Loading the globe…

Eastern Flank Monitor

NATO–Russia/Belarus frontier · open sources · open imagery

About

What this is. A timeline of publicly reported events along the frontier between NATO and Russia/Belarus, from the Barents Sea to the Polish–Belarusian border, with the crossings, the routes through them, and open satellite data for any point.

Method. Primary sources first. Every event links to where it was published. Locations come from the place names a report mentions and are approximate when no place is named. Russian and Belarusian state outlets and milbloggers are read for what they claim and how they frame it, never as neutral fact.

Limits. Most military flights do not broadcast ADS-B, so an empty sky in the aircraft layer means nothing is broadcasting, not that nothing is flying. Satellite heat spots include field fires and industrial flares. Heat seen on four or more of the last seven days in one place is dimmed as persistent. GNSS interference is inferred from aircraft that report low navigation accuracy.

Open data used

Sentinel-2 cloudless 2024 by EOX IT Services (contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data), CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Sentinel-2 and Landsat scenes: Esri Living Atlas image services (Copernicus / USGS data)
Daily imagery and night lights: NASA GIBS / Worldview (MODIS, VIIRS)
Heat spots: NASA FIRMS (VIIRS 375 m, near real time)
Military aircraft: adsb.lol (ODbL)
GNSS interference: gpsjam.org
Crossings, roads and railways: OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)
Military sites: OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), via Overpass (GeoJSON · query)
Site photos and video: Wikimedia Commons (each under its own licence), Wikidata (CC0), Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
Borders: Natural Earth via world-atlas
World imagery: Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics