Short- and long-term impacts of the Russian–Ukrainian War on atmospheric pollution from satellite and ground observations

The Russian–Ukrainian war has become the most devastating military conflict in Europe since World War II in terms of human losses, infrastructure damage, and environmental consequences. Atmospheric air, being the most dynamic environmental domain, is particularly challenging for tracking war-related impacts, yet it is continuously affected by both acute pollutant emissions and long-term shifts in emission patterns. Using Sentinel-5 Precursor data together with ground-based air-quality observations, we analyzed the first three years (2022–2024) of the Russian–Ukrainian war to assess its influence on atmospheric pollution.

Changes in landscape fires have become one of the main environmental fingerprints of the war. During the baseline period (2019–2021), thousands of fires occurred across the entire territory of Ukraine, mostly associated with seasonal burning of plant residues in agricultural fields. In contrast, the full-scale war period has been characterized by severe wildfires concentrated along the frontline, while the number of fires in the rest of the country has decreased significantly due to stricter legislative restrictions. As a result, biomass-burning emissions have been redistributed – substantially higher than pre-war levels along the frontline, but noticeably lower across the remaining territory.

Fragmented ground-based air-quality monitoring data, as well as the destruction of monitoring sites near the frontline, failed to capture the overwhelming majority of the impacts following thousands of explosions and missile strikes. Nevertheless, 255 cases were identified during the first three years of the full-scale war (2022–2024) in which missile or drone attacks on cities were confirmed by subsequent increases in air pollution at monitoring stations. Detecting short-term air-pollution impacts with remote sensing also remains challenging, mainly due to the time gap between emission events and satellite overpasses. Most short-lived pollution episodes are therefore missed; however, it has become possible to detect air-quality impacts from landscape fires near the frontline and from some missile strikes on industrial facilities.

In contrast to short-term impacts, long-term consequences are becoming more clearly visible. At the regional scale, Sentinel-5 Precursor observations reveal a 10–30% reduction in NO₂ over major cities due to the destruction of industrial facilities. Despite increased pollutant emissions from landscape fires along the frontline, the effect of large-scale destruction of cities prevails, resulting in lower NO₂ levels than before the war. CO concentrations were 2–4% lower regionally compared with the 2019–2021 baseline, while severe damage in Mariupol led to a long-term CO decrease of about 10% over the city. CH₂O and SO₂ also showed decreases in several regions, although poor signal-to-noise ratios limit the ability to determine the underlying causes.

Compared with columnar satellite data, ground-based observations show more diverse long-term trends within individual cities. In many urban areas close to the frontline, TSP increased, and SO₂ rose due to the use of lower-quality fuels and diesel generators during power outages. In contrast, NO₂ and CO predominantly decreased, consistent with the broader regional patterns detected by remote sensing.