“The guys grabbed a drink, and decided to make some noise” by Novaya Gazeta Europe

The project provides an extensive overview of the Ukrainian conflict before it escalated into full-scale war after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 (the date of publication 24 August 2021).

The analysis is based on data on the number of ceasefire violations provided by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission. We gathered more than 2000 daily reports in PDF format from the OSCE website using Python. These PDFs have different structure according to different publishing periods, so we created a programming tool to parse them and convert them into large CSV files. It also required some manual work to prove the recognition quality.

By matching the timeline of ceasefire violations with the social and political events and media propaganda, it became clear that at the time the conflict had transformed from real military operations into so-called hybrid war or infowar. And some groups had an interest in maintaining that state of affairs.

As a result, we created a scrollytelling which demonstrates the real dynamics of the conflict in Donbas over 5 years. It was very new for us, so to do that we built and embedded a new engine to run this visualization on our website by using JavaScript, React framework and D3 library.