How Ukraine’s biggest OSINT agency impacts war reporting

OSINT, which stands for open-source intelligence, has been a crucial tool for reporting on Russia’s war against Ukraine – from Bellingcat’s investigation into the downing of a commercial flight over eastern Ukraine by Russian-controlled forces in 2014 to uncovering Russian war crimes during the all-out invasion since 2022.

A lot of the reporting has been done by international investigative groups and media outlets, but Ukraine also has strong OSINT communities. The biggest and the most prominent one is Molfar, a commercial company that since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion has been doing important investigative work and has developed robust media operations.

A global OSINT agency of 40 qualified analysts and 200 volunteers, Molfar identified the names of the Russian troops involved in the shelling in Dnipro on January 14 and uncovered a clandestine Russian intelligence ring of 167 agents in Europe at the end of May 2023, among other notable investigations. The company’s analytics has been cited by major international publishers like The Economist, Financial Times, and Newsweek. 

The Fix spoke with Daria Verbytska, Head of PR, and Maksym Zrazhevskiy, Head of Research (IT) about the media side of Molfar, its educational mission, Russian disinformation campaigns, and the most vital trends in OSINT.

The truth must be public

Molfar was founded as an intelligence company in 2019, providing commercial services  

like person or company review, market research, or HUMINT (human intelligence, which entails obtaining sensitive information from people).

The company still operates a for-profit enterprise; the number of commercial orders has tripled since the war’s start thanks to foreign customers, Molfar’s CEO Artem Starosiek said in an interview with Ukrainian media outlet Detector Media. Yet, the organisation is most prominent for its non-profit work covering Russia’s war. 

Within the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, Molfar firmly entered the media field, publishing their investigations of Russian crimes in Ukraine on their own platforms, and sharing relevant information with Ukrainian and foreign media.

Out of 60 Molfar employees, 9 are responsible for the agency’s public content: a video producer, a scriptwriter, two authors, an SMM manager, a visual designer, two PR managers, and the Head of PR. The team’s work is inextricably tied to the research department, which includes up to 40 researchers who are conducting the investigations. 

The most popular stories published by Molfar in 2023 are about the destruction of electronic warfare equipment as a prelude to a counteroffensive (3.168 million unique users in April 2023), identification of Russians involved in a terrorist attack in Dnipro in January (2.318 million unique users since January 2023) and new solution of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the fight against Iranian drones (more than 1 million unique users since January 2023), according to the statistics provided by Molfar’s PR team to The Fix.

Molfar has active accounts on social media, most notably a Telegram channel with over 28,000 followers, where the organisation has invested resources in community building with activities like OSINT tournaments. Molfar is also focused on YouTube and Linkedin, Verbytska told The Fix.

Apart from self-publishing their investigations, Molfar has a base of around 1000 journalists from all around the world who published work about Ukraine using information sent by the agency. Most journalists use the agency’s reports as a source for their own material. However, there are also joint investigations with media organisations. 

For example, the team cooperated with Direkt36, a Hungarian non-profit centre for investigative journalism, and the Greek private investigations agency Marathon Investigations to gather information about the ties of Sergey Naryshkin, director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, to Viktor Orbán government. The news got spread inter alia by Deutsche Welle, Daily News Hungary, and Balkan Insight.

Publications of Molfar’s work in foreign media helped the organisation build trust among Ukrainian news outlets, Verbytska believes.

According to Verbytska, Molfar’s media operations aren’t aimed to generate profits and are fully funded by the agency. The publishing project also has grant support, which covers 10% of its operational costs. Besides commercial projects, Molfar earns money on OSINT online courses and plans to sell merch, though the profits from this work are donated to charity. Molfar does not receive paid orders from the state and provides all war-related information to the authorities voluntarily.

“Our plan for the near future is to counter Russia by finding facts and evidentiary truth to spread both to the Westerners and Ukrainians”, Verbytska told The Fix.

In the longer term, Molfar’s hope is to help hold pro-Russian collaborators and corrupt officials to account. Verbytska says that this requires the creation of a complete list of people, companies, and organisations involved in anything destructive – corruption, financial fraud, or pro-Russian activities with provided evidence. Molfar already publishes investigations on pro-Russian business schemes in Ukraine and keeps a list of foreign propagandists of the Russian regime.

OSINT as a weapon against Russian disinformation 

Molfar looks at the OSINT industry globally, cooperating with Ukrainian and foreign investigators to uncover Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Among Ukrainian ones are OsintFlow, OSINT Bees, and NGL.media, which is focused on corruption. 

Asked about the global trends in OSINT, Molfar’s Head of Research Maksym Zrazhevskiy named the following:

1. Development of different software for information acquisition and processing, especially those free and based on AI

For example, ChatGPT isn’t good for search, because it has a database up to 2021, but it’s good enough for basic big data analysis, Zrazhevskiy said. The team also uses it for translations, CEO of Molfar said in an interview for Detector Media.

2. Rise of military OSINT 
After February 2022 everyone saw how open sources can be used to search for strategically important information. Zrazhevskiy mentions geographical OSINT as a crucial element of military OSINT; it is based on extracting data on the location of military units from satellite photos, location photos, or videos and through metadata, including the time when the subjects of the investigation took the pictures and videos, the location of the objects, and the actual location of specific Russian brigades and battalions.

The opening of state registers in various countries also drives the development of this direction. As an example, Zrazhevskiy cites searching for information on where Russians keep their money. This is how the Russian news outlet Vazhnye Istorii [“Important Stories” in Russian] found Vladimir Solovyov’s fifth Italian villa in March 2023. After this publication, the Russian propagandist was completely banned from entering the EU.

3. Rise of cryptocurrency OSINT

This trend is focused on tracking cryptocurrency transactions. This work is especially useful for investigations into financial frauds and corruption, Zrazhevskiy says, highlighting the development of tools designed for this work as well.

(All the tools for OSINT recommended by Molfar and used by the agency’s researchers are listed here).

Molfar’s effort to improve war reporting

In a conversation with The Fix Zrazhevskiy says that the quality of foreign reporting on the war in Ukraine is improving, but not enough. He believes the lack of quality is mainly driven by the low-quality research and lack of awareness about Russian psychological operations (PSYOP) in mainstream media. 

“At first [after an incident like a Russian attack], Russians either keep silent or blame only Ukraine. Then they start publishing multiple versions of what could have happened to confuse everyone. We quite often see when the mass media just quote Russian officials and publishers, simply spreading misinformation”, Zrazhevskiy said.

As an example, he brings the case of the Kakhovka Dam, which was blown up by the Russian army. World media in the first critical days wrote “damaged”, and “collapsed” instead of “blown up” or without unequivocally stating that Russia did it, even though the Ukrainian authorities had warned that the dam was mined by the Russian army long before the catastrophe. This story shows another popular mistake among foreign news outlets: lack of deeper dive into context. Zrazhevskiy believes.

“That’s why we are needed, trying to somehow improve it with our research, sharing it with the media. Trying to gain platforms, so that more Western journalists or ordinary people see and understand who they are dealing with”, said Zrazhevskiy.

In an interview with The Fix, Verbytska also noted that Molfar‘s cooperation with foreign media shows that the world is less interested in reports from Ukraine, but there is more and more analytical content on the global effects of the war – in the economic, social and political spheres.

For the next year Molfar has ambitious plans: hire more people – researchers and writers, educate people more on OSINT, especially Ukrainian kids at schools, and do more video content, Verbytska said. “Our highest task is to create a world OSINT cradle in Ukraine with an institute of evidence-based truth and reputation”.

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