The DeepState map is exactly the resource where Ukrainians look first when they want to learn about the progress of our troops and the situation at the front in general. Not everyone knows that this is a Ukrainian development, and its founders are a lawyer and a programmer, who at first, in 2020, filled the Telegram channel with events of international politics, and only since February 24 have they completely devoted it to the events of the great war.
Roman Pogorely and Ruslan Mikula told ICTV Facts about how they created the Deep State map, about helping the army and their dreams of getting to the deoccupied territories.
We met in the Kiev office – among maps, humanitarian aid and no longer operational shells that the soldiers handed over to the guys.
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Roman and Ruslan said: work continues 24/7. Some people work from the office, many people work from home. The co-founders of the card have known each other since 2014. At first they organized military training courses for young people, but now they are completely focused on maps and filling out telegrams – the channel.
“I now know the geography of the Kharkov, Donetsk or Zaporozhye regions better than my native Kiev region,” admits Ruslan.
He himself is a Buchan. The most terrible events of this city were experienced in Kyiv. Then we had to work from the basement. His main job at that time was to transmit to the military the data that the residents of captured Borodyanka, Makarov, Irpen and Peskovka collected at the risk of their lives. It was for this active position, Ruslan believes, that the Kiev region paid the price.
“People informed us about the movement of the columns, and we then informed us where each column was moving. As we know, Borodyanka was defeated because the column was smashed to smithereens. Planes arrived from Belarus, and then they did the worst, adds Ruslan.
At the beginning of the offensive, their Telegram channel was especially popular in the Kyiv region. Then he already had 10 thousand subscribers.
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Shortly before the formal start of the offensive, the guys began to publish data about the revival of Russians near our border.
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– We began to notice the movements of the Russian military. They monitored the trains, tracked all the trains with military personnel. Information was taken from special sites and systems that even showed where everything was moving from and where along our borders. The Russians posted a lot of things online. For example, how they travel through villages along the border. The soldiers posted this on their Twitter, VKontakte, and Facebook pages. They were proud of it. When they say now that they supposedly didn’t want to, that they were forced to, they all wanted to. In the first days of the war, they were very proud of this,” notes the developer.
The founders of DeepStateUA say: their goal is not to gain a large number of subscribers or popularity throughout the world. In fact, the most important thing is to do good and not harm. Therefore, the information published may be somewhat out of date.
“Not a single map in the world will ever be accurate during combat operations,” says Roman. “War is such a dynamic thing that even at the moment when we are talking, everything can change. We have built our reputation on the fact that we are not in a hurry, we check everything very carefully. This is where our connections with the fighters began. We are responsible for every information, every designation. If in a Telegram channel the news is just something informational, on the map it is people’s lives.
The main thing in their work is the safety of the fighters, this is the responsibility towards them 10:13 conscience does not allow playing on this in the news. We cooperate with evacuation services, the State Emergency Service, and the military.
“There is not a single line of contact that would be accurate on the map,” adds Ruslan. — Sometimes we know something, but we don’t publish it for obvious reasons. For example, when de-occupation occurs, and we know about it, until there is some kind of agreement, we post it so as not to set anyone up.
Ruslan says that now there is less information from people in the occupied territories. Firstly, its reliability is much more difficult to verify than it was in the first months of the offensive.
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Nowadays they mostly use proven sources. First of all, the following soldiers help fill out the DeepStateMap:
“Right now, the most trust is in the wing, which flew, took off, and the guys did their job.” For example, we are in contact with aerial reconnaissance officers and can look at some lines of contact. We don’t publish this, but we can make an analysis and conclusions for ourselves about what will need to be changed on the map,” he says.
The card logo was invented by Ruslan. A knight on a chessboard, he says, is an unpredictable figure. And the name Deep state is an American term that means a certain shadow force that non-publicly controls the state and prevents the state from turning in the wrong direction.
And the best signs of trust are numerous gifts from the military and the trust of Ukrainians who regularly donate money to volunteer projects.
– If we talk about trust, in March people already started donating money to us for a volunteer. Then we gave the cry that we needed to close the request, and we saw that even those readers who knew nothing about our request were throwing money at us.
The most important thing, they say, for them is to be useful. And the dream is to get to those freed and so far inaccessible points, the location of which they so carefully map.
ICTV
