Instead, believe the lights Russians leave on at night. Sweden’s intelligence services arrived at that figure by measuring nighttime luminosity, an increasingly mature and rigorous branch of economic geography. Because unlike the Kremlin, night lights don’t lie. Artificial light at night (ALAN) provides strangely honest data on GDP, poverty, war, and many other things governments would rather scientists didn’t measure. Recent analyses of NASA satellite data have made the field even more relevant, revealing the night side of the planet to be a subtle fact-checker of misinformation.