The Art of Insight

Chapter 22A Journalist at War

with Anatoliy Bondarenko

Figure 22.1: “Under attack. What and when Russia shelled in Ukraine” by Petro Bodnar, Yevhenia Drozdova, and Nadia Kelm

Simon Ducroquet / “https://texty.org.ua/projects/107577/under-attack-what-and-when-russia-shelled-ukraine/ / last accessed June 19, 2023.”

Just as others might take pleasure from a good horse, or a dog, or a bird, I take even more pleasure from good friends.

—Socrates, quoted by Xenophon

“My friend is at war,” I wrote in my notebook when Anatoliy Bondarenko told me in an email that he had joined the Ukrainian army as a captain. Since February 24, 2022, when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, not a week has passed that I have not thought about him, his family, or his team at the nonprofit investigative journalism publication he co‐founded, Texty.org.ua. The war might have been decided by the time you read these lines, written in late May of 2023—in Ukraine's favor, I hope.

Texty isn't well known outside of Ukraine. That's a shame. The quality of their visualizations is comparable to publications with far more reporters and designers on staff. At the start of the invasion, Texty launched an impressively detailed tracker of Russian artillery and air strikes, and they've updated it to this day (Figure 22.1). Anatoliy told me that they used satellite data provided free of charge by Planet Labs, a ...