Extra Content: Imagery & Artillery (example attached)

As you all probably know - purchased satellite imagery is a key asset for gathering evidence on the war in Ukraine, and particularly for checking claims around strikes. Both sides make sometimes quite specific claims on strikes, and these can often be verified or debunked by getting a well time image and doing some BDA.

Another are where they're useful is tracking the depletion of reserve equipment from Russian depots. Here, people will usually use cheaply available imagery - stuff that costs maybe $80+US per image. Sometimes however you can't afford to use imagery that may be 6 months out of date, and so it's worth paying for a satellite to take a custom shot at a much greater price.

Recently I did that for a major Russian artillery storage facility - because in his excellent recent work, CovertCabal had used an image from mid 2022 for his count which seemed too out of date to give a good estimate.

Once these image come in (an example attached here), the counting process usually has to be a team effort to reduce the error rate when counting smudges and blobs.

The usual method for something like this would be to have multiple people each conduct rough quick counts. Based on those counts you'd find image blocks where you had near consensus and those where a much closer look is required. It's a fairly basic approach but it makes these counts doable in a practical amount of time.

Each image is usually broken down into sectors to ease the checking and comparison process.

In this case, the first pass comparison suggest a drop of approximately 1,500 artillery pieces between July 2023 and the comparison image used in this case. Based on past experiences, that may vary to anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 by the time all checks are done. I may share some of those findings once they firm up.

For those of you who are interested in doing a small practice along at home - I've attached a comparison image from 2022 of one sector in the South East of the facility.

Most of this work never makes it onto my YT - it's really just about making sure that when I make general statements, I have evidence sitting behind it.

That said, a bunch of Patreon money goes towards funding this kind of stuff, and I thought you might find the process interesting.

If you do (or don't) please let me know below so I know if more of this kind of content would be interesting to those of you here on Patreon.