Satellite Journalism in the Russian War against Ukraine

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session on the war in Ukraine is Turo Uskali, whose interest is in news surveillance technologies in war reporting; his team is exploring this through interviews with Finnish war correspondents in Ukraine, and their Ukrainian fixers, from 2014 to 2021. How are they cutting through the fog of war in their reporting?

But first, the project conducted a literature review of research on war reporting, which covered a broad range of wars; only three of the articles found focussed on the role of new surveillance technologies such as drones and satellites, however. The present-day Ukraine war is one of the first where high-resolution satellite images are playing a substantial role in news reporting, from the initial Russian military build-ups before the full-scale invasion in 2022 to the ongoing coverage of battlefield events. This is different even from the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, where signs of an impending invasion were not detected.

This marks a shift in the availability of satellite images to news media. Ahead of the US invasion of Iraq, Colin Powell lied to the world about weapons of mass destruction by showing classified satellite images that could not be independently verified; this would be much more difficult now that commercial high-resolution satellite images are available. This has enabled mainstream news media to conduct their own assessments, even if such images are still not cheap. This makes the war on Ukraine the first large-scale ‘satellite journalism’ war; it may be the best-documented war in history.