Ukraine war: what satellite images of Russian tanks can – and can’t – tell us
- Vehicles from the now-infamous convoy near Kyiv appear to have taken up new positions, but does this signal an unforced error or imminent assault?
- Publicly available images and videos are allowing the conflict to be tracked in an unprecedented way, but technology has its limitations
Satellite images showing the dispersal of a now-infamous Russian military column north of Kyiv are proving both the extraordinary ability of publicly available technologies to track the war in Ukraine as it happens – and their limitations.
The high definition images from Maxar Technologies Inc., dated March 10, showed artillery pieces and tanks from the column in new positions in the surrounding woods, fields and towns, in particular Hostomel, the site of an airport that has been fought over since the start of the invasion.
Yet despite the quantity of so-called open source intelligence, there no was reliable way to discern what the redeployment will mean. Some people saw an imminent assault on Ukraine’s capital, others an unforced Russian error that is left the units vulnerable to Ukrainian attack.
“It’s probably a mixture of both and completely in line with Russian military doctrine, but why now, we really don’t know,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a research fellow at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, focused on the future of war. “The fog of war still applies,” he said, regardless of the unprecedented levels of monitoring.
Even before the February 24 invasion, officials, military analysts, journalists and data sleuths alike were poring over images and videos uploaded to social media platforms such as Telegram, YouTube and Twitter as they tried to assess the extent of Russia’s deployments near the Ukrainian border.