Measuring and Accounting for War Destruction Using Human-Reported and Satellite-Derived Conflict Data: Ukraine, 2022–2023

Kenneth Hewitt’s (Citation1983) article detailed the destruction and death resulting from World War II aerial bombardments with a focus on German and Japanese cities. Given data limitations, his maps and analysis were not disaggregated below the city scale. We build on his pioneering efforts and the increasing availability of high-resolution conflict data to examine how our ability to measure and account for war destruction has changed in the last forty years, especially in narrowing the time lag between conflict events and subsequent analyses. Our analysis of the impact of the war in Ukraine in the twenty months after the Russian invasion of February 2022 relies on three existing datasets; a Ukraine-wide time series of urban damage data derived from open Sentinel-1 radar satellite imagery as well as two geolocated and time-stamped conflict event data sets (ACLED and VIINA). By comparing the conflict events to the urban damage in a space–time analytical framework, we present a multivariate approach to document the dynamics of urban destruction and account for factors contributing to shared or divergent assessments of the place, timing, and intensity of war. These methods represent a step toward the harmonization of multimethod war impact assessments, especially in the face of disputed facts in the “fog of war.”