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Troitske fire, 31 August 2025 Троїцький район · Troitske, Kupiansk

Out · last detection 2 Sept 2025, 23:52 UTC

The fire started on 31 August 2025 in Troitske, Ukraine, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 533 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 156th largest in Luhansk Oblast since 2016 (of 909 with a page). Number 158 in Ukraine in 2025, of 1359.

The power measured by the satellite is low (15.0 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.

Compare with…
Burnt area
533ha
Copernicus perimeter
Duration
5days
31 Aug 2025 – 4 Sept 2025
Municipalities hit
2
districts
Started on
31 Aug
2025
Heat detections
31
in a single hotspot: 15 MW
Danger at start
31
High · FWI index
Average daily power
74MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 31 Aug4 Sept
2 Sept 2025

How it evolved, day by day

31 Aug 2025 · 122 MW · 15 1 Sept 2025 · 85 MW · 10 2 Sept 2025 · 14 MW · 6
31 Aug 1 Sept 2 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

34°high
35km/h · peak gust
19%lowest humidity

It had gone 5 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.3 mm on 8 Sept.

This area had burned before

25% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 87 ha in 2023, 45 ha in 2024.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 0.3% of the area of London (5.3 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. Troitske Троїцький район 20,833 inhabitants · 27.4 km from the centre where it started
    532 ha reached on 31 Aug
    0.3 %
  2. Kupiansk Куп'янський район 137,200 inhabitants · 30.4 km from the centre
    1 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 land52 %
  • Agricultural areas38 %
  • Mixed forest9.3 %

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)
31 Aug 32.7 °C 19 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
1 Sept 33.9 °C 26 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
2 Sept 27.7 °C 42 % 32 km/h 0.7 mm Moderate 20
3 Sept 23.7 °C 45 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
4 Sept 20.4 °C 47 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 17
5 Sept after 20.7 °C 47 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
6 Sept after 24.1 °C 35 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
7 Sept after 25.5 °C 39 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
8 Sept after 25.6 °C 41 % 36 km/h 1.3 mm Moderate 14

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 24 Aug 2025
After · 11 Sept 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 2 September 2025 the air beside the fire reached 19 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak19 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1036 µg/m³
Optical depth0.34
2930311234567
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 · 31Every 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 Troitske fire last?
Copernicus dates it between 31 August 2025 and 4 September 2025: 5 days between the first and last image with fire.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 533 hectares (5.3 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Troitske (532 ha, 0.3 %); Kupiansk (1 ha, 0.0 %).
Did the fire reach a town?
The fire started in Troitske and came within 27.4 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 33.9 °C, humidity dropped to 19 % and gusts hit 35 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 31, 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; 2 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 31 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.