Ukraine war offers intel bonanza for Russia watchers

Russia’s massive assault on Ukraine is providing Western intelligence agencies and analysts with a rare live opportunity to verify their assessments of the Russian army’s strengths and weaknesses in the field.

The scale of the deployment means Moscow’s military equipment, methods, doctrine and especially its weak points are on full show — including via vast quantities of open-source data, images and video.

“What people are realizing is that what they imagined [about the threat from this country] does not correspond to the reality of this deployment,” says Alexandre Papaemmanuel, a professor at Paris’ Institute for Political Studies (IEP).

The Ukraine war is exposing “logistics that aren’t up to date and ineffective coordination” on Russia’s part, he tells AFP.

Information publicly available to spies, analysts and experts on the war in Ukraine ranges from high-quality day and night satellite photos from private firms in almost real time to images of fighting, captured equipment and alleged Russian atrocities posted by the Ukrainian defenders and civilians.

Recent conflicts like the Syrian civil war have thrown out an increasing volume of online data to be pored over by a growing community of so-called “open-source intelligence” (OSINT) analysts, as well as government spies. But the flow of unclassified data from Ukraine is on a different scale.

“Western and Ukrainian intelligence agencies’ targets are much more visible and accessible,” says Damien van Puyvelde, a University of Glasgow intelligence researcher.

They will be using “intelligence from images, electromagnetic, and doubtless partly also intelligence stemming from human sources,” he adds.

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