You probably won’t have heard any of this on the news. Welcome to The Under Reported War.
NASA FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System) combines real-time data from multiple heat-sensing satellites to show the outbreak of major fires across the world. Using that data, I have masked off the area of Eastern Ukraine from Sumy to Crimea where the vast majority of fighting has occurred since the Russian retreat from Kyiv in early 2022. Inside that area you can see month-by-month where fires generated by artillery and aerial bombardment occurred.
The animation starts in Dec 2021 so that you have some idea of what the map should look like when there is no fighting. From April-September 2022 you can see how intense the Russian artillery bombardments in Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kherson oblasts were. Then the Russians ran short of ammo, Ukraine counter-attacked, and the Russian retreated. The number of fires dropped radically.
In 2023, there was stalemate as minor Ukrainian counter-attacks got almost nowhere, followed by Russian offensives that suffered the same fate. Meanwhile, new supplies of missiles and artillery munitions began to arrive from Iran and North Korea.
Last year, in 2024, you can clearly see the stalled Russian offensive up north of Kharkiv in April, followed by Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk a couple of months later. By this time, Russia had switched to using glide bombs to compensate for artillery shortages and that is reflected in the pulverising red fire lines that erupt along the frontline until October.
And then it fell quiet, probably for two reasons. First, Ukraine’s long-range drones blew up major munitions storage depots across European Russia. It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of tons of artillery shells, missiles, rockets, bombs and other munitions were destroyed. Second, Ukraine worked out how to use electronic warfare to jam the Russian glide bombs.
In the last month, the number of fires has stoked up. This might reflect Putin’s determination to do something, anything, on the battlefield to influence the Americans. However, Ukraine’s drone attack near Moscow last week destroyed a large part of Russia’s biggest munitions arsenal. We might see this new intensity drop swiftly.
What the animation shows clearly is how small Russia’s advances have been in the last two years. Also that, contrary to the information warfare Russia wages successfully on Western journalists, its ability to advance using its artillery-led doctrine has dwindled to next to nothing. Finally, Ukraine’s electronic warfare and long-range drone attacks have (so far) thwarted Russia’s attempts to regain the overwhelming firepower it once wielded.
__________________________________________
By the way, when the whole map erupts in occasional evenly spaced red dot outbreaks of what looks like measles, that’s not the fighting. It’s seasonal agricultural burning of stubble. Looks like it happens twice a year in this region.
The animation proceeds in half monthly chunks. That’s purely because it is a good way to aggregate the fires. It would take a long time to do it day-by-day only to get much the same effect and I don’t have that much free time.
__________________________________________
Feel free to post your comments or observations.
Share this post