Vladimir Putin says there is no “war” in Ukraine. First-hand footage posted on social media suggests otherwise.

Since Russian troops stormed into Ukraine on Feb 24, videos, pictures, and dash cam footage has been shared online, charting the destruction of cities, towns, hospitals, and roads by Putin’s army.

Although not all posts have been independently verified, the digital evidence is helping to tell the story of the Ukrainian invasion in real time.

Using open source investigation methods, The Telegraph has collected data from online posts on Twitter, Telegram and Reddit to plot where shelling, gunfire and troop movements are most likely to have taken place.

The final picture offers a glimpse at how the war has intensified, the cities facing the heaviest fighting, and where the latest battlegrounds are right now.

On the second day of the invasion, the data tracks the path taken by Russian troops as they prepared to launch their siege on Kyiv.

A flurry of digital activity starts near the border in the north, where Russians take control of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, before moving down towards the capital.

The county’s eastern regions are also consistent hotbeds of military activity in the data, as Ukrainian forces battle with Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk.

Visible too are the sieges of the cities of Kharkiv and Sumy on the north-eastern border, the latest areas to feel the brunt of Putin’s forces.

In recent days, the data also shows the Russian advance towards the key port of Odesa; first in taking control of the city of Kherson and then by launching an assault on Mykolaiv.

Data for this map has been gathered from a selection of users, channels and subforums across Twitter, Telegram and Reddit that are dedicated to sharing footage from the invasion.

We collected posts going back to the beginning of the invasion and are collecting new posts every hour.

For each post we extracted any mention of a Ukrainian city and town, adding them up to get a total number of reports for each location on a given day.

We are then representing the reports as a heatmap, with counts mapped at the location of the city or town involved, rather than the precise longitude or latitude of the event in question. 

We have excluded from the map any location with only a handful of reports.

Drawing firm conclusions from online sources amid the fog of war has risks. Digital communities are susceptible to human error and attempts at disinformation.

Yet a hallmark of the war in Ukraine has been the sheer breadth of attempts to gather, watch and verify footage by anyone with a smartphone and connection to the internet.

New footage from the front line is disseminated on social media every day and is being picked up by open source intelligence researchers who are attempting to verify it by finding its precise location.

This method, known as “geolocating”, is achieved by trawling Google Earth and using obscure details in the original grainy imagery to pinpoint an exact match. Similar techniques were successfully established during the Syrian civil war.

At the forefront of the verification efforts in Ukraine are key Twitter researchers, including PhD student Rob Lees, who has gained over 300,000 followers in the last month for his relentless documentation of the vehicles and weapons being used by both sides of the conflict.

But fake viral footage is spreading alongside documentation of the real horrors, posing a challenge to the efforts of online communities to capture the truth.