About the project
Alarm Maps shows air threats over Ukraine on a live map: where Shahed drones and missiles are heading, where they came from and roughly how much time is left before they arrive.
This is not an official alert source. The map does not replace air raid sirens, the official «Povitriana tryvoha» (Air Alert) app or the channels of the State Emergency Service and the Air Force. It shows what open monitoring channels have posted, with their delays and their mistakes. Take cover on the official alert, not on a marker here.
Where the data come from
The source is public posts of open Telegram channels that monitor the air situation, including the Ukrainian Air Force channel @kpszsu and volunteer monitoring channels. We add nothing of our own: if nobody posted about an object, it is not on the map.
That is the main limitation of the project. The channels do not cover the country evenly: over large cities there are many posts, over sparsely populated areas almost none. An empty map means “nobody posted about it”, not “there is nothing there”.
How it works
The service reads new posts of the monitoring channels, works out the threat type, the place and the direction from the text, and puts a marker on the map. Posts of different channels about the same object are merged into one target, so that one group of drones is one marker, not three.
Between posts a marker does not stand still: it moves by dead reckoning towards the reported destination. That is also where the time to arrival comes from — and why it is an estimate, not a measurement.
What is in the air right now — target types, where they are heading and how many minutes are left — is listed on the radar page as plain text, without the map.
Why the English site shows no channel posts
The Ukrainian version shows, for a selected target, the line of the channel post it came from. The English version does not: the posts are written in Ukrainian and Russian shorthand, and a machine translation of a military alert is a new source of errors. Everything you see in English — type, count, route, time to arrival, uncertainty — is built from the same data, and each target still names the channel it came from.
How far you can trust it
As a rough picture — yes; as exact coordinates — no. The error adds up at every step:
- The post may have come late, describe the place roughly (“somewhere over Poltava Oblast”) or get the type wrong.
- The text can be ambiguous: the wording is unusual, and many Ukrainian villages share the same name.
- The estimated position assumes steady flight, not radar. The longer since the last post, the larger the error; for a selected target it is drawn as an uncertainty zone.
So a target nobody has mentioned for a while first turns grey and then disappears by itself: removing a marker is better than showing an invented one.
Privacy
The site has no ads, no ad pixels and no third-party trackers, no sign-up and no user accounts — we do not know who you are and do not try to find out.
The only thing counted is anonymised Cloudflare statistics — Cloudflare is the provider the site is served through anyway: page views, country, browser type and load speed. Cloudflare states that it does not collect visitors' personal data; we see aggregate numbers only, no individual person is in them, and they are not passed on to anyone. We use them to notice when the map slows down and whether people find it during an attack.
The project is non-profit; donations cover the server and the model that reads the posts.
Base map
The base map is OpenFreeMap, built on OpenStreetMap data. Place names follow the official Ukrainian romanization (Kyiv, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia).
Back to the map · What is in the air now · Questions and answers