Yes. I believe there are open-source satellite photographs that are available, without interpretation, to be inspected. There are all kinds of reports from the ground, given that this is the year 2023. It's necessary, of course, to evaluate these reports very carefully, but with practice it's possible to do so. It is not necessary to have a conflictionist view of things in order to suggest that skepticism is always a good thing when one is evaluating information provided by people who have an interest in the information being believed or disbelieved.
I can answer only from my personal and individual experience. I was trained in the last decade of the Cold War. I cut my teeth on reading the Soviet press. It's necessary to evaluate even testimony that looks like it's first-hand and that says it's first-hand. It's always necessary to ask a question about the motives of the people providing it and to ask what the other angles are. It's like a jigsaw puzzle, and you have to put all the pieces together to equilibrate, to balance, what's more likely and what's less likely.
I'm not certain, sir, that there's a single source or even a small handful of sources that one can have recourse to with confidence to say that these are the ones we have.... With all due respect to the International Crisis Group, which I highly respect, they are one of a large number of analytical—