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Balakliia fire, April 2025 Балаклійський район · Balakliia

Out · last detection 21 Apr 2025, 10:09 UTC

The fire started on 19 April 2025 in Balakliia, Ukraine, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 633 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 35th largest in Kharkiv Oblast since 2016 (of 558 with a page). Number 115 in Ukraine in 2025, of 1359.

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Suggestions: Balakliia · 2024Izium · 2024Izium · 2025Izium · 2024

Burnt area
633ha
Copernicus perimeter
Duration
3days
19 Apr 2025 – 21 Apr 2025
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
19 Apr
2025
Heat detections
27
in a single hotspot: 135 MW
Danger at start
22
High · FWI index
Average daily power
219MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 19 Apr21 Apr
21 Apr 2025

How it evolved, day by day

19 Apr 2025 · 527 MW · 11 20 Apr 2025 · 118 MW · 14 21 Apr 2025 · 13 MW · 2
19 Apr 20 Apr 21 Apr

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

The weather it burned in

25°high
45km/h · peak gust
14%lowest humidity

It had gone 10 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.5 mm on 27 Apr.

This area had burned before

13% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 81 ha in 2022.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 0.4% of the area of London (6.3 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. Balakliia Балаклійський район 2.0 km from the centre where it started
    632 ha reached on 19 Apr
    0.4 %

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

  • Coniferous forest53 %
  • Mixed forest40 %
  • Other natural land6.8 %

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)
19 Apr 24.8 °C 14 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
20 Apr 25.1 °C 14 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
21 Apr 24.3 °C 16 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
22 Apr after 25.7 °C 21 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
23 Apr after 27.4 °C 17 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
24 Apr after 26.3 °C 21 % 25 km/h 0.7 mm Moderate 18
25 Apr after 27.5 °C 14 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
26 Apr after 19.2 °C 45 % 59 km/h 0.6 mm High 25
27 Apr after 10.2 °C 30 % 56 km/h 1.5 mm Low 10

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 12 Apr 2025
After · 28 Apr 2025

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 18 April 2025 the air beside the fire reached 20 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak20 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1055 µg/m³
Optical depth0.42
1718192021222324
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 · 27Every 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 Balakliia fire last?
Copernicus dates it between 19 April 2025 and 21 April 2025: 3 days between the first and last image with fire.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 633 hectares (6.3 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Balakliia (632 ha, 0.4 %).
Did the fire reach a town?
The fire started in Balakliia and came within 2.0 km of its centre. 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 25.1 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 45 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 25, class 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.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 27 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.