A year ago, as signs built of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Guardian’s news desk in London started a live blog. There had been occasional live blogs on the story since the end of January, but 12 February 2022 was the first in what would turn out to be an as-yet-unbroken run covering the military, political and above all human cost of the conflict, and signifying the Guardian’s commitment to covering this world-altering event.
It was just 12 days later, on the morning of 24 February 2022, when Russian president Vladimir Putin announced he was sending forces to carry out a “special military operation” in Ukraine – more plainly, the invasion of a neighbouring country. Within minutes came reports of explosions across Ukraine, from Kharkiv to the capital, Kyiv.
Samantha Lock, one of the Guardian’s live bloggers in Australia, was on duty at the moment the invasion was confirmed. “It was 2pm in Sydney when the first series of missiles were launched towards Kyiv. Our reporters deftly oversaw the first few frantic hours of war, never imagining it would dominate the news agenda one year on,” she says now.
Lock, along with Helen Sullivan, also in Sydney, and Martin Belam and Léonie Chao-Fong, based in London, have between them anchored the majority of the year’s Ukraine live blogs. From (very welcome) feedback from readers, our live bloggers know there are people who rely on these updates and turn to them each day, wherever they are in the world. But the team is also acutely mindful of the responsibility of allowing new readers, or those who return to the live blog in moments of particular crisis, to access what has proven to be an immensely complex news story.
“We are always conscious to keep providing context and analysis alongside the latest developments, as we appreciate not everybody reads it every day,” Belam says. “It signals how important we believe the story is that we’ve devoted significant resource to covering it, and that we are doing it on the quiet days as well as the days when there are significant attacks or diplomatic developments. Guardian readers know they can pick up their phone, tap on the live blog, and pretty rapidly get an overview of what type of day it has been, whether they have missed anything major, whether there has been an escalation. It provides a genuinely useful resource.”
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By January of this year, the Guardian’s Ukraine live blogs had seen more than 400 million page views, accounting for more than a third of all page views to Ukraine coverage since the invasion began; on many days they have been the most-read story across the Guardian. Those live blogs have run to over 3.4 million words – almost 10,000 words a day – on Europe’s biggest war since 1945.
And those words need to be carefully chosen, in a world in which misinformation flourishes, even official accounts cannot always be trusted or verified, and harrowing detail needs to be sensitively conveyed.
As Lock explains: “We compare the often conflicting Ukrainian and Russian claims with official government transcripts, defence ministry reports, independent analysis and ministerial statements. We keep an eye on local news media reports, regional authorities’ releases, open-source intelligence data and the real-time conversations that unfold across social media channels.”
“When the Telegram feed we rely on for the very first small pieces of news from officials and organisations fills with red exclamation marks, I know that today is a day of strikes,” says Sullivan. “We report this information and provide context: what we do is simple, but important. Uncertainty is difficult to live with and I think of our rolling coverage as keeping the lights on in a room people can visit at any moment to be comforted by the truth.”
The live blogs are also enriched by contributions from Guardian colleagues on the ground in Ukraine, all of whom play an essential role in telling the story from where it is happening by sending blog posts, images and tweets for use in our live reporting.
Amid the grind of war, Chao-Fong points out, there is always scope for something new. “There are the days when there is one single thing we need to focus on – the Mariupol hospital airstrike, for example – but then there are the days when we can look at the everyday lives of Ukrainians, the anti-war activism in Russia, and how the war is impacting communities across the world.”
Beyond those 10,000 words a day – the diligent sourcing of information by our live bloggers, the reporting from those on the ground and correspondents across Europe and the world – lie the details that never make it into any live coverage. As Belam explains: “One of the most difficult days was quite early on in the war: a missile hit the railway station in Kramatorsk when it was packed with women and children waiting to evacuate. The images were horrifying and far too graphic to use. One caption caught my eye – ‘Dog rescued from Kramatorsk station’ – and I thought maybe later I can use this in a post about the rescue operations. I clicked on it and the poor dog had been rescued, but was so badly wounded that I doubt it had long to live.
“A lot of the images and video footage I’ve seen from the war has stuck in my mind, but that picture of that bloody and shrapnel-wounded dog wrapped in a blanket in someone’s arms really got to me. You start questioning yourself, why am I more affected by the image of the dog rather than the people, and you immediately know that you are in a very heightened emotional state, and that makes you even more conscious of the imperative to be writing as dispassionately as possible.”
Few would have expected the war to still be ongoing, but while peace still seems far off, the Guardian’s Ukraine live blogs will continue for as long as they are needed.
Our reporters were on the ground long before the invasion on 24 February, on both sides of the border. Since that day we have usually had at least two reporters in Ukraine at any one time – and often four or five – covering all aspects of the war. We hope to be able to maintain this presence until the conclusion of the conflict and beyond.
“Putin’s invasion of Ukraine shocked the world,” says Chao-Fong, “and the Guardian’s live blog is a daily reminder of why we and our readers should care – and the figures show that they do.”
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