Soon after President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian military to invade Ukraine early on Thursday, plumes of black smoke billowed out of a burning vehicle on the tarmac of what appeared to be a military airstrip.
The video showing the scene immediately started making the rounds on Twitter after being first shared on a Ukrainian Telegram channel.
In the video, even the heavy breathing of the man holding the camera is audible over the sounds of broken glass and rubble crunching underfoot.
According to the Time magazine, Thomas van Linge, a 25-year-old based in Amsterdam, who verified and uploaded it to Twitter, wrote online: “The video depicted utter destruction after an explosion at the military airfield in Lutsk, western Ukraine, just 90 kilometers away from the border with Poland.
It appeared to be some of the day’s first evidence that the Russian assault on Ukraine was confined not just to the country’s south and east, but military targets across the country, even those just miles away from a border with a Nato member-state, he added.
Another video shared by van Linge on Thursday morning purportedly showed Russian military vehicles advancing north into Ukraine from Crimea. This time, the source of the footage was a public-facing CCTV camera trained on a road leading off the peninsula.
When data enthusiast Oliver Alexander saw online security camera footage showing military trucks on a Ukrainian road hours after the Russian invasion, he noticed a familiar detail.
"You could see that they had diagonal lines painted on them, which is what was spotted on units based in Crimea. So you could tell they were coming from there," he told Reuters, referring to the Russian-annexed Crimean Peninsula.
The 28-year-old took some stills and posted them on Twitter, marking the location they were taken and giving his followers a sense of the speed at which Russian forces were moving north.
The tweets of van Linge and Alexander are among a torrent that have been posted online since early Thursday morning by internet sleuths using a practice known as open-source intelligence (OSINT) to document the Russian invasion.
And the number of such contents keeps growing.
OSINT is a field of social media analysis that over the last decade has emerged from obscurity into a central feature of modern war reporting, as social media and smartphone access have allowed videos, photos, and other data from war-zones around the world to proliferate.
"OSINT has been really phenomenally deployed in a way that we haven't seen before," said Justin Crow, a researcher at Sussex University in Britain whose work focuses on social media intelligence, referring to the Ukraine conflict.
The era of OSINT
The OSINT sector has boomed in recent years with the development of tools aiding data analysis, and is now crowded by reporters, activists, researchers and amateur enthusiasts - who often work together as they try to verify information.
The work entails gathering publicly available resources, such as social media videos and photos, and looking at it through "a real time magnifying glass", said Crow.
That could include, for example, analysing metadata to find out when or where a video was taken or cross-referencing images with satellite photos to verify locations and contextualize footage, he said.
"(OSINT's) role is really about clarifying information for the broader public because ... governments have this capability in house already," said Crow.
Before missiles started pounding Ukraine, OSINT sleuths played an important role in keeping tabs on the military buildup that preceded the invasion, assessing troop deployments with satellite images.
Hurdles
Amid the intense fighting, Twitter blocked several researchers’ accounts sharing details about Russian military activity in Ukraine—but later admitted it "mistakenly" did so.
Shockingly, many researchers sharing Russia-Ukraine information found their Twitter accounts "unexpectedly" suspended since late Wednesday.
Twitter`s Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, on Thursday said in a tweet that the company`s human moderation team made the mistake.
"A small number of human errors as part of our work to proactively address manipulated media resulted in these incorrect enforcements. We`re fixing the issue and reaching out directly to the affected folks," he post
