Methodology

What Vigil is

A context platform, not a news service. Each conflict module explains what happened, where, who is involved, why it matters, and what to watch — updated weekly, not hourly. We are deliberately slower than the news and aim to be more durable than it.

Confidence grades

Every quantitative claim carries three things together: a value, an as-of date, and a confidence grade. We never publish a bare number.

• High — multiple independent, credible sources agree; little serious dispute.
• Moderate — credible sourcing with known gaps, wartime distortion, or meaningful disagreement between estimates.
• Low — contested, unverifiable, or single-sourced; published only when the uncertainty itself is informative, and labelled as such.

Where a figure cannot be responsibly estimated, we say so — "not reliably estimable" is a legitimate published value here.

Sources

We synthesise from public material: official statements, established media, OSINT and geolocation communities, satellite-derived reporting, NGO and international-organisation data, think-tank analysis, and market data. Feed and brief items name their source type. We do not use leaked, hacked, or operationally sensitive material.

Source registry

Every citation on this site references an entry below by a stable id; the build fails if a record cites a source that is not registered here. Types classify how a claim is grounded, not how true it is — that is what the confidence grade is for.

• IMF World Economic Outlook — Government data
• US / EU / UK sanctions designations — Government data
• Established historical record — Historical record · Events documented consistently across mainstream histories and contemporaneous reporting; not individually cited.
• Public market and insurance data — Market data
• Established international media reporting — Media reporting
• UNHCR Ukraine situation data — NGO / international organisation
• IAEA Ukraine nuclear safety updates — Official statements
• Official government statements — Official statements · Statements by the governments concerned; treated as positions, not facts.
• LostArmour strike-footage cataloguing — OSINT / geolocation · Russian-language OSINT catalogue of published strike footage (notably Lancet employment). Useful for documented-use volume; counts reflect published footage, not verified effects, and carry a pro-Russian selection bias.
• Oryx visually-confirmed equipment documentation — OSINT / geolocation
• ISW campaign assessments — Think tank
• RUSI component and capability analyses — Think tank · Teardown and capability reports (e.g. recovered-drone component analyses). Findings represent the institute's analysis of examined samples, not fleet-wide certainty.
• SIPRI Military Expenditure Database — Think tank

Safety: context, not targeting

Vigil describes conflicts structurally and historically. We do not publish current unit positions, force concentrations, base coordinates, movement tracking, or anything designed to support targeting. Our content model has no fields for such information — the rule is enforced by the site's build system, not by editorial memory. Front lines on maps are approximate and labelled illustrative. Force information is broad, delayed, and historical.

Neutrality

We describe; we do not advocate. Actors are labelled by role (belligerent, backer, hedger) and bloc, never as "friendly" or "hostile." Neutral framing does not mean false balance: where facts are documented — an invasion, an annexation, a strike on civilian infrastructure — we name them plainly.

Markets

Economic sections explain exposure and transmission channels at the level of sectors, commodities and instrument categories. Nothing on this site is investment advice, and we never recommend, rank, or name securities as opportunities.

Corrections

Errors are corrected in place and logged publicly on thecorrections page, which is never purged. Material corrections are noted on the affected page. If you find an error, we want to know.

Cadence and honesty about status

Modules are reviewed weekly. Every page carries its last-updated date; if a module falls behind, that date is the honest signal — we do not hide staleness. Content marked prototype or sample is illustrative and says so in a banner.

Privacy

No analytics, no tracking, no accounts in this version of the site.