How To Read This Chart: Eavesdropping on Russia's campaign of destruction

Plus, how design changes along with the war ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

Try four weeks FREE, then $4 every four weeks for one year  Sign up for this newsletter Read online     By Philip Bump  Email Did a friend forward this to you through an unencrypted radio transmission? Sign up here. One of the challenges that Russia has faced in its effort to subdue — to subsume — Ukraine is that it has proved to be unprepared for the technological moment. For all of the fulminating before the war about Russia's ability to hobble Ukraine's Internet infrastructure or to inject disinformation into its opponent's population, it's become apparent that Russia, not Ukraine, is at a disadvantage on modernity. We see this in the information fight, certainly; Ukraine, fighting on friendly ground and with an ongoing connection to the rest of the world, has effectively framed the conflict in sympathetic terms. But it's also true in how Russia has trailed in using technology to conduct its war and in how technology is helping to hold Russia accountable.  Consider a recent post from the author of the newsletter Line of Actual Control. (I'll call him LOAC moving forward, as his employer allows him to write but not using his actual name.) It's one of the most remarkable examples of open-sourced investigation that I've ever seen. It began with tweets like this one. That's hard to parse out of context, but it, by itself, is a fascinating document. That Twitter user, @xateond, listens to unencrypted radio chatter over the Internet and posts what he hears. In other words, while modern militaries like the United States' have systems to protect communications between commanders and soldiers, Russia often doesn't, allowing anyone — even people on the other side of the world — to listen in. It's roughly the difference between sending someone a text message on your iPhone and sending someone a postcard. ADVERTISEMENT   What @xateond is publishing appear to be coordinates: target 133, x — referring to a horizontal coordinate — 84 620 and y (a vertical coordinate) 27 700. LOAC was curious if the numbers actually meant anything. "I started thinking about how to visualize these coordinates, or at the very least, understand if they are coordinates in the first place," he told me in a phone call. "And that's where the grid came in." He took the numbers recorded by @xateond and put them in a simple Excel table. What emerged was an obvious pattern: It wasn't just random coordinates but, instead, clusters of locations. Now, he had to figure out what the coordinates themselves correlated to. 84 what? 27 what? These weren't latitudes and longitudes. As it turns out, the answer was readily available: Russian military maps use similar coordinate positions. You can see them, for example, in these captured Russian maps that were shared on Twitter. The coordinates in the tweet above indicate a position near Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine — one of the places where fighting and shelling has been heaviest. ADVERTISEMENT   Next, LOAC took his Russian map and overlaid it on known satellite imagery of the area and put his Excel grid of coordinates on top. All three lined up. A stack of three images: satellite imagery at bottom, a Russian map of the region above that and LOAC's Excel spreadsheet on top. (Line of Actual Control) Here, for example, LOAC shows how one place that was located twice in the overheard chatter (hence the 2) lines up with satellite photographs: the southern end of a reservoir at top (in circle) and a small village in the large rectangle at bottom. The 2 aligns with a field just west of a small lake or pond. Detail from the stacked maps and satellite imagery. (Line of Actual Control) Most of LOAC's newsletters focus on satellite imagery, so he was able to pull images from before and after the period at which the coordinates were sent out over radio. And what he found was striking: Just to the west of that small lake, right where the 2 had been, a patch of dark earth now appeared — as though burned. Comparison of the region above before and after an apparent artillery strike. (Line of Actual Control) The implication is clear. The coordinates @xateond was sharing were probably artillery strike directions. Over and over, LOAC's investigation of the commands led to the discovery of places where damage had been incurred. The other parts of the message were probably meaningful as well, he told me, reinforcing the idea that these were artillery orders. The "target" identifier was probably a unit identifier and the "angle" further instructions on how to target the specific location.  This is one of the most striking examples of data visualization that I've ever seen: military orders intended solely to instruct artillery units on attacks that are reverse engineered into geolocated positions of the strikes from halfway around the world. It's certainly an indication of Russia's failure, yes — but also of the remarkable ingenuity that can accompany a clever use of technological tools.   An evolving conflict means evolving representations At the outset of the war in Ukraine, I explored the way in which media outlets were representing the initial Russian strikes on maps. Last week, a cartographer named Levi Westerveld noticed something interesting: Over time, the way the New York Times had represented the conflict had evolved in ways that seemed to follow the shape of the war itself. He began with a map published soon after the Russian invasion began. The Russian incursions were depicted with large, striking red arrows. The areas it controlled seeped in from the edges like smoldering flames eating at a piece of paper. And that reflected the reality of the first strike: large, one-sided and — many outside observers believed — inevitable. Over time, however, the nature of the conflict changed. Russia wasn't making quick progress and, in fact, Ukraine eventually began clawing back territory. A bit over a week after the first map — after the point at which the United States had warned that Kyiv was likely to fall — the Times maps showed a balance of Russian and Ukrainian forces. By late March, a map dropped the Russian zones of control entirely. What Westerveld captured is fascinating: the shape of the war captured literally and figuratively in a progression of maps.  It's easy to view this through a critical lens — that assumptions about the conflict were changed and, with them, there was a scramble to revise depictions of how the war was progressing. But, instead, it's worth considering this generously. The point of the maps is to depict what's happening in Ukraine, and softening the effect of Russia's invasion does exactly that. A war that was expected to be dominated by Russia has not been and so maps that were dominated by Russia themselves became more balanced. That, as the Times's Josh Keller explained over email, is the approach the paper took. His team was constantly assessing how it displayed information about the war, Keller said, noting that the maps are "a synthesis of a range of sources, including our correspondents in Ukraine, witness reports, social imagery, military analysts and government statements." "Early on, the routes of the Russian invasion were the primary focus," he explained. "As the war evolved, we reported out new sources of information that allowed us to draw a more detailed picture of the fighting. And as the invasion stalled, we began to more explicitly represent the positions of Ukrainian defenses and counterattacks." Few visualizations are perfect upon their creation, and fewer still are perfect over time. Would it have been better for the Times to maintain the same big-red-arrow format once those arrows stopped pressing forward? Similarly, would it have been accurate in the war's first days to present the conflict as balanced and delicate? There are probably ways in which a balance could have been struck, with the benefit of hindsight, but updating the depictions seems like precisely the right approach to take. And, of course, there is no reason at all that I would want people to be kind in assessing whether the creators of visualizations might have made a dramatic mistake. No. Reason. At. All.   Okay, maybe one reason. Last week, I wrote about the Census Bureau's new data on population gains and losses by county. In it, I showed this map. That cluster of counties near the Mississippi River that lost population, I speculated, might be linked to the Census Bureau's known undercount in calculating the nation's Black population. But: Nope. Rebecca Tippett, director of Carolina Demography at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pointed out that the undercount related to the 2020 Census, pinned to April of that year. The data above is changes in estimated population by county from July 2020 to July 2021 using other measurement tools. In other words, this is not a function of that known inaccuracy.  Have a theory on what it is a function of? Let me know!   This week's reads The incredible scale of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, visualized Analysis ●  By Philip Bump ●  Read more »   The people to whom Trump spoke on the day of the Capitol riot Analysis ●  By Philip Bump ●  Read more »   Birthplace of U.S. presidents within the Lower 48 states By thedataracer | Reddit ●  Read more »   Russian Missile Command: The game where 60 percent of your missiles don't work Analysis ●  By Philip Bump ●  Read more »   I am obviously not going to be in the habit of linking to commercial products here, but I do think these … blankets? shawls? things? that show graphs depicting the warming climate are in keeping with the spirit of this newsletter. My thanks to Bill Henning for passing along. You can find the rest of my work at The Post here. You can listen to shortwave radio — potentially including Russian artillery strikes — here. Have a question, suggestion or a chart that needs fixing? Email me or talk to me on Twitter: @pbump. See you next Saturday.

Try four weeks FREE, then $4 every four weeks for one year    Manage my email newsletters and alerts | Unsubscribe from How To Read This Chart | Privacy Policy | Help You received this email because you signed up for How To Read This Chart or because it is included in your subscription. ©2022 The Washington Post | 1301 K St NW, Washington DC 20071