaging firm) Planet.”
Watanave immediately responded. He took one of the images and geographical data for the air base posted by Furuhashi, a professor at Aoyama Gakuin University whom he knew well from a previous research collaboration, and published them on Cesium, a digital earth platform. This marked the beginning of their joint project — Satellite Images Map of Ukraine — which is ongoing.
To date, Watanave and his collaborators have mapped over 500 visuals, documenting how the war has unfolded and ravaged the country, destroying not only military facilities but also homes, theaters and kindergartens.
As the project’s title suggests, Watanave initially relied on aerial images made public by private-sector companies such as Maxar Technologies, Blacksky and Planet Labs. These companies — whose clients include governments, militaries and businesses — share a sample of the visual data they collect using proprietary satellites, partly for corporate social responsibility reasons and partly for publicity, Watanave said. But they don’t disclose detailed locations of objects shown in the images.
That’s where Watanave and his collaborators come in. They look for precise locations on Google Earth, zooming in on streets, buildings and other landmarks. After identifying locations, they publish the images on the Cesium website. Their painstaking efforts have helped viewers get a broader understanding of the war.
“When you put an image of the attacked air base on a map, you will immediately notice that it’s just 30 kilometers from the city of Kharkiv and less than 100 km away from the border with Russia,” Watanave said. “Then you can guess why Russians attacked this base as they embarked on their invasion of Ukraine — they probably wanted to fend off a counterattack by Ukrainian airplanes.”
Watanave soon realized, however, that commercial satellite pictures alone were not enough to tell the story.
“Images from the front lines are not provided because they may show where Ukrainian military vehicles are, which could be used by Russia. We also see pictures of Mariupol after the city was razed, but not ones showing the brutal destruction.”
He now uses other tools, such as FIRMS, which provides near real-time fire data around the world. Originally developed by NASA to monitor wildfires, the site’s data indicates where battles are intensifying in Ukraine. He also uses publicly available "synthetic aperture radar" data. SAR periodically scans ground surfaces with microwaves and detects bumps and dips.
Using SAR, Watanave has detected the location of an ongoing construction project at the western end of Mariupol, which Russia occupies.
“Russia, after destroying the city, wants to erase it from people’s memory,” he said. “They have removed all the debris and are now trying to build a completely new Russian city there. We can tell all this from tracking SAR data.”
Watanave is writing a paper outlining how citizens can utilize these open source intelligence tools. Thanks to such technologies, even those without special expertise or expensive equipment can uncover inconvenient truths and counter propaganda, he said.
“Data doesn’t lie. Data keeps on capturing what’s happening on the ground.”
His posts on the Cesium site also include photos contributed by Ukrainian citizens recording and sharing evidence of the destruction of their country.
On Sketchfab, a 3D content platform, citizens have uploaded high-resolution photos from Ukraine. The 3D pictures, which can be easily produced with free scanning apps on smartphones, include interiors of a ruined kindergarten, a children’s library and an apartment building whose walls have fallen down, exposing pieces of furniture inside.
Watanave has contacted people who have posted such images, seeking permission to reuse them and asking where they were taken. Citizens have been very cooperative, he says.
“The details of a destroyed kindergarten cannot be shown by satellites taking shots from the sky and won’t be reported by the mass media,” he said. “But they reveal the kind of damage that has really caused psychological pain to local people.
"This project started out with the geo-referencing of satellite images, but I feel it’s only natural that it has evolved this way, to incorporate scientific data and pictures taken by humans.”
Watanave, who has built digital archives showing people’s experiences of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, as well as text and visual accounts of atomic bombing survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, said he also wants to expand the Ukrainian project in the future by adding in people’s stories, hopefully collaborating with Ukrainian citizen groups.
“It may be hard to fight a giant, violent force, but if each of the billions of people on Earth keeps plugging away at what they can do, it might add up to become a major force. It might reach people in Russia as well.”
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