Web Scraping

Data Analysis in Action: The Role of Data Collection in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict

“War is 90% information.” — Napoleon Bonaparte

Rakia Ben Sassi
Published in
6 min readApr 8, 2022

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Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

As I have started writing this article, I didn’t expect it to end this way. Weeks after creating my first draft, Russian forces entered its western neighbor’s border and war raged in Ukraine.

Many questions have been raised. People around the world kept their eyes glued to their screens, waiting for more news about the invasion and looking for answers. I was no exception. I’ve seen the steady stream of content, talking about the different sides of the crisis, its ramifications, and its ripple effect.

I scrolled past articles about the cyber warfare between Russia and the west. I scrolled past articles about the human cost of the attack and its economic consequences. I scrolled past articles about the mass exodus of western firms over the Ukraine invasion.

But most importantly, I’ve mulled over the data game… I mean the data war.

Although the first version of this post was about how to use web scraping to trade cryptocurrency like a pro, I felt more curious about exploring a different topic: the role of data in international conflicts.

Through the lens of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, we’ll explore in this post the answer to the following questions:

  • What kind of data could we collect in such a conflict?
  • Who can benefit from such data collection?
  • Which are the use cases of this double-edged sword?

Examples of Conflicts Data

Let’s start by having a look at samples of collected data to assess the situation:

The human cost of war

  • Over 3.8 million people fled Ukraine since Russia invaded, while about 6.5 million have been displaced within the country.
  • Over 15,000 demonstrators have been arrested across Russia since the launch of the war on Ukraine.
  • “Google is removing from Maps any user-submitted locations in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus to avoid user-generated pins being linked to…

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