Preparation is not fear. It is work you do while you are calm.
Escalation leaves a record before it becomes an event. Governments publish that record. Almost nobody reads it. czujka reads twenty-six public sources, scores the level by rule, and reports when the level changes.
Imagine eight instruments pointed at one country. One listens to what foreign governments tell their own citizens about travelling there. One counts how often that advice has changed recently, and how seriously. One asks whether anybody is shooting. One reads official statements from defence ministries. One measures how close the country is to a place where people are already being shot at. One watches money. One watches aircraft. One watches whether the internet still works.
Each instrument returns a number between nothing and everything. Each has a weight, because they are not equally informative. Add them up with their weights and you get one number.
That number is not a chance of war. It is a measure of how much of what can be observed is currently pointing at a place. Ukraine sits at 100 because it is the thing being measured against.
For a journalist
Eight weighted components, normalised to the unit interval, summed and then anchored so the country with directly measured hostilities reads 100. The weights are fixed and published, not fitted. They are visible alongside.
Advisory carries 34 per cent because it is the only component that survived an eleven-year backtest. Media volume carries zero by design. It was measured across the same period and could not separate escalation from noise, including in the one window where it produced its largest anomaly in a decade.
Component values are exposed per country through the public API. The airspace component is withheld from the published breakdown because its sources forbid redistribution. It is four per cent of the weight. The index is an exposure measure. It has no forecast horizon and no probability interpretation, and it should not be quoted as one.
Fig 1How the index is weighed
Ukraine · index 100.0 · heaviest part: travel advisories
Move across to change country
A scale with one loading column per component. The width of the discs in a column is that component's fixed weight. The height of the stack is what that component reads today. The deck carries the sum, the spring gives way by that much, and the dial reads it against the anchor. Move across the drawing to change country and watch which columns do the work.
Why prepare
In 2022 the record changed seventy days before the tanks did. Almost nobody was reading it.
This is the part that matters, so here it is slowly.
An invasion does not begin on the morning it begins. It is preceded by paperwork. Foreign ministries quietly re-word their travel advice. Embassies send families home. Insurers withdraw cover. Airlines reroute. None of it is secret. All of it is published, in documents written for other purposes, which is exactly why nobody reads them.
What the warning actually looked likeEach bar is one change to a government travel advisory in the hundred days before 24 February 2022. Taller means more serious. Read it left to right: thin and occasional for two months, then taller and closer together, then every day.
Regional warningConflict-grade changeLeave, or embassy withdrawn
Hover a mark to read it.
0days out
The first conflict-grade change. A single sentence, in a document nobody reads.
0days out
Embassy families withdrawn. A government moving its own people is the clearest statement it can make without saying anything.
0days out
The first instruction to leave. The queues have started and a passport renewal takes longer than you have.
024 February 2022
Everything that was easy on day seventy is now impossible.
Seventy days is a long time. It is enough to fill water containers and forget about them. It is enough to renew a passport at the normal price. It is enough to put copies of your documents somewhere that is not your flat. It is enough to agree with your family where you will meet if the telephones stop, and then never mention it again.
None of that is survivalism. There is no bunker in it and no tinned food for a decade. It is four afternoons of administration, done once, reviewed twice a year, and otherwise forgotten.
A household that has done it is not frightened. It is finished with the subject. That is the entire argument for preparing: not that something will happen, but that the work gets very much harder at exactly the moment you would need to do it.
The index exists to tell you which seventy days those are. It is the part you cannot do yourself, because it means reading twenty-six sources every day for years, including all the years when nothing happens.
Lead times measured from the published advisory record for 2022 and graded by czujka's own classification. Across the control periods tested between 2016 and 2026, no comparable sequence occurred.
The record, right now
measuring
These are live. The homelab pushes every ninety seconds and the figures move when it does. Most of these sources keep no history that can be retrieved later, so the archive is written every day and kept. A day that is not recorded cannot be recovered.
Method
Three rules it will not break.
01
The score is deterministic.
A language model writes the daily summary. It never moves the number. The level is a set of rules applied to measurements, so the same inputs give the same answer every time.
02
Silence is not calm.
When a source stops reporting, the reading says so and its confidence falls. It never reads as low risk. Seven of the ten countries cannot observe hostilities on their own territory, and each of them states that.
03
Your government is right.
czujka is an instrument, not an authority. Where it disagrees with your national civil protection service, that service is correct. In Poland it is Rządowe Centrum Bezpieczeństwa.
What it reads
Twenty-six feeds, polled on their own cadences. Counts are live.
Two of these feeds carry licence terms that forbid redistribution, so this site publishes czujka's own derived numbers and never their data. Media volume is collected and deliberately carries zero weight in the index.
The app
A ladder with four rungs, and your own plan attached to it.
The index says how exposed a country is. The ladder says what that should mean for you, today, in your house. They are different questions and the app answers the second one.
Fig 2The ladder is an interlock
L1 Normal · no standing advisory, nothing moving
Move across to climb
The rung is not a judgement. Each slide in the bed is one condition the ladder reads, and each bar across them is one route to a rung. A bar can only drop when every slide it crosses shows a notch beneath it. One condition missing and the bar stays up, whatever anybody thinks of the news that week. Two bars serve rung three and two serve rung four, which is why each of them has two ways in.
L1Normal
Keep water, documents and a half tank. Hold one conversation with your family. Check it twice a year. Then forget about it.
L2Notice
Read the detail. Refill what has expired. Nothing changes in your week.
L3Elevated
Do the things that stop being easy: prescriptions, cash, passports, the route driven once. This is the last level at which the queues are normal.
L4Armed conflict
The decision you already wrote down is now in force. One named person makes it, and it is re-made on a clock.
czujka
L1Normal
Poland. 9 of 9 feeds reporting.
We leave if…
answered · stays on this device
Meeting point
answered · stays on this device
Water rotation
due in 3 weeks
The questionnaire is the product
About thirty questions. Where you would go. Which road. Who decides. What must happen before you leave. Each one comes with a recommended answer drawn from your own civil protection guidance, so the work is choosing rather than composing.
Two of them cannot be outsourced
"We leave if ___" and "we stay if ___". They have to be conditions you could recognise without an argument. Writing them while calm is the single highest-value thing in the whole system, and it is the reason the app exists.
Then it watches on your behalf
czujka compares the signal against your answers rather than against a general one, and tells you when your own condition is met. Not when something happened somewhere.
Privacy
Write it once. We cannot read it.
Your answers describe where your family sleeps, which road they would take, and where the documents are. That is the most sensitive data anywhere near this project, and none of it is needed to compute a score. It is encrypted on your device with a key we do not hold. This is not a promise that we will not read it. We cannot.
Polish and English first. Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Finnish and Romanian after.