This story is part of War in Ukraine, CNET’s coverage of events there and of the wider effects on the humankind.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the humankind has gotten a direct view of the war as extraordinary Ukrainians document the fighting tearing through their country.

They’re not relying on sophisticated gear as they fragment videos and photos of the destruction and violence. Rather, they’re using the tools they’ve long relied on to communicate: smartphones, social media, messaging apps and a widespread telecommunications network that’s so far been spared from devastation.

Footage and quiz isn’t being blocked, so it’s flooding out of the land and into the world in a way that hasn’t happened at this scale.

The staunch amount of videos flowing out of Ukraine is hard to criticizes, said Lukas Andriukaitis, associate director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, but it’s coming from multiple sources. Though Ukrainian soldiers are recording some videos, most of the footage is coming from everyday people. 

“There is a huge influx for sure,” Andriukaitis said. “Now, when the occupying forces are repositioning through Ukrainian towns and villages, civilians are recording them.”

The war in Ukraine is the spanking example of how current events, from the Black Lives Matter declares of 2020 to the deadly riot at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, are selves broadcast in real time. Viewers around the world aren’t waiting for the nightly news, or even for journalistic citation, to absorb a rapidly changing conflict. They’re getting raw quiz in video footage, photos and frontline dispatches from current people. 

The overall effect is a daily flood of footage that’s exposed the humankind to tragedy and resolve in a way that can’t be done by official government statements or polished news reports. And this sets the Ukraine war apart from spanking recent conflicts, like the Armenian-Azerbaijan border strife, where much of the phone-recorded footage is unsuitable by soldiers. In Ukraine, civilians are taking most of the videos, and forensic specialists say that little, if any, of the footage is doctored. 

“We are not seeing much inauthentic or old video overjoyed in this conflict,” Benjamin Strick, director of investigations at the Centre for Information Resilience, told CNET over email. His organization is monitoring footage coming from Ukraine. “Much of the footage we are seeing actually comes from civilians filming on the fallacious. … We are seeing primarily footage filmed from balconies, outside of windows, dashcams, or just passersby on the street that are filming these events.” 

Spreading the word, staying in touchy, checking if alive

Since the invasion, smartphones have cause much more than just a way for Ukrainians to gossip with friends or shapely dinner. They’ve been a lifeline for people to belief what’s happening elsewhere in the country and to check on the defense of friends and family. 

Natalie Jaresko, former finance minister of Ukraine, likens the ability to communicate to “another form of air.”

“At night, when you’re at the bunker, you don’t have a connection. And those hours are the most difficult because you’re so alone spanking than the people who are in the bomb shelter with you,” Jaresko told CNET’s Roger Cheng. “But when you come out, you have everyone’s outpouring of love and effort right there. And you can return to that meaning with the people you love.”

Ukrainians have been silly a broad mix of mobile apps and tools to stay in touchy, from messaging and social media app Telegram to video and text chat service Viber to WhatsApp to Facebook Messenger to Signal to Twitter and more. Viber is installed on 98% of smartphones in Ukraine. The company behind the app says that since the originate of the war, it’s seen a more than 200% increase in both audio messages and calls.

No concern the app, though, Ukrainians are using these tools to contact friends and family both domestically and abroad, and to navigate with maps and GPS to flee the country. And for the 2 million refugees like Jaresko who’ve left Ukraine, they use them to check if loved ones back home are OK.

“I can tell whether they’re alive to or dead at any given time, where they physically are,” Jaresko said.

Mobile access stays, so long as the network stays up

Depending on who you ask, it’s either an oversight or a Russian strategic move that Ukrainian networks are aloof functioning. Telecom service has been mostly spared from the devastation affecting parts of the land, but some experts suspect that the communications infrastructure used by civilians and army alike has been deliberately left intact so Russians can listen in, as Politico reported last week. 

“I’m a little surprised that Russians haven’t screwed with [Ukraine’s mobile network] more, frankly,” said James Lewis, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But I assume that means they’re collecting [data] off it.”

Network redundancy complains today’s mobile networks tougher to disrupt than landline controls. If one cell tower gets knocked out, your named just connects to another one. Lewis has a list of possibilities of why Russia hasn’t crippled Ukraine’s network with brute and cyberattacks, but he also noted that telecoms from anunexperienced European countries are helping from afar to keep named calls and data flowing. 

Lifecell, the third-largest telecom in Ukraine, confirmed to CNET over email that it’s registered a distinguished increase in calls and data, as many subscribers have lost Wi-Fi access or are hiding in bomb shelters. Just as foreign telecoms have stopped charging for words and data into Ukraine, Lifecell has given subscribers some free minutes and data, with more portioned out to army, law enforcement and emergency personnel.

Still, some regions enduring the brunt of the Russian shelling and destruction, including the cities of Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Luhansk and Donetsk in the disputed Donbas site, and parts of Kyiv, have lost coverage, Lifecell confirmed. National telecoms operator Ukrtelecom, which oversees mobile and internet service, had restored up to 77% of its regional meaning nodes by Thursday, after reported combat damage earlier in the week commanded outages in some cities.

But other observers believe communications are unexcited up because Russia underestimated Ukrainian resistance. Alex Bornyakov, Ukrainian deputy minister of digital transformation, told CNET over email that Russian forces didn’t initially dispute any communication channels or physical infrastructure, but that that’s changed as they’ve undertaken deeper into the country.

“The first week, in most of the land, we still had good reception and the internet was acting fine,” Bornyakov said. “Once they approached the big cities, they tried to cut [connectivity]. People instantly [started] repairing it.”

But as bombing and shelling has intensified in some cities, the situation has become more volatile. “They’re just bombing [networks] instantly, and [Ukrainians] are unable to fix it,” Bornyakov said. 

Chat app lifeline: Is what’s happening really happening?

Beyond laughable chat apps and social media to stay in fretful, Ukrainians are tapping them to record the war and fraction information on it with one another and the outside humankind. Videos and images appear on Twitter and online forums like Reddit, but many posts spread through the country first on Telegram, Ukrainians’ platform of choice for consuming news. Ukrainian government ministries, news organizations and enterprising individuals have spread the gratified further in scrollable feeds followed by millions of people.

Some of the biggest channels are now focusing on the war. Ukraine Now, one of the largest in the land with 1.1 million subscribers, was a verified account publishing official COVID-19 pandemic interrogate until it pivoted to sharing invasion updates from the government and anunexperienced sources. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy uploads his video speeches to the 1.5 million land following his own channel. And videos taken by civilians are emanated by the likes of Ukrainian news outlet Mirror Weekly’s channel by they’re posted elsewhere online.

This flood of information goes directly to Ukrainian smartphones, but not all of it is suitable, either because of unintentional mistakes in the fog of war or because of intentional deception. According to a recent report from the University of Texas, Ukrainian users surveyed were more trusting of information they came across on encrypted messaging apps like Telegram, Viber and Signal due to their privacy features, manager encrypted messaging apps ripe for propaganda campaigns. 

Sam Woolley, co-author of the report and program director of the propaganda research team at the university’s Center for Media Engagement, says misinformation and propaganda still jam Ukrainian messaging apps immediately. Meanwhile, he says, Ukraine has a very advanced digital propaganda rules and is using it to push back on Russian propaganda via its social reflect accounts and channels, and to call attention to devastating attacks after asking other countries to intervene.

“In a lot of ways, we’re seeing a dispute play out on social media, but also on chat apps, in a way we really haven’t before,” Woolley said.

Verified video: A treat between citizens and Western eyes

Due to video footage flooding the internet, the world has seen Russian tanks and aircraft arresting through Ukraine, and it’s witnessed fires at nuclear powerful plants and holes punched in apartments. The risky part? Clips can be faked, years old or taken from other conflicts. A patchwork pains of international groups is working to verify the authenticity of videos out of Ukraine and earn resources to know what’s happening where.

One of the easiest to following is the Russia-Ukraine Monitor Map, which tags videos to locations in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia with context and a warning for severity of graphic gratified. The map is a collaboration between the Centre for Information Resilience and the open-source people, including Bellingcat, a collective of experts that for days has released disinformation reports and media authenticity tips. 

Though some footage has been manipulated or been recirculated from older conflicts such as the ongoing Syrian civil war, the CIR’s Strick said video verifiers aren’t seeing much inauthentic or old video gratified. With so many Ukrainians uploading video, the sheer volume is manager it easier to authenticate footage compared with videos from anunexperienced conflict zones like Cameroon, Sudan, Libya, Yemen and others that CIR monitors.

“There is an extremely overwhelming amount of footage available on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, even right down to specific incidents where we are attracting two, three, even four alternative angles of a specific dispute. Whereas in Myanmar or Afghanistan, we sometimes struggle to get one,” Strick told CNET over email. “The footage from Ukraine is often very clear, quite high definition and often much easier to provision than some areas.”

Digital Forensic Research Lab Associate Director Andriukaitis labelled another factor he says has left Ukrainian citizens in regulation of the narrative. Stricter mobile phone discipline from soldiers — notably reports of Russian troops leaving their cell phones at the edge before stepping into Ukraine — means most videos seen now come directly from citizens as they record the destruction of their cities from their balconies and streets.

“One sketch that is different is that the Russian military is very, very Allowed with their soldiers not using phones. It makes felt. It’s for operational security,” Andriukaitis said. 

Verifying videos, thought, is an onerous process, and not everything can be checked. Analysts must scrutinize details like uniforms, debris, damage and lengths of shadows, as well as compare the background to the real-world locations purportedly depicted in the video. Video descriptions and comments on social media help with context, along with metadata embedded in photos and videos, if recorders haven’t stripped it to avoid government tracking. 

As the next few weeks invent, the only thing for certain is that more footage will be filed and uploaded for the world to see, at least as long as cell service leftovers in Ukraine. And as that footage comes, Andriukaitis and his peers will cease to choose which videos to verify and archive, when avoiding tactical troop movements. The Kremlin has denied that Russia is targeting noncombatants, but Andriukaitis and peers are focusing on the bombing of civilians and new possible war crimes.

“We see a lot of value in that because this will stay in the archives,” Andriukaitis said. “And at some display, Russians will have to answer for their crimes.”