The Washington Whiz Kids Mapping the War in Ukraine

In the 560 days since Russia launched its full-scale assault on Ukraine, daily reports produced by the Washington-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War have become some of the most widely cited authorities on the state of the conflict. ISW’s maps, which are updated daily to reflect needlepoint changes on the front line, have been used by the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, the Washington Post, and CNN in recent months. 

Detailed battlefield updates were once the sole preserve of militaries, intelligence agencies, and embedded journalists. ISW’s Ukraine updates underscore how open-source intelligence has drastically changed public understanding of war. The team’s analysts, many of whom were not yet out of high school when Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, methodically mine the internet on a daily basis to build a near real time picture of the war’s progress which has been used by the media, governments, and humanitarian agencies in understanding the war’s progress. 

“It allows people who don’t have access to classified information a much deeper understanding of what’s happening at a tactical, operational, and strategic level in Ukraine,” said retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Robert Sharp, who served as the director of the National Geospatial Intelligence agency, speaking about ISW’s work. 

ISW’s map of the front line, a frayed red line scored across southeastern Ukraine, is made up of thousands of coordinates of Russian and Ukrainian positions, each one painstakingly identified, verified, and continually updated by the ISW team. Beyond the media, their work has been cited by researchers with the demining organization the Halo Trust, U.N aid agencies, and NASA Harvest projects, which seek to calculate the war’s impact on global food supplies. 

The man behind the map is 26-year-old George Barros, who leads ISW’s four-person Geospatial Intelligence Team. Sitting in a spartan office in Washington, D.C., on a Friday afternoon in mid-August, Barros whirls the wheel of his computer’s mouse, deftly navigating between villages that most Ukrainians, let alone others around the world, likely had never heard of before the war.

Maps by the Institute for the Study of War show the assessed control of terrain in Ukraine and the main maneuver axes (left), as well as the assessed control of terrain around Pyatykhatky and Robotyne, as of Sept. 5 at 3 p.m. ET.Institute for the Study of War

The bread and butter of their work is open-source geolocation, a technique brought to prominence by groups such as Bellingcat, which uses context clues from images and footage of the conflict—a bend in a river or the markings on a tank—to pinpoint when and where an image was taken. Systematized and coupled with other powerful tools, such as NASA’s real-time map of global fires and commercially available radar and satellite imagery, the mix has enabled Barros’s team to build out a sophisticated picture of who controls the terrain in an ever-shifting battle thousands of miles away. 

The approach is not without error. “The process is not about producing the perfect map every time. It’s a process about producing the best map that’s possible given the evidence and information that’s accessible at the time,” Barros said.

The early days of the conflict were the most chaotic as Russian forces advanced rapidly along numerous lines of attack, coming within nine miles of central Kyiv in the early weeks of the war. But as the fighting has concentrated in eastern Ukraine, it has become easier to trace shifts in the front line. “The kind of debates that we’re having, it’s about not kilometers. The debates are like, ‘what’s happening at the hundreds or tens of meters level?’” Barros said. 

While ISW’s work has become a go-to source for maps and updates on the conflict, some seasoned military analysts, who declined to speak on the record for this piece, find them to be overly bullish about the performance of the Ukrainian military. They also criticized the media’s over-reliance on the institute’s battlefield updates, noting that analytical misfires by the young team have ended up being replicated many times over in the press.

In May, following a drone attack on the Kremlin, ISW’s daily report speculated that it could have been perpetrated by the Russian authorities as a false flag operation to set the stage for a wider social mobilization around the war effort. In a thread on X, formerly Twitter, Nathan Ruser, an analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said, “it’s irresponsible to throw these largely baseless theories out there knowing how they’ll be consumed.”

“These updates … have become incredibly incorporated into the process that media uses to write the first draft of history for this war,” wrote Ruser, who did not respond to a request for comment.

Sharp, the former director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, said that the critiques from experts with deep experience in the subject matter are likely valid, but that there is still value in providing detailed updates for those without access to classified government reports. “There’s value in being that aggregator, and putting that together. And they’re making it widely available,” he said. 

The institute’s Russia team lead, Mason Clark, is the first to acknowledge that the reports are often based on incomplete data. “So much of what we write is a medium confidence assessment,” he said, using language borrowed from the intelligence community. “It’s a running joke on the team that if you [type] Control-F, the most common thing in our updates is, ‘ISW cannot independently confirm this report at this time,’” he said. 

In many ways, Clark shares the frustration of ISW’s critics at the way in which the institute’s assessments are picked up by the media, often shorn of their carefully worded analytical caveats. “We actually published a statement on our methodology back in May, making clear that none of our work should ever be quoted without those probability statements,” he said. 

One of the team’s first major analytic misfires was over the question of whether Russia would invade Ukraine at all. “We thought there was no way the Russians were going to invade because they would be moronic to do so,” Clark said. “We were looking at their force deployments and saying, there’s no way the forces deployed in Belarus would be able to capture Kyiv, this is a terrible command structure, they’re going to face long, hard fighting,” he said. 

The underlying analysis was right: Russian forces were kneecapped by poor planning in the early days of the way. But their ultimate conclusion failed to account for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s obsession with bringing Ukraine to heel at any cost.

When the invasion began, ISW’s Russia team consisted of three people: Barros, Clark, and Kateryna Stepanenko, who graduated college just the year before. What started that day as a quick four-page update spearheaded by Clark on the state of the invasion, as Russian forces streamed across Ukraine’s borders, has since evolved into an eight-person team and a meticulous production process that runs seven days a week. 

The team’s day begins around 8 a.m. with collection, sifting through an extensive list of more than 100 online sources, including Twitter and Telegram accounts as well as updates from various parties to the conflict. By lunchtime, the day’s collection document has grown to 41 pages of color-coded notes on every major dimension of the conflict. 

The sense of mission is palpable as the team works in near silence at two neat rows of white desks in ISW’s office in central Washington, D.C. One point of levity: The meme wall, which was dominated by pictures of Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose brutality and public outbursts cast him as one of the arch villains of the conflict. A whiteboard keeps track of bets cast as to when Prigozhin would “fall out of a window,” established months before he died in a plane crash last month. 

Aside from their maps, ISW’s monitoring and translation into English of key accounts on Telegram, a popular messaging app in Russia and Ukraine, has been some of their most widely cited work. Stepanenko, who originally hails from Ukraine, initially began scouring Telegram for updates on the war to make sure her family in the country were safe. “That’s where I noticed we have a big gap in our information,” said Stepanenko, who began systematically building a database of Telegram accounts related to the war, collating them by their various ideological affiliations. 

With no content moderation in a realm already awash with disinformation, Telegram can be a swamp of speculation and falsehoods. But it nevertheless plays a powerful role in shaping public perceptions of the war and can offer a peek into power struggles within the Russian system. 

In Russia, where the media has been tightly muzzled by the Kremlin, hawkish military bloggers such as those active on Telegram have largely remained free to provide some of the most vocal criticism of the war’s progress. Russian officials have also been suspected of using the platform to leak information and stir up scandal amid bureaucratic knife fights. 

“We severely underestimate the power and importance of the information space to Russian officials,” Stepanenko said. She summarized her work: “I just really like Kremlin drama.”