By Jay Heisler, Freelance Canadian Journalist
Bio: Irina Tsukerman (LinkedIn Profile) is a New York-based national security and human rights attorney, geopolitical analyst, and strategic adviser whose work focuses on information warfare, geopolitical risk, foreign influence, and international security. Born in Ukraine, she has written and spoken extensively about Russia’s war against Ukraine, Russian influence operations, sanctions and sanctions circumvention, international security, and the changing geopolitical relationships connecting Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the broader international system. Her analysis has appeared in Kyiv Post and numerous U.S. and international publications, and she is frequently interviewed by media outlets around the world on national security and geopolitical developments.
Tsukerman is President of Scarab Rising, Inc., a media and security strategic advisory, and a Board Member of The Washington Outsider Center for Information Warfare. She is a Fellow at the Arabian Peninsula Institute and represents Ukraine’s Diplomatic Legal Hub in the United States. Her professional affiliations include the North American Society for Intelligence History and the European International Studies Association. Her work brings together legal analysis, information warfare, geopolitical research, and regional expertise, with particular attention to Ukraine and Russia, the Middle East, foreign influence networks, and the ways in which developments across seemingly separate theaters increasingly shape one another.
1. Is OSINT seeing an increasing relevance in geopolitics circles?
Yes. I have seen OSINT become considerably more important in geopolitical circles because the information environment surrounding international affairs has changed beyond recognition. Governments retain collection capabilities unavailable to the public, but analysts outside government can now independently examine developments that would once have been extremely difficult to verify. The important development is not simply that more information exists. It is that different forms of publicly available information can be combined to reconstruct military, political, economic, and informational developments with considerable sophistication.
Some of the most obvious changes have occurred in military and security analysis, where commercial satellite imagery and publicly available visual evidence have dramatically expanded what researchers can establish independently. Developments at military installations can be followed over time, damage to strategic infrastructure can be assessed against earlier imagery, and changes in deployment or construction can be placed alongside political and operational developments. The cumulative picture is often much more valuable than an isolated discovery because a seemingly insignificant change can acquire meaning when it coincides with activity elsewhere. At the same time, this creates one of the central analytical problems with OSINT: establishing that something happened is not the same thing as understanding why it happened. A movement that looks like preparation for an operation can reflect reinforcement, rotation, logistical necessity, political signaling, or deliberate deception. The analyst still has to understand the military doctrine, political objectives, institutional behavior, and historical context behind what appears on the screen. Just as an example, the debates over whether or not Russia’s troop movements in the months leading up to the full scale invasion indicated the intent for an attack, have now become settled in hindsight, and yet different intelligence agencies argued vociferously over the interpretation which led to conflicting announcements, information flow to Zelensky’s government, and policies. Similarly, today, OSINT by independent analysts could bridge the gap between the political rhetoric coming rom the Baltic governments denying a likely potential attack and various intelligence agencies, including from those countries, that claim that a hybrid provocation is increasingly imminent.
Economic intelligence has undergone a comparable transformation, particularly as sanctions, export controls, industrial capacity, energy, technology access, and supply-chain vulnerabilities have become increasingly more important instruments of geopolitical competition. Russia is an obvious example because there is a tremendous difference between announcing sanctions against Moscow and establishing what those sanctions actually accomplish six months or two years later. Publicly accessible commercial information can help reveal whether Russian industries are obtaining restricted components through new intermediaries (it is!), whether trading relationships have migrated to different jurisdictions, whether procurement costs are rising, and whether apparent disruptions are temporary inconveniences or genuine constraints on military production. This is where OSINT can become particularly useful because it allows analysts to test political claims about economic pressure against observable adaptation by the target. Of course, other contexts are just relevant, such as establishing contributions to the war by China, Iran, and North Korea.
The same approach can illuminate political relationships and foreign influence, although this requires considerably more caution. Public records and other open information can help reconstruct connections among political figures, governments, commercial interests, lobbying organizations, advocacy groups, research institutions, and media organizations. This is something that I and my team at The Washington Outsider Center for Information Warfare are using part of our investigative practice, using OSINT tools and techniques to find these types of connections and then analyze them for relevance. A single relationship may mean very little, while a pattern developing over several years can help explain how certain interests acquire access or how particular narratives become embedded within policy discussions. At the same time, association cannot simply be converted into an allegation of coordination or misconduct. Serious analysis has to establish what the evidence actually demonstrates and remain explicit about where inference begins. That distinction is especially important in foreign-influence research, where politically attractive conclusions can easily run ahead of the evidence. Moreover, OSINT alone may not always be independently sufficient to provide conclusive evidence. OSINT can help gather clues and track patterns, but other forms of intelligence may still be necessary to fill in the gaps or to provide corroboration. An example of successful application of OSINT from our practical experience is a major report we published after a year-long investigation titled “Shadow Networks” https://www.thewashingtonoutsidercenter.org/shadow-networks-a-longitudinal-investigation-of-transnational-influence-organized-crime-and-political-access-in-the-united-states/. While the report stands alone based on open source evidence, it also mentions human sources as evidence, which provides additional weight to the interpretation of what was gathered through OSINT, and which, given the complex geopolitical context, could arguably be interpreted ambiguously or in more than one way.
Information warfare complicates the entire process because the open information environment is simultaneously a source of evidence and a theater of operations. Social media has made it possible to observe how narratives emerge, mutate, migrate between audiences, and eventually acquire legitimacy far beyond their original source. The most effective influence operations are frequently built around something real: an authentic grievance, a selectively presented fact, a historical memory, an economic concern, or an existing political division. A foreign actor does not necessarily have to invent the vulnerability it exploits. It can identify something already present within a society and manipulate its salience, interpretation, or emotional resonance. Consequently, I am often less interested in whether one isolated claim is technically true than in why that particular claim surfaced at that particular moment, which audience it was designed to reach, how it was amplified, and which strategic objective benefited from the resulting discussion.
My legal background inevitably affects how I approach all of this because there is a substantial difference between finding an interesting piece of information and establishing something that can support a serious evidentiary conclusion. Open-source material increasingly contributes to investigations involving sanctions violations, foreign influence, corruption, human rights abuses, and potential war crimes, but the evidentiary threshold becomes much more demanding once the material is expected to withstand legal or institutional scrutiny. An authentic photograph can still have a false or an inaccurate caption. A genuine corporate record can establish ownership without establishing operational control. A financial relationship may warrant further investigation without proving improper conduct. This is where legal standards such as “preponderance of evidence” and “beyond reasonable doubt” come into play! A video can establish that an event occurred without telling us who ordered it or what the intent behind it was. Provenance, chronology, preservation, authentication, corroboration, and context therefore become central to the analytical process as opposed to the technical formalities added afterward. In other words, OSINT gives us the “who, what, when,” and sometimes even the “how”, but not necessarily the “why”.
What concerns me increasingly is that the enormous quantity of available information can create a false sense of omniscience. Analysts may have access to thousands of individual data points and still be looking at a systematically incomplete picture. Alas, that certainly happens with US government agencies on a regular basis, which is why we have seen a number of major public intelligence failures linked to significant security and geopolitical developments in recent years (i.e. underestimating Taliban’s influence in Afghanistan before the fall of Kabul, misinterpreting the chain of events related to Prigozhin’s uprising, and of course, divergent and contradictory perspectives related to assessing Russia’s and Ukraine’s relative military strength, and potential for achieving strategic objectives). The activities producing the largest public footprint are not necessarily the activities carrying the greatest strategic significance, and sophisticated technical tools do not necessarily eliminate confirmation bias, inadequate regional expertise, or flawed assumptions. There is a tendency in some circles to believe that enough data will eventually resolve ambiguity. Geopolitics does not work that way because political intent, internal deliberations, clandestine relationships, and strategic deception frequently remain invisible regardless of how much publicly available material has been collected.
Adversaries have also become much more conscious of the OSINT environment and can manipulate the very indicators researchers use to understand them. That’s why data poisoning has become such a central part of discussion at security and stratcom gatherings when discussing AI, OSINT, and information warfare. A government that knows satellite imagery is being examined can alter observable activity. Authentic material can be deliberately released because someone wants analysts to discover it and draw a particular conclusion. Genuine information can be placed within a misleading chronology or surrounded by false interpretation. Some of these things have always been a normal part of intelligence activity and cognitive warfare, but new tools and increasing reliance on online sources and have escalated their use. In other words, verification solves only one part of the intelligence problem. Knowing that something is real does not tell you why you are seeing it, what you are not seeing, or whether the actor responsible for making it visible wants you to misunderstand its significance.
That is why I think the expansion of OSINT actually makes substantive geopolitical expertise more important. Technology can help establish relationships and identify patterns, but it cannot substitute for understanding the actors themselves. Russian military activity has to be interpreted through knowledge of Russian institutions, political objectives, historical behavior, and strategic culture. Sanctions circumvention makes little sense without understanding the industries, jurisdictions, and commercial relationships involved. Foreign influence cannot be analyzed intelligently without understanding both the external actor and the domestic political environment it is attempting to penetrate or manipulate.
For me, the greatest contribution of OSINT is therefore not so much the democratization of individual pieces of information but the possibility of connecting developments that were previously much harder to examine together. Military behavior can be evaluated alongside industrial production and economic adaptation. Sanctions can be assessed through what happens to procurement rather than what governments announce. (Participation in defense economics workshops earlier this years really opened my eyes to the discrepancy between the two~!) Political relationships can be examined in conjunction with commercial interests and information operations. When these connections are approached with appropriate skepticism and genuine subject-matter expertise, OSINT becomes an extraordinarily powerful means of testing narratives and reconstructing how states exercise power. That is why it has become increasingly central to serious geopolitical analysis, and I expect its relevance to continue growing.
2. How often is OSINT brought up in serious discussions of the war in Ukraine?
As I see it, OSINT is now deeply embedded in serious discussions of the war in Ukraine, although participants do not necessarily stop to identify it as OSINT every time they rely upon it. The war has produced an extraordinary volume of publicly accessible information, and that material has changed how analysts assess battlefield developments, Russian force regeneration, defense-industrial production, sanctions enforcement, foreign military support, war crimes, and information operations. In many respects, Ukraine has become the defining conflict for demonstrating both what OSINT can accomplish and how easily open information can be misunderstood when analysts confuse what they can see with the totality of what is happening.
The military applications are probably the most familiar. Publicly available imagery can document equipment losses, provide evidence concerning strikes against military facilities, reveal changes in defensive positions, and help establish what happened at strategically important locations. Yet even here, some of the most widely circulated conclusions require qualification. Visually confirmed equipment losses provide a defensible minimum rather than a comprehensive accounting. Successful strikes tend to generate imagery while unsuccessful operations frequently leave a much smaller public footprint. A photograph may establish that a particular weapons system was destroyed without telling us whether it can be replaced quickly, whether the loss affects operational capacity, or whether the unit involved possesses substantial reserves. The danger is that an extraordinarily well-documented war can begin to look like a completely transparent war, when it remains anything but transparent.
Where I find OSINT particularly valuable is in moving beyond the immediate battlefield and examining Russia’s ability to sustain a prolonged war. Industrial production, access to foreign technology, government financing, labor constraints, energy revenues, logistical capacity, and external assistance all influence Russia’s ability to regenerate forces and maintain operations. Public information allows analysts to test sweeping claims about the Russian war economy against observable behavior. If Moscow claims that production has increased dramatically, the relevant questions concern what is actually being produced, at what quality, with which components, at what cost, and whether those production levels can be sustained. Similar scrutiny should apply when Western officials claim that particular sanctions have significantly degraded Russian capabilities.
Sanctions circumvention has therefore become one of the most important applications of OSINT to the Ukraine war. Russia has enormous incentives to reorganize procurement relationships and to find intermediaries capable of supplying restricted goods. Investigators can sometimes identify changes in trade patterns, corporate relationships, procurement activity, or the movement of components through third countries. The significance is broader than identifying individual violations, though. These patterns can reveal where sanctions architecture is failing, how quickly Russia adapts to new restrictions, and whether enforcement is keeping pace with increasingly sophisticated circumvention mechanics. We have seen that throughout the war and more recently with identifying Western components in advanced Russian weapons and other technologies.
The same analytical caution applies to foreign support for Russia and to Ukraine’s own rapidly evolving capabilities. Establishing that a weapons transfer occurred does not necessarily establish its strategic effect, just as documenting a spectacular Ukrainian strike does not establish that the underlying capability can be reproduced at scale. One successful operation can prove that something is technically possible while telling us relatively little about inventory, failure rates, production capacity, countermeasures, or the frequency with which the operation can be repeated. The public information environment naturally privileges visible successes, which makes disciplined interpretation particularly important – and difficult. There is a natural tendency for confirmation bias, and for early triumphalism, as part of pressure to produce narratives conforming to the propaganda needs of one’s own “side”.
My interest in OSINT in the Ukrainian context also extends beyond intelligence analysis because there is an increasingly important intersection between open-source investigation, journalism, and international criminal accountability. I recently participated in a Diplomatic Legal Hub discussion in Kyiv on the role of war journalists in documenting war crimes and the implementation of the Berkeley Protocol in Ukraine. That conversation went directly to an issue I consider fundamental: journalists and researchers are collecting very significant quantities of potentially valuable information, but information does not automatically become evidence merely because it is authentic or publicly accessible.
The Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations is particularly important in this respect because it provides a methodological framework for handling publicly available digital material in investigations involving international criminal law, international humanitarian law, and human rights violations. For Ukraine, this has a direct impact on its operations and daily life. The country is dealing with an overwhelming volume of digital material generated during an ongoing war, some of which may eventually become relevant to domestic prosecutions or international proceedings, and is aimed towards that outcome. If potentially significant material is collected without appropriate attention to verification, provenance, preservation, and evidentiary integrity, its future legal usefulness can be compromised even when the underlying information is genuine.
This is also why I believe journalists require much greater OSINT training. A war correspondent will likely encounter potentially significant evidence before a prosecutor, investigator, or specialized documentation organization ever sees it. The journalist’s immediate professional objective may be reporting the story, while the same material could eventually become relevant to establishing a pattern of attacks, identifying perpetrators, reconstructing chronology, or demonstrating knowledge and intent. Understanding how to preserve original material and document its provenance can therefore have consequences extending well beyond publication.
The initiative associated with Giunduz Mammedov is especially important in that regard. Mammedov, who served as Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine from 2019 to 2022 and who now currently holds a senior military law-enforcement role within the Armed Forces of Ukraine, has been pushing the discussion toward practical training and workshops that would give Ukrainian and other journalists stronger OSINT capabilities. I see considerable value in that approach because journalists should not suddenly be transformed into prosecutors or intelligence officers. They should, however, understand when material they encounter possesses evidentiary significance and how careless handling can destroy information that would otherwise contribute to accountability.
Training also has to address verification because the speed of wartime journalism creates pressures that run directly against the patience required for rigorous open-source investigation. Reporters encounter images, witness accounts, official statements, social-media material, and claims circulating in real time, often under a lot of pressure to publish. OSINT methodology can help journalists distinguish what has been established from what remains unverified,to preserve original evidence rather than repeatedly reproducing degraded copies, and to recognize when apparently independent claims actually originate from the same underlying source. Those skills improve journalism even when the material never enters a courtroom.
The Berkeley Protocol discussion also raises a broader institutional question for Ukraine. Over 4 years of full-scale war have produced an enormous decentralized archive held by journalists, civilians, NGOs, military personnel, government institutions, researchers, and international organizations. Some of the most valuable evidence may currently exist in places nobody would immediately think to search. Developing common methodological standards and training people who routinely encounter this information increases the possibility that material collected today will remain usable years from now, when investigators may be attempting to reconstruct events whose witnesses have dispersed and whose physical evidence has disappeared.
There is another reason I think Mammedov’s emphasis on training journalists is strategically significant. Ukraine’s experience is creating expertise that will remain relevant far beyond this particular war. Future conflicts will generate even greater quantities of digital evidence, including synthetic and manipulated material produced with increasingly sophisticated AI tools. Establishing provenance and preserving original data will become more difficult at precisely the moment when courts, journalists, governments, and the public will be confronted with unprecedented volumes of ostensibly documentary evidence. Ukrainian journalists and investigators are already dealing with problems that other societies are likely to encounter with increasing frequency. In that respect, Ukraine once again has become a theater of real-time experimentation and groundbreaking innovation.
Information warfare makes these evidentiary standards even more important, as I posited in my presentation at the Diplomatic Legal hub gathering. Russia has every incentive to challenge authentic evidence of its conduct while simultaneously introducing misleading or manipulated material into the information environment. The resulting contest is not simply over competing narratives. It increasingly concerns whether societies can establish reliable methods for determining what happened and preserving that determination in a form capable of surviving years of political dispute, propaganda, technological change, and legal challenge. Moreover, Russia has tried to shut down the voices of journalists by physically eliminating them through targeting for death or through indefinite detention. For that reason, finding objective ways of preserving not only evidence but authentic and reliable means of interpretation is particularly important.
That is why serious discussions of OSINT in Ukraine have increasingly moved beyond the question of whether open-source information is useful. The more important questions now concern methodology, professional training, evidentiary integrity, and the relationship among journalism, intelligence analysis, legal investigation, and accountability. My participation in the Diplomatic Legal Hub discussion reinforced my view that Ukraine is becoming one of the most important environments in the world for working through these questions in real time. The workshops initiated by Mammedov to strengthen OSINT training for Ukrainian and international journalists are part of that evolution, because the people documenting a war today may also be preserving the evidentiary record on which accountability depends years from now – but much more is needed. This processes is hampered by Ukraine’s splintered media environment, and by the shortages of an organized international professional approach to providing this training and initiating these conversations. I am particularly grateful for the opportunity provided by this interview because I see it as opening a door towards a much more systematic and integrated means of communicating and establishing normative OSINT practices in coordination with Ukrainian journalists and analysts.
3. Can you say a bit about your writing about the Ukraine War?
My work on the Ukraine war, unlike a lot of what has gotten visibility in both mainstream and specialty publications, has never been confined to battlefield developments, first, because I am not a defense expert on the ground, and also because I do not think the conflict itself can be understood that way. I was born in Ukraine, and professionally I come to the subject as a national security and human rights attorney whose work also involves geopolitical risk, information warfare, foreign influence, and the Middle East. Inevitably, that has taken me into questions about how Russia sustains the war politically and economically, how Moscow operates outside the immediate theater, how other conflicts affect Ukraine, how Western policy changes Russian calculations, and what happens if the fighting eventually subsides without resolving the conditions that produced the invasion.
For Kyiv Post, I have explored some of the less visible dimensions of Russian strategy, particularly information warfare and Moscow’s efforts to shape attitudes toward Ukraine outside the familiar Washington-Brussels framework. I have been especially interested in the Gulf and broader Middle East because Russian influence there does not depend on persuading governments or publics to accept every Kremlin claim about Ukraine. Moscow can accomplish quite a lot by encouraging strategic neutrality, exploiting frustration with Western policies, presenting itself as an indispensable economic or security partner, and convincing regional actors that their interests are better served by maintaining flexibility toward Russia. The messages are tailored accordingly. Arguments that resonate in the US may be useless in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, or elsewhere, so Russian influence operations adapt themselves to local grievances, interests, and political cultures.
That question quickly becomes inseparable from Russia’s ability to preserve international relationships while fighting a major war. I have spent a great deal of time analyzing Moscow’s increasingly consequential relationship with Iran, including military cooperation, sanctions circumvention, technology transfers, energy interests, and the ways in which Russian and Iranian priorities intersect without necessarily becoming identical. In fact, I was one of the first people to draw attention to CRINK, long before it became a mainstream, popular term and certainly before it became trendy to acknowledge the level of military and intelligence integration and cooperation among these countries. North Korea presents a different equation centered more immediately on weapons and ammunition, while China gives Russia economic breathing room of an entirely different magnitude. I was one of the earlier voices taking Kim’s rapprochement with Putin seriously, months before the results of these high level meetings translated into tangible defense consequences. I underscored the likely impact on the war in Ukraine while most “big name” analysts still posited that North Korea had nothing to offer Russia and that the relationship was much more about symbolism than substance. I also advanced quite early the argument that none of these relationships should be collapsed into a generic anti-Western alliance, which again, reflected a certain school of thought in both Washington and European policy circles. I stressed in my writing and my interviews that Moscow is acquiring resources and strategic flexibility from countries pursuing their own interests, and those transactions can also create dependencies and obligations that affect Russian behavior elsewhere. Part of the reason for the disconnect between the way I saw the situation and earlier mainstream analysis is that much of it came from the Russia-centric focus of the voices discussing these developments, whereas I saw myself as not so much a Russia specialist, as more of a broader geopolitical analyst and focused more on trends and patterns than on Kremlinology as such. That approached had served me well in being able to use OSINT tools to make accurate long-term predictions early. However, on the other hand, because my approach was once considered maverick, by the time it caught on, I had already moved on to other angles, and moreover, because I did not initially publish widely in defense and high profile mainstream publications, my early contributions went by and large unnoticed. But if you look at my early Kyiv Post articles, for instance, where I talk about the likelihood of a backfire for Russia when the exhausted veterans return from Ukraine, angered and seeking opportunities that Russia cannot provide, it was literally years ahead of the time when it became popular to believe that Russia is not only unlikely to win the war but may suffer far more serious losses than anyone could imagine. Today the discussion of the returning Russian troops has become mainstream and imaginable simply because the collapse of Russian strategy in Ukraine and its influence in other parts of the world, such as Syria and Africa, makes such a development close to inevitable. But when I first wrote it, it at best seemed a remote possibility, one among many potential scenarios.
Similarly, the Middle East consequently appears frequently in my Ukraine-related analysis even when Ukraine is not ostensibly the subject. Russian retrenchment in Syria, relations with Gulf states, energy politics, Iranian regional activity, maritime insecurity, and changing security arrangements can all affect Moscow’s resources or international maneuverability. I tracked Saudi-Ukrainian relations very early from the Saudi purchase of Ukrainian armed vehicles in 2021, and wrote about the potential for defense cooperation on The Washington Outsider Substack long before the Iran war erupted, creating a real and immediate need for Ukrainian drone and counterdrone technologies. The reason for that was due to my independent professional contacts with the Saudi defense sectors, which caused me to keep a close watch in any lateral outreach that seemed relatively insignificant compared to Saudi defense engagement with the US, Europea, and China. Just as importantly, I have tried to carry in my various publications the message that Russia does not operate separate foreign policies in hermetically sealed theaters. If its position deteriorates somewhere, it looks for cheaper ways to preserve influence; if a regional crisis raises energy prices, that can affect Russian revenues; if cooperation with Iran expands in one field, it can create opportunities for exchange in another. I am interested in those second- and third-order effects because they frequently receive attention only after they have already altered the strategic environment. Recognizing that pattern, I had deliberately tried to get ahead of these developments and to use OSINT to forecast, not merely, analyze strategies and events.
I have approached the historical dimension somewhat differently, particularly in my work for the Robert Lansing Institute. The tendency to begin the story of Russian aggression in February 2022 produces a distorted picture of how we arrived here. Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia should have forced a much more fundamental reassessment of Western assumptions about Moscow, and even that was hardly the beginning. The earlier wars in Chechnya, Russia’s exploitation of unresolved territorial conflicts, its political and intelligence operations throughout the former Soviet space, and the escalation against Ukraine beginning in 2014 were part of a much longer development. My interest has been in why these warnings repeatedly failed to produce a durable strategic response and why Western governments so often treated each confrontation as an isolated problem that could be managed without reconsidering their underlying assumptions about Russia.
That history also informs my interest in what happens after Putin. I have explored this extensively in Kyiv Post because I think the personalization of the Russian threat creates a serious vulnerability in Western thinking. Putin is central to the system, yet Russia’s security institutions, military establishment, economic networks, nationalist constituencies, and imperial political traditions do not disappear when an individual leader does. A successor could be less theatrical, more polished, and considerably more appealing to Western governments while retaining many of the assumptions about Ukraine and Russia’s neighborhood that made the present conflict possible. In some respects, such a figure could present a more complicated strategic challenge precisely because governments exhausted by confrontation would likely interpret a change in tone as a change in objectives.
The possibility of premature Russian rehabilitation follows naturally from that problem. I have examined how normalization could return through a series of decisions that individually appear relatively minor: renewed commercial engagement, selective diplomatic contacts, pressure for sanctions exemptions, changing governments, competing international crises, and the gradual return of the argument that Russia is simply too important to isolate. Moscow does not need everyone to forget what happened. It needs enough governments to conclude that moving on is more convenient than maintaining pressure. Ukraine could therefore face an extremely difficult postwar struggle over international memory and political attention even after the intensity of combat declines. Unfortunately, these predictions have already started coming true, both as a result of the Trump administration’s unilateral moves in that regard, the corruption of international sports and cultural institutions welcoming back Russian athletes and performers without demanding accountability for their war support, and thanks to the uneven European politics and push for a return to strategic if performative dialogue with Moscow.
My interviews and media commentary have taken these questions in directions that conventional analysis often does not. Journalists in the Middle East, Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Europe, and elsewhere tend to ask about Ukraine through the strategic concerns of their own regions. That has produced discussions involving energy security, Iran, the South Caucasus, maritime routes, sanctions, Russian regional influence, European political instability, and U.S. credibility. I find those conversations useful because the future of Ukraine will partly depend on governments and societies that do not necessarily organize their foreign policy around the war. Understanding what they care about, and how Russia approaches them, is essential to understanding the international competition surrounding Ukraine.
I have also become increasingly concerned with the physical limits of Western support. It is easy to discuss commitment in political terms while ignoring production capacity, depleted inventories, competing military requirements, maintenance, and replacement timelines. My analysis has therefore looked at questions such as air-defense availability and the consequences of simultaneous American commitments in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific – before that became a documented problem as a result of Operation Epic Fury. A promise to provide a weapons system and the ability to supply it in sufficient quantities over several years are very different propositions. Moscow watches those constraints closely, and visible shortages can influence Russian calculations about whether it can simply outlast the political and industrial capacity supporting Ukraine.
Negotiations are another subject where I tend to resist reading diplomatic activity at face value. Russia has a long history of treating negotiations as another instrument of statecraft rather than as an activity occurring after coercion has failed. Talks can buy time, probe divisions among opponents, legitimize territorial gains, create pressure for sanctions relief, or shift international attention toward the concessions demanded from Ukraine rather than the conditions Russia created. When I assess negotiations, I am therefore interested in what Moscow is doing militarily, economically, and politically while diplomats are sitting at the table. The existence of dialogue tells us very little by itself about whether Russian objectives have changed, which is a common mistake in the broader media coverage on this subject.
The legal dimension has become more prominent in my recent engagements as well. Through Ukraine’s Diplomatic Legal Hub, including my recent participation in a discussion concerning war journalists, war-crimes documentation, and the Berkeley Protocol, I have been looking more closely at the serious evidentiary problem created by a war documented in real time by thousands of people. Digital material may have immediate journalistic importance and later acquire significance for an investigation or prosecution, but that transition is not automatic. How evidence is authenticated, preserved, contextualized, and traced back to its origin can determine whether something that appears compelling today remains useful years later.
Giunduz Mammedov’s initiative to organize OSINT workshops for Ukrainian and other journalists is particularly relevant to that challenge. Journalists are often among the first people to encounter potentially significant information, yet their professional imperative is understandably to establish the story and report it. Giving them stronger OSINT skills does not mean turning reporters into prosecutors. It means helping them recognize when material may have significance beyond the immediate news cycle, how to verify it more rigorously, and how to avoid inadvertently destroying or obscuring information that could later contribute to accountability. Given the scale of documentation produced by this war, I think that kind of professional cross-pollination between journalism, OSINT, and legal investigation will become increasingly important. In particular, this matters when it comes to countering propaganda by well-supported trolls with reach into US and other policy circles who have used their significant following to try to discredit the Bucha massacre, and other seminal events of the war.
Some of the interviews I have conducted have also allowed me to bring individual Ukrainian experiences into a discussion too often reduced to military hardware and maps. I had used my video podcast “The Washington Outsider Report on the Coalition Radio”, which was recently folded into The Washington Outsider Center for Information Warfare, to highlight unique perspectives and information from various experts on and from Ukraine. Personal histories from people who actually come from the region complicate the political mythology Russia has constructed around it and remind international audiences that eastern Ukraine is neither politically monolithic nor reducible to the identities the Kremlin has assigned to it.
Across all of this, what interests me most is the interaction among developments that are usually placed into separate analytical boxes. A Russian relationship in the Gulf can affect the economic environment surrounding the war; an Iranian development can affect Moscow’s military options; a shortage in an American weapons inventory can alter Russian expectations; a political shift in Europe can change the durability of sanctions; an information campaign thousands of miles from Kyiv can influence whether another government considers Ukraine worth supporting. The war has never existed solely on the battlefield, and its eventual outcome will not be determined there alone. That interconnectedness has shaped much of my analysis, commentary, interviews, and legal work since the full-scale invasion began.
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