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Mapping the Ukraine war: where is the latest fighting?

Our satellite view of the conflict, updated daily

Updated on November 20th 2023

Where in Ukraine is the war taking place? Intelligence sources, both traditional and open-source, can give a sense of what goes on in cities such as Kyiv, and, with a bit more difficulty, near the front line on the Ukrainian side. But it is much harder to know what happens at the front, or deep in Russian-occupied areas. To map the fighting, we have developed a system based on data from satellites that fly over the country twice a day. Like any view of the war, it is imperfect and incomplete. But unlike other methods, it offers a consistent and neutral guide to probable military activity anywhere in the country, so long as skies are clear.

Cloud cover, % of time

Detected fires, November 20th 2023

War-related*

Other

None

All

Russian-occupied Ukraine

June 5th 2023

Russian-occupied Ukraine

June 5th 2023

Kyiv

Kharkiv

UKRAINE

Bakhmut

Zaporizhia

Donetsk

RUSSIA

Kherson

Sea of Azov

Black Sea

Number of fires

Crimea

*Assessed by statistical model. Days of extreme heat and immediate aftermath (August 4th-August 11th 2023) excluded.

Our tracking system is based on data from FIRMS, a publicly available system set up by America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which was originally designed to detect forest fires. We have built a machine-learning algorithm that evaluates the location of each fire detected by FIRMS, and assesses whether or not it is related to the war. It consists of 100 separate models built to predict fire activity in non-war years. If at least 95 of these models agree that the number of fires identified at a given place and time is abnormally high by pre-war standards, the algorithm marks these “extra” fires as war-related. So far, the model has mapped over 20,000 war-related fires using this method. Many are probably artillery fire, but others result from attacks such as missile and drone strikes.

Fires marked as war-related, by area of control

Seven-day moving average, days with less than 50% cloud cover

*No day with less than 50% cloud cover in surrounding week, or days of extreme heat and immediate aftermath (August 4th-August 11th 2023).

Our method is far from perfect. Some of the fires it marks as war-related are incorrectly classified. Given its strict thresholds, the number that are not flagged as war-related but should be is probably even larger. Moreover, many fires never get detected at all, either because they end before the satellites pass overhead or because the satellites’ view is blocked by clouds. (Much as fire is a constant of war, so is its fog.) This means our picture, like any other of the conflict, is partial: it is a guide to activity, and far from a full tally of the devastation.

Nonetheless, this system offers unique insights. It detects activity anywhere in the country, and—weather permitting—provides live counts of fire events day by day. As the war continues, our map will continue to update.■

Inspect all our code, data, and models on GitHub.

Sources: DMSP Nighttime Lights; ESA; EUMETSAT; Google Earth Engine; Institute for the Study of War; NASA; WorldPop; The Economist

Mapping the Ukraine war: where is the latest fighting?

Our satellite view of the conflict, updated daily

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