At 3:15 AM local time, Jeffrey Lewis, an open source intelligence (OSINT) expert and professor at Middlebury Institute, saw a traffic jam in Belgorod, Russia, using the traffic layer of Google Maps. “Someone’s on the move,” he tweeted.
“I think we were the first people to see the invasion,” Lewis told Motherboard. “And we saw it in a traffic app.”
Hours before, Vladimir Putin had announced a “special military operation” in Donbas, a region in Eastern Ukraine he had declared independent earlier in the week, foreshadowing a potential invasion. But the traffic buildup Lewis was seeing on Google Maps was across the border from a different region of Ukraine, north of Kharkiv. The traffic jam slowly extended to the border, where it then disappeared.
[…]
Source: Google Maps Live Traffic Showed the Russian Invasion of Ukraine | Motherboard