Data & Indices
Quantitative tracking drawn from two established datasets — GDELT's event and tone data, and the Institute for Economics & Peace's Global Peace Index — read alongside the qualitative sections elsewhere on this site.
GDELT: event tone & volume
The GDELT Project monitors global news media in 65 languages and codes reported events by actor, action type, and tone (a roughly −10 to +10 sentiment score derived from surrounding text). The panels below query GDELT's public DOC 2.0 API directly — a free, keyless, CORS-open search API built for exactly this kind of embedding — for coverage mentioning Russia or Ukraine alongside war-related terms. Each panel searches GDELT's rolling 3-month window (the API's default and maximum lookback for this mode); it is not a full historical archive.
Drone attacks — coverage volume
Tracked as a separate, narrower panel since drone strikes are a distinct escalation indicator worth watching on their own rather than folded into general war coverage.
Note: GDELT's DOC API rate-limits to roughly one request every 5 seconds per visitor, so the three panels above load one at a time with a short staggered delay (see script below) rather than all firing at once — loading them simultaneously was returning a rate-limit message instead of a chart in at least one panel. If a panel still appears blank or cut short after a few seconds, try the "Open full-size" link under it, which opens GDELT's own unconstrained page.
Global Peace Index (GPI)
Published annually by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), the GPI ranks 163 countries and territories across 23 indicators spanning ongoing conflict, societal safety, and militarisation (higher score = less peaceful). Unlike GDELT, IEP does not publish a free API or machine-readable data feed — its "open data" Excel series is only available through a paid data-licensing arrangement — so the figures below are transcribed directly from each year's published report and updated by hand when a new edition is released, typically each June.
| Country | 2026 rank (of 163) | 2026 score | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Russia | 163 | 3.367 | Ranks as the least peaceful country in the index for the first time in the GPI's history. |
| Ukraine | 160 | 3.184 | Among the five least peaceful countries in the 2026 index, alongside Russia, Sudan, DR Congo, and Israel. |
For context: Iceland holds the top (most peaceful) rank for the 19th consecutive year at a score of 1.161. Global peacefulness declined for the 12th consecutive year in the 2026 index. IEP's own interactive map lets you rewind the ranking year by year back to 2008 and drill into all 23 underlying indicators (Ongoing Conflict, Safety & Security, Militarisation) individually — that tool is the most detailed publicly available view of this data, more granular than what could reasonably be reproduced here without a data license.
View Global Peace Index interactive map (rank history & indicator drill-down) →
Black Sea maritime traffic
Contested control of the Black Sea — grain-corridor shipping, Russian Black Sea Fleet movements, and the security of Ukrainian and Russian ports — is one of the more trackable open-source indicators of the war, via AIS (Automatic Identification System) vessel-tracking data that commercial ships broadcast continuously.
MarineTraffic — Black Sea live vessel map
Live AIS ship positions across the Black Sea, including the approaches to Odesa, Sevastopol, and Novorossiysk. Centered on the Black Sea at zoom level 6 — pan and zoom freely once open.
Open live Black Sea map at MarineTraffic →Methodology
GDELT panels query the DOC 2.0 API's timelinevol and timelinetone modes directly via embedded iframe — GDELT sets an open CORS policy specifically to support this kind of embedding, so no server-side fetching, caching, or copyright concerns apply here the way they do for the Daily News and Expert Analysis sections: this is aggregate statistical data about coverage, not reproduced article text. Query terms are documented in the caption under each panel so they can be audited or adjusted. GPI figures are taken from the Institute for Economics & Peace's published annual report and rankings page, cross-checked directly against the source at the time of writing; because IEP has no free live feed, this section will only reflect the year of the report currently transcribed until manually refreshed at the next annual release.