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Bakhmut fire, 3 September 2026 Бахмутський район · Bakhmut, Perevalsk

Out · last detection 11 Sept 2026, 09:56 UTC

The fire started on 3 September 2026 in Bakhmut, Ukraine, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 845 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 50th largest in Donetsk Oblast since 2016 (of 1004 with a page). Number 59 in Ukraine in 2026, of 984.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Bakhmut · 2022Bakhmut · 2024Bakhmut · 2025Bakhmut · 2024

Burnt area
845ha
Copernicus perimeter
Duration
≈ 9days
3 Sept 2026 – 11 Sept 2026
Municipalities hit
2
districts
Started on
3 Sept
2026
Heat detections
16
in a single hotspot: 55 MW
Danger at start
28
High · FWI index
Average daily power
98MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 3 Sept11 Sept
11 Sept 2026

How it evolved, day by day

3 Sept 2026 · 280 MW · 14 4 Sept 2026 · 2 MW · 1 11 Sept 2026 · 10 MW · 1
3 Sept 4 Sept 11 Sept

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

29°high
50km/h · peak gust
20%lowest humidity

It had gone 22 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.7 mm on 14 Sept.

This area had burned before

99% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 439 ha in 2022, 788 ha in 2024, 354 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 839 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 0.5% of the area of London (8.4 km² against 1,583 km²).

London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).

This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.

What happened to each town

  1. Bakhmut Бахмутський район 108,637 inhabitants · 45.0 km from the centre where it started
    824 ha reached on 3 Sept
    0.5 %
  2. Perevalsk Перевальський район 69,738 inhabitants · 31.6 km from the centre
    18 ha
    0.0 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the official perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance runs from the point marking the centre of each area to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.

What burned

  • Other natural land59 %
  • Agricultural areas33 %
  • Mixed forest7.7 %

Land cover inside the perimeter as reported by Copernicus EFFIS (outside the Corine Land Cover area).

The weather day by day

ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, the standard reference for past weather, and the Canadian Fire Weather Index (the same system Copernicus uses), computed by WorldFires from that data. Days after the fire run until the first rain.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
3 Sept 26.4 °C 36 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
4 Sept 26.7 °C 32 % 19 km/h 0.3 mm High 26
5 Sept 29.2 °C 23 % 50 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
6 Sept 22.2 °C 38 % 36 km/h 4.7 mm Low 7
7 Sept 18.6 °C 45 % 45 km/h 0.5 mm Moderate 14
8 Sept 20.5 °C 33 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
9 Sept 22.7 °C 22 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
10 Sept 28.4 °C 20 % 17 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
11 Sept 28.4 °C 25 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
12 Sept after 27.5 °C 34 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
13 Sept after 30.9 °C 26 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
14 Sept after 25.7 °C 45 % 27 km/h 1.7 mm Low 11

Before and after, from space

Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.

Before · 27 Aug 2026
After · 18 Sept 2026

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 5 September 2026 the air beside the fire reached 35 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak35 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1044 µg/m³
Optical depth0.28
12345678
Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)

Detections table · 16Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
⬇ Download CSV Times in UTC. Each detection is a 375 m pixel: a large fire yields hundreds per pass.
Date and timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Ukraine ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Bakhmut fire last?
The official perimeter only gives the start date (3 September 2026). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 11 September 2026 (9 days from 3 September 2026), the last day with detections before more than 10 days in a row without any, so it is approximate.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 845 hectares (8.4 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Bakhmut (824 ha, 0.5 %); Perevalsk (18 ha, 0.0 %).
Did the fire reach a town?
The fire came within 31.6 km of the centre of Perevalsk, the closest of the areas it touched. That is the distance from the perimeter, or the nearest hotspot, to the point marking the centre; it does not mean it entered the houses.
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 29.2 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 50 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 40, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Ukraine (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

Where to verify it

A satellite detection is not an official report. Final figures and the fire’s status are published by each country’s emergency service.

Emergency number: 101 · 112 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

Satellite cross-check

History of this page Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

No changes since 24 October 2026.

RSS Changes to this page

Does something look wrong on this page?

This page is built from satellite data and official records, and it sometimes gets things wrong: the wrong dates, the wrong town, two fires merged into one, or something that was not a wildfire at all. If you know this fire first-hand (you live nearby, saw it, fought it or reported on it), tell us what really happened and we will check it.

Report an error
What do you think is wrong?

We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy. This is not an emergency service: if there is a fire now, call 101 · 112.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
  • The official perimeter has no end date: the end is the last day with VIIRS detections inside the perimeter before a gap of more than 10 days (150 days at most), so it is approximate. 16 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.
  • Weather: Copernicus ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, in cells of about 25 km.

How we build fire pages: methodology ›

Where this data comes from

The perimeter and land cover come from the Copernicus European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), measured on MODIS and Sentinel-2 imagery and published under CC BY 4.0. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. Municipal boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM2 (Public Domain). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ slightly from each country’s official figure.