Method and corrections.

More than 50 Russian outlets: the state-owned and state-aligned press inside Russia, the services that carry Moscow’s message abroad, and the Russian press now publishing from exile, together with the main Telegram channels of military bloggers and nationalist commentators. Everything is kept in the languages it was published in.

Outlets are grouped by ownership and editorial control, using published evidence for each one. The exile press is collected for the same days and analysed as a control.

The collection sets out to hold everything these outlets publish, whatever the subject, and questions are put to the whole record afterwards.

For most outlets, the archive is checked every night against the outlet’s own record of what it has published. Articles the outlet published but the archive does not hold are listed by address and, where they are still online, recovered. A gap is counted as a list of articles, never as an estimate.

Where an outlet’s own record cannot be checked, the outlet is named as unmeasured. Every published figure states the outlets and dates it covers, and counts are given as floors: the true number may be higher, never lower.

Each article is stored with the time it was captured. Articles recovered later are marked as such. Changes made by a publication seen after capture are recorded, with both versions kept.

More than 8 in 10 articles collected live are captured within an hour of publication, and more than 9 in 10 within two hours. Measured over every day from 1 July to 7 October 2026, across 902,586 articles collected live with a stated publication time; articles recovered later, and those whose outlet gives only a date, are counted separately.

Each article’s text is fingerprinted (SHA-256) when it is collected. The fingerprints are timestamped by two independent systems: within the hour through OpenTimestamps, which anchors them to the Bitcoin blockchain, and again each day by a timestamp authority working to the RFC 3161 standard. Records collected before late September 2026 are timestamped from then onwards.

This makes the archive tamper-evident. Given an archived text, its fingerprint and the timestamp proof, anyone can check with public tools that the text was in the archive at that time and has not been changed since – including by Vigeat Europa. The proof covers the archive’s own record: the article text as collected, with the address and time it was collected from.

Since October 2026, most newly collected articles also have their page source kept as the outlet’s server delivered it, fingerprinted and timestamped; the rest will follow.

A further copy of the archive is held in write-locked storage for ten years.

Machines do the first reading, at a scale no person could. Before a study begins, the set of articles it rests on is defined by a written rule, and the whole set is analysed, not a sample.

Where articles are coded – for example, by the reason an article gives for a sanction – the coding brief is tested for consistency on unseen articles before use. Findings that rest on judgement are only published where that consistency holds.

Every published figure is recomputed from the underlying article-level records, and a human being reviews the evidence behind each principal finding, including the source articles quoted. Where checks reveal problems, the analysis is corrected and rerun. Every claim traces to an archived article, available on request; from October 2026, each study’s evidence is frozen at publication in a fingerprinted, timestamped package.

Vigeat Europa is run from The Hague. Its founder has worked for years on Europe’s east and European foreign policy – on peacebuilding in the South Caucasus and in support of Ukraine’s legal profession – and has edited European foreign-policy publications.

The founder has also spent years in corporate and financial public relations, positioning and messaging, which is where he learned how narratives are built.

Errors in published work are corrected in public, on the page where they appear, with the date and what changed. To report one: corrections@vigeat.eu