A real-time war map, with the delays stated
WarWatch's war map is a 3D globe that shows the latest reported conflict events as timed alerts, colours every country by the volume of armed-conflict reporting it is generating, and opens a sourced dossier on click. 'Real time' here means minutes behind public reporting, never ahead of it — this page says exactly where the latency sits.
Where the time goes between an event and a marker
| Criterion | What happens | Typical delay | Who controls it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Event → first public report | A journalist, official channel or OSINT account publishes something. | Minutes to days, depending on access and theatre. | The publisher. |
| Report → WarWatch ingest | The source is re-read and new items stored with their link. | Minutes. | WarWatch's fetch schedule. |
| Ingest → classification | A keyword filter, then a model, judge type and severity. | Seconds to a few minutes. | WarWatch. |
| Alert → your screen | The open map polls for new alerts. | Up to 30 seconds. | WarWatch. |
The first row dominates. A war map can only be as current as the reporting it reads, which is why the platform prefers the phrase live reporting to live events wherever the difference matters.
What the map shows
Conflict alerts
Country severity
Country dossiers
Strategic corridors
Supply-chain assets
Tracking mode
What a marker cannot tell you
A pin says that something was reported at roughly this place at roughly this time. It does not say whether the report is one of ten today or the first in a month, whether the country it sits in has been trending up for a fortnight, or what the government there looks like. Those are the questions WarWatch attaches to the map rather than leaving to the reader.
- What happened — the alert’s summary and its source link.
- How it fits — the country’s severity band, trend and daily brief, built from the last seven days of reporting.
- Why it may matter — the dossier’s posture axes, sanctions and macro figures, and the assets and corridors nearby.
- What to watch next — custom alert rules on a country, a corridor, a phrase or a single asset, and a daily report by email.
Sourcing and verification
The map draws only on public material and keeps the provenance of every item. Classification into alert types is automated and is treated as a triage step, not a verification: it decides what is worth showing, not whether it is true. Where a country dossier quotes a figure that has a publisher, that figure is fetched from the publisher and stored with its URL and date.
Limitations
- Positions are as precise as the source: frequently a city, sometimes only a region.
- OSINT and Telegram material can be wrong, staged or old footage re-shared as new.
- Under-reported theatres are under-represented on the map.
- Automated classification makes mistakes in both directions; a missed event is not proof of quiet.
Every alert is also available through the public API, and the underlying articles in the archive.
Frequently asked questions
- How real-time is a real-time war map?
- No public war map sees an event as it happens. It sees a report of the event, published by a news organisation, an OSINT account or an official channel, and places it on the map some minutes later. WarWatch re-reads its sources on a schedule of minutes and the map checks for new alerts every 30 seconds, so a typical alert appears within minutes of the report — but the report itself may be hours behind the event.
- How accurate are live war maps?
- As accurate as their sources, and no more. A marker reflects what a publisher reported, with the publisher's own precision — often a town or district rather than a coordinate. Early reports are frequently revised. Treat any live map as a view of public reporting, not as independently verified evidence.
- Where does WarWatch's map data come from?
- From 45 publicly available sources: international wires and press, regional outlets for each theatre, defence trade press, OSINT publishers, verified Telegram channels and geolocated incident feeds. Each alert keeps a link to the report it came from.
- Why do alerts disappear from the map?
- Map alerts expire five hours after they are raised. The map is meant to show what is being reported now; the full record stays in the intel feed and the searchable archive.
- Can a real-time war map show every military event?
- No. It shows the subset of events that reach public sources, filtered by what the platform classifies as high severity. Quiet operations, events in poorly covered regions and anything not yet reported are absent by definition.
Related resources
See the map
The live conflict map, the country dossiers and the intel feed are free to open. Premium adds critical alerts, the strait monitors, the supply-chain figures and the daily report by email.
WarWatch (war-watch.com) is a global conflict intelligence platform built on publicly available information: news wires, regional press, public OSINT feeds and open datasets. Conflict information changes quickly and early reports are often incomplete or later revised. Nothing on this site is a substitute for official security guidance, and no event shown here should be treated as independently confirmed unless a source says so.