02/10/2026
🔥 OSINT, the frontline and OPSEC: when open-source information gets ahead of official reporting
OSINT volunteers from InformNapalm volunteer intelligence community conducted a small experiment. We compared public reports from the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on selected sectors of the frontline with signals from Western OSINT analysts and monitoring accounts that geolocate published footage of combat operations.
The methodology was fairly simple. We compared three layers of information:
▪️ what the Ukrainian side was officially reporting at a given moment;
▪️ what could already be established from publicly available photos and videos using OSINT methods; and
▪️ what additional conclusions external analysts were drawing from these data.
This was not an attempt to determine who “pencils the frontline more accurately.” General Staff reports and OSINT maps serve different purposes. If a settlement is not mentioned in the operational report does not mean that there is no military action there, just as the geolocation of an individual video does not in itself prove stable control over the territory. Geolocation primarily confirms occurrence or a specific event in a specific place and time period.
But when these sources are systematically compared, an interesting pattern emerges.
InformNapalm compares official Ukrainian reports, external OSINT geolocations, and OPSEC restrictions—highlighting Operation Vivaldi to show why open-source intelligence timing matters on the battlefield.
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