The Undeniable Street View(.com) is the world’s first* war zone shown in Street View or made into an interactive Street View experience – allowing anyone in the world to walk Ukraine’s war-torn streets and observe the targeting of civilian areas from multiple angles. A feature also shows how some streets looked pre-invasion.

Created by shooting 100KM street film through destroyed neighbourhoods of 6 front-line cities, this provides a unique way to experience a war zone and observe Russia’s crimes with a variety of civilian infrastructure targeted, including residential buildings, schools and hospitals – turning every visitor into a witness.

On 24th Feb 2023 marked one year of Russia’s barbaric full invasion and also one year of Russia's brutal targeting of civilian areas / infrastructure. This pattern of targeting residential buildings, schools and hospitals of course is consistently denied by Russia. This denial is normally in the form of saying pictures and film showing these attacks are fake news. In a war of propaganda, the value of discrediting these stories is high for Russia. And so the value for Ukraine to validate them is enormous.

Additionally, a year of the conflict, President Zelenskyy and United24 (his government initiative) challenged the media world to prevent a new potential enemy growing – worldwide indifference. We needed to remind the world why support for Ukraine is right, and needed. And we knew the most powerful way to do this was to highlight the truth / fight the miss-truth about Russia's targeting of civilians.

As the one-year anniversary approached, we decided to show Russia's criminal targeting of civilian infrastructure in a manner that is hard to deny.

We launched The Undeniable Street View(.com) – The world’s first war-zone shown in Street View or made into an interactive Street View experience. 100KM Street film was shot with the official Google Street photographer of Ukraine, filming 6 frontline cities by car under risk of attack. With footage from destroyed neighbourhoods of Kyiv, Irpin, Kharkiv, Izyum & Sumy, we made a site the same way as Google Street View – allowing anyone around the world to walk Ukraine’s streets and observe Russia’s targeting of civilian areas / infrastructure first-hand – turning every visitor effectively into a witness.

The site became a unique document of a crime - allowing anyone to walk neighbourhoods, look around 360°, and see up-close residential buildings, schools and hospitals that were hit.

The target audience was everyone in the world. The site was made so anyone with a tablet or computer can visit Ukraine and walk the streets to see the targeting of civilian areas for themselves. The idea was to fight Russian miss-truths and create as many witnesses to the crime as possible around the world - in the hope any perpetrators are held to account – and support for Ukraine would be refreshed.

The second audience is the world media and news wires. We hoped the combination of an innovative idea, the cause, and the partners would help organic PR pick-up. We only had a $10,000 budget - so we relied on "earned media" to bring site visitors and become a story in its own right. We did this by weaponising the truth of what is going on there - specifically the attacks on and killing of civilians.

Building and shooting a Street-View experience of an active war-zone is a world first because Google don't allow uploads to their Street-View of imagery showing war or violence.

So we built a site to work exactly like Google Street-View’s functionality. Anyone could explore, “walk” and look around 360° as they pleased. Ultimately a singular photo or video footage can be taken from a favourable angle, but Street-View, you can see the targeting of civilian areas from several angles and perspectives yourself. Plus with over 100KM of land on show, it's a comprehensive document.

All Street-View footage was shot by Ukraine's official Google Street View photographer Mykola Omelchenko, using a car driving around neighbourhoods recently on the front-line (often under threat of attack). 6 cities and regions were captured: KYIV, IRPIN, KHARKIV, IZYUM and SUMY. Using GPS data, we made a way users could also toggle between pre-invasion and post-invasion imagery.

SITE VISITORS: 5.2 Million = 5.2 Million witnesses created FROM 154 different countries.

TOP 20 COUNTRIES: 1. Ukraine 2. Poland 3. Germany 4. Russia 5. United States 6. United Kingdom 7. Italy 8. Canada 9. Netherlands 10 Czech Republic 11. Spain 12. France 13. Estonia 14. Romania 15. Belarus 16. Lithuania 17. Brazil 18. South Korea 19. Israel 20. Hong Kong / Sweden

31.6M total minutes spent on the site

CYBER ATTACKS BLOCKED: 206

EARNED MEDIA: $156 Million (from a total project budget of $10,000)

IMPRESSIONS: 408 Million

NEWS / NEWSPAPERS / MEDIA: Over 350 worldwide news outlets and multiple major news titles.

SPECIAL REQUESTS:

1) We received a request via UNITED 24 for another city to be shot /represented on the site recently hit in a missile attack – Zaporizhzhya – a city with the largest nuclear plant in Europe.

Everything above can be officially verified by third parties.

It was a project designed for global viewing and interaction. We provided an idea that would be universally understood in an experience that would be interacted with in a way everyone would get too.

However, inside Ukraine this went viral, was picked up by all major media outlets with a wealth of positive and appreciative sentiment, including at a governmental level for its impact.