Over the past three years, the open source community and open source intelligence have been critical to cover the war in Ukraine and assess the situation. OSINT has even been used in the weeks and days leading to the war to expose what was going to happen through the detection of soft signals despite Russia’s lies. Thanks to this work, it has been possible to showcase the reality on the ground, the extent of Russia’s violence and war crimes but also to debunk the mechanisms of a strong and sustained propaganda machine to break Ukrainian national cohesion and international support.

But Russia’s war against the West extends far beyond Ukraine and its frontlines. Russia has mobilised every single resource to fuel its war machine. Again the work of open source projects and communities has been able to identify and track sanction evasion networks, follow Russia’s shadow fleet everywhere in the world, get images of weapons acquisitions from countries like Iran, North Korea and follow Russia’s efforts to keep access to international finance through the multiplication of crypto asset platforms.

The fight itself has also been happening globally: the African continent with support to military regimes in places where terrorist groups are now ruling and human rights violations are at their peak, strong influence efforts to reshape historical partnerships with sustained influence campaigns against the West, but also sabotages across Europe and multiple attempts at undermining European cohesion.

INPACT/AEOW has now spent three years researching and documenting a key instrument of Putin’s aggressive policy: the Wagner group and its multiple iteration on the African continent, in the Middle East, in Ukraine and back in Russia. We have learnt that Russia does not settle for deals and only follow its own plan. There has been no break and willingness to stop expanding their interests abroad. They have kept pushing for it using overt and covert tactics. We are now seeing some of the faces we have tracked for years in charge of European matters and hybrid warfare.

We believe OSINT communities still have a role to play by being this nagging stone in Russia’s shoes. This is what we are for.