How this war is read while it happens and written down afterwards: open-source tracking, the 2022 buildup, and the history being assembled in real time.
This war is being read as it happens by people with satellite imagery, social video and spreadsheets, and written into history at the same time. Both processes are visible here.
The 2021 buildup was assembled largely from open sources, including soldiers posting their own trains on TikTok, and it broke the pattern of every earlier war scare. What made it readable was not secret access but a willingness to weigh the evidence against the base rate of false alarms rather than defer to it.
The same instinct runs through the historical material: veterans of 2014 describing an army that no longer exists, and participants recording what happened before the account hardens.
Drawn from Episode 1
Rob Lee on how civilian TikTok videos of Russian trains, a record Black Sea naval deployment, 85% of BTGs moved and no covering exercise separated the pre-invasion buildup from the war scares of 2016 to 2018.
Get an email when a new episode drops. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Ukraine Military History Institute