Falling Russian drone debris started 17 forest fires in Chernihiv Oblast between 7 and 13 September, burning 10.8 hectares, Ukraine's state forestry enterprise Forests of Ukraine said.

Russia's drone campaign is causing damage beyond its immediate targets, as falling debris can start fires in forests and other open areas. Forest fires linked to military activity have become a recurring problem across Ukraine. The previous week, 56 forest fires covering 84 hectares were recorded nationwide, with 95% attributed to hostilities, according to the state forestry enterprise.

Drone wreckage also started fires in eight other oblasts during the same period. Kherson Oblast recorded 3.7 hectares burned, Odesa 2 hectares, and Sumy 1.91 hectares. Smaller areas were affected in Zaporizhzhia (0.7 hectares), Dnipropetrovsk (0.5 hectares), Kyiv and Zhytomyr (0.12 hectares each), and Mykolaiv (0.1 hectares), according to Forests of Ukraine.

Russia kept up the daily barrages all week. Between 7 and 13 September, it launched more than 2,000 strike drones at Ukraine, by the Air Force's daily counts, and air defense downed or suppressed about 1,800 of them. The heaviest came on the night of 13 September, when 453 drones and S8000 Banderol munitions flew in from six directions and 405 drones and four Banderols were brought down. Twice that week, Russia also attacked in daylight, sending 410 drones on 12 September and 323 on 13 September between 06:30 and 18:00.

About 165,000 hectares of Ukrainian forest have burned since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022, with most of the damage linked to fires caused by shelling and combat.

In total, 46 forest fires covering 25.7 hectares were recorded across the enterprise's territory that week, with about 72% linked to military activity, according to Forests of Ukraine.

The wider environmental toll

The fires are part of a wider environmental toll from Russia's war. The Initiative on Greenhouse Gas Accounting of War, working with the NGO Ecodiya and Ukraine's environment ministry, put emissions from war-driven landscape fires over the first four years at 70 million tons of CO2 equivalent, in an assessment reported by the Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group.

The same review recorded 2,643 environmental incidents monitored by Ecodiya, with 2025 accounting for 931 of them.