Four Years of Russia-Ukraine War, Sudan’s Child Soldiers on TikTok, India’s Untreated Tap Water, and Waning US Influence at the UN
by Hanna Duggal for Global Investigative Journalism Network
Four years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the war continues, with recent momentum swinging back to Ukraine after several years of grinding Russian advances. To understand the history of the conflict and the unprecedented role that drone warfare has played in both the battlefield and civilian life, Italy’s IRPI Media undertook a broad data investigation into the conflict. In other high-profile news, The Economist collaborated with jmail.world and broke down Jeffrey Epstein’s email network, including with whom he exchanged the most messages while rating the correspondence based on how disturbing its content was. Our roundup of the Top 10 in Data Journalism considers stories from February 11 to 24, which includes a Reuters deep dive into why richer countries feature more in the Winter Olympics and on the medal podium, Bellingcat’s visual investigation into how child soldiers in Sudan are using TikTok and gaining followers, and the waning influence of the US as seen though UN General Assembly votes.
Quantifying Four Years of Russian Attacks on Ukrainian Cities
February 24, 2026 marked four years since Russia invaded Ukraine. IrpiMedia, an Italian investigative journalism outlet, used data from NGOs, think tanks, and universities to document Russian attacks on Ukraine beyond the frontline. Drawing on figures from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Kiel Institute, Truth Hounds, Vanderbilt University School of Law and Ukrainian energy company Dtek, it mapped drone and missile strikes, foreign aid to Ukraine, double-tap attacks, strikes on healthcare and energy infrastructure, and power outages. Of 87,100 missiles and drones launched at Ukrainian cities, 61,352 were intercepted. Calendar heatmaps showed attack volumes over time, while satellite images documented the destruction of eastern cities such as Bakhmut and Mariupol. Bar charts and maps illustrated the effectiveness of Ukraine’s air defenses and the geographic concentration of strikes, highlighting the war’s heavy reliance on drone warfare and Moscow’s targeted attacks on civilian infrastructure.
Who Featured Most in Epstein’s Emails?
The Economist collaborated with jmail.world, a browser-based archive of the Epstein files, to analyze 1.4 million emails extracted from more than three million pages of Jeffrey Epstein documents released by the US Justice Department on January 30. Engineers at jmail.world used the AI tool Reducto to extract email content, including senders, recipients, and dates, from PDFs. The Economist then identified and analyzed the 500 most frequent correspondents. A treemap showed that most emails were with Epstein’s staff, but 19% were with financiers, 10% with scientists or doctors, and 8% with media figures. The team also used a large language model to score each email from 0 to 10 based on how disturbing its content was. A bubble chart highlighted 1,474 emails that received the highest score of 10, with examples of sexual messages between Epstein and women with redacted names.
Sudan’s Child Soldiers on TikTok
Bellingcat, in cooperation with Sudanese station Radio Dabanga, investigated viral TikTok videos of child soldiers in Sudan’s civil war, focusing on “lion cubs” affiliated with both the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). The team geolocated footage showing young teens in military uniforms, armed, celebrating battles, and posing with senior commanders, some even among corpses. Bellingcat identified 12 TikTok accounts spreading this content. After reporting the accounts to TikTok, seven were removed, with the remainder later taken down. Bellingcat geolocated TikTok videos appearing to show a RSF “lion cub” celebrating the capture of the 22nd infantry division SAF base in Babanusa, West Kordofan, in December. Tens of thousands of followers were gained in the weeks following the video. The investigation used satellite mapping and on-the-ground geolocation to follow the child soldiers’ journey with analysts noting the content normalized and glamorized warfare, potentially encouraging recruitment and demonstrating how social media has transformed child soldiers into viral symbols despite platform rules prohibiting the exploitation and militarization of minors.
Cost of Participating in the Winter Olympics
Reuters Graphics analyzed Winter Olympics participation data to examine the financial and structural barriers faced by athletes from poorer countries. Using Olympic records categorized by World Bank income groups, packed bubble charts showed that at the 2022 Winter Olympics, nearly 78% of athletes came from 49 high-income nations. Bar charts illustrated the high cost of entry-level equipment, often exceeding half the average annual income in low-income countries. A dot matrix visualization broke down athlete representation by sport and region, covering 15 disciplines from alpine skiing to speed skating, flagging which income groups and continental regions had zero participation in a given sport across the last three Games. Ice hockey, curling, and speed skating recorded no athletes from low- or lower-middle-income countries across that period.
Tennessee Highway Patrol’s Dangerous High-Speed Pursuits
The Institute for Public Service Reporting, in collaboration with Lighthouse Reports, reviewed hundreds of arrest affidavits filed in the city of Memphis, Tennessee to analyze vehicle pursuits conducted by the Memphis Safe Task Force. The data examined the first five weeks of the task force’s operation, from September 29 to November 3, 2025. The methodology focused on affidavits containing “evading arrest” charges, identifying 75 separate vehicle pursuits. Using a pictogram chart, the review found that 32 of these pursuits (43%) resulted in accidents, with 29 conducted by the Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP). At a rate of more than two pursuits per day, the findings suggest the task force was on pace for roughly 780 vehicle pursuits annually, far exceeding the Memphis Police Department’s recent annual average of 144. The analysis also revealed that up to 48% of THP’s 66 pursuits were initiated after stops for equipment violations, such as missing headlights, broken taillights, or expired tags.
Countries Distancing Themselves From the US, in UN Votes
The Guardian analyzed UN General Assembly voting records, compiled by data firm Focaldata, to map global shifts in alignment with the US and China. The number of countries strongly aligned with the US fell dramatically, from 46 under the Obama and Biden administrations to just seven under Trump, while China’s bloc of aligned countries remained largely intact. A world map visualized each country’s current alignment score alongside its directional shift between 2024 and 2025, color-coded to indicate swings toward the US or China. Focaldata assigned each country a voting alignment score from +1 (always voting with China) to -1 (always voting with the US), based on contested UN resolutions. By measuring how closely each country’s votes correlated with those of the US or China, researchers tracked alignment changes over time. A line chart traced individual country scores from 2008 through 2025 under different US administrations, showing that Canada, South Korea, Japan, Germany, and the UK all moved sharply away from the US in 2025. A scatter plot also tracked the economic power of US-aligned versus China-aligned countries over time, revealing Chinese-aligned nations now represent greater economic growth than US-aligned ones.
IndiaSpend analyzed water quality and functionality data from the water resource ministry’s 2024 national assessment, India’s flagship rural tap water program. The assessment drew on data collected between July and October 2024 across sampled villages in 761 districts spanning 34 states and Union territories. Twelve households were surveyed in each village, alongside all public institutions including schools and health facilities. Using bar charts, IndiaSpend’s analysis found that of all tap water samples collected from household connections, 24% failed microbiological quality tests against a national pass rate of 76%. Pass rates at public institutions were lower across all facility types and three in four households reported consuming tap water without any treatment or filtration, which leaves them at risk of falling ill. Among the minority of households that did treat their water, boiling was the most common method at 13.2%, followed by straining through cloth at 11.2%. A choropleth map showed that state-level pass rates varied from 99% in Ladakh to 31.1% in Tripura, with several large states falling below the national average. The story found that field test kits for basic on-site water testing were absent in 73% of villages and skilled maintenance personnel were available in only 58% of villages.
Public vs. Private School Performance on Medical Exams in Brazil
Folha de S.Paulo analyzed data from the Enamed — Brazil’s national medical school annual exam, designed to assess the quality of medical training — to compare the question-by-question performance of students graduating from private versus public medical programs. The analysis was conducted by Folha’s data team using an interactive bubble chart visualizing each question’s correct-answer rate broken down by institution type — public, private, and overall — with bubble size representing the proportion of correct answers and color indicating which institution type performed better on each question. The chart could be filtered by institution type and followed the order of questions as they appeared in the exam booklet. Private medical school students performed worse than their public counterparts on 85 of the 90 valid questions. Of the 39,000 students who sat for the exam, 24,500 were from private programs and 9,800 from public ones; 61% of private students achieved adequate performance compared to 81% of public students. The finding was notable because private medical students have a stronger socioeconomic profile than their public counterparts and the results contributed to the Ministry of Education suspending a call for new private medical school licenses earlier this month.
How Have Degree Choices Changed Since 1970
Nathan Yau analyzed bachelors degrees from the US National Center for Education Statistics to dive into how the popularity of college courses in the US have shifted since 1970. The analysis ranked fields of study by total degrees awarded each year, with a slope down or up indicating a change in position. The findings revealed that business rose to the top spot in 1980 and has maintained dominance, with 368,000 degrees awarded in 2024. The chart also highlighted the decline over time of education degrees, the rise of computer science, and the growth in degrees for parks and recreation, and fitness.
Sizing Chaos of Women’s Clothing
The Pudding’s in-depth piece on women’s clothing sizes explains why finding the right fit is so challenging. A scrollytelling visualization traced the median 11-year-old US girl into adulthood, mapping her waist against available clothing sizes at each stage. It revealed that the median adult woman, with a 37.68-inch waist, roughly a size 18, falls outside the standard size range, which usually stops at size 16, effectively excluding more than half of all adult US women. The analysis drew on body measurements from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, using data collected between 2021 and 2023, and compared them with figures from 1988–1994 to track changes over time. Size charts from July 2025 were manually collected from 15 popular US apparel brands, including mass market, fast fashion, premium, and luxury labels, covering bust, waist, and hip measurements across regular and plus-size ranges. Standards organization ASTM International’s standardized size tables from 1995 and 2021 served as a benchmark. Interactive visualizations highlighted key inconsistencies: a dot plot showed how the same waist measurement corresponds to different sizes across brands, while a side-by-side dress form comparison of ASTM charts revealed that today’s size 8 is 2.5 inches larger in the waist than its 1995 equivalent, reflecting vanity sizing — the practice of keeping size labels the same despite underlying measurements becoming larger.
Hanna Duggal is the writer of GIJN’s fortnightly Top 10 in Data Journalism column, and a data journalist at AJ Labs, the data, visual storytelling, and experiments team of Al Jazeera. She has reported on issues such as policing, surveillance, and protests using data, and reported for GIJN on data journalism in the Middle East, investigating algorithms onTikTok, and on using data to investigate tribal lands in the US.
This article first appeared on Global Investigative Journalism Network and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.