If the first casualty of war is the truth, its first fatality may soon be the internet. 

A frantic international effort is underway to preserve Ukraine’s digital history and Russia’s media archive. The stakes, say internet archivists, include how the war and contemporary Ukraine are remembered.

A team of over 1,300 volunteers at a newly launched global initiative called Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online are racing to preserve hundreds of thousands of websites. Archivists from the National Electronic Archive of Ukraine, the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress are trying to save copies of news publications, digital archives of museums, local government pages, exhibitions and more. 

Archivists are able to save copies of websites through capturing a website’s code with a number of what are called “crawling” tools.