Go read this report about how researchers used Google Maps to track the invasion of Ukraine

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

According to a report from The Washington Post, a team of researchers used a combination of maps and radar imagery to track the movement of Russian troops, tipping them off to an invasion of Ukraine before the public knew about it.

According @googlemaps, there is a "traffic jam" at 3:15 in the morning on the road from Belgorod, Russia to the Ukrainian border. It starts *exactly* where we saw a Russian formation of armor and IFV/APCs show up yesterday.
Someone's on the move. pic.twitter.com/BYyc5YZsWL

— Dr. Jeffrey Lewis (@ArmsControlWonk) February 24, 2022

When Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at California's Middlebury Institute of International Studies, noticed bad traffic near the Ukrainian border, he knew it wasn't a typical rush-hour pileup. Lewis and his students discovered the jam on February 23rd, just before the start of the Russian invasion. After seeing Russian tanks and other military vehicles near the same location in a radar image, they had to check out the maps on the internet.

Lewis told The Post that in the old days, they would have relied on a reporter to show them what was happening on the ground.

Real-time data from phones is used to track traffic. Lewis theorizes that the heavy traffic was captured from the phones of the civilians stuck at the roadblock and not from the Russian soldiers carrying their phones. The Post notes that after Russian troops entered the country, there were road closings in the city of Kharkiv.

The location of bomb shelters to people in Ukraine and a notification that warns users in the vicinity of major crises are unknown, according to the Post. Some of the subway stations are being utilized as shelters. Damian Menscher, a security reliability engineer at the internet giant, points out on the social networking site that usage of the maps has spiked in the country since the start of the Russian invasion.

The Washington Post's report shows that the use of Google Maps by civilians and soldiers on the ground in Ukraine is an unlikely tool. With the prevalence of social media, people in Ukraine are able to get their stories out to thousands, if not millions of people from around the globe, providing insight and information that outsiders would typically have access to by way of traditional news outlets.