Baltic Watch fuses only what is broadcast, published or posted about NATO's north-eastern flank: machine signals move the indicators, text claims fill a lane and never move the board. Non-commercial, no tracking, no advice.
ADS-B from adsb.fi (non-commercial), AIS from Fintraffic Digitraffic (Finnish receivers, CC BY 4.0) and aisstream.io, Portnet port calls (CC BY 4.0), Traficom nautical warnings (CC BY 4.0), EANS NOTAM, gpsjam.org daily H3 data (CC-BY), IODA internet connectivity, NASA FIRMS thermal anomalies, Global Fishing Watch events (non-commercial), Elering and Fingrid grid data (Fingrid CC BY 4.0), Litgrid cross-border flows, STUK dose rates via FMI open data (CC BY 4.0), the Lithuanian Radiation Protection Centre's RADIS network, the Belarusian NPP operator's own ASKRO posts (adversary official, context only), EMSC and University of Helsinki seismic bulletins, RSS from Baltic, Nordic and Russian outlets, Telegram public previews. Basemap: OpenStreetMap contributors, OpenFreeMap.
Thermal anomalies come from NASA FIRMS: the VIIRS and MODIS instruments on polar-orbiting satellites pass over the region several times a day and flag any pixel (375 m to 1 km across) much hotter than its surroundings. Most are gas flares, plants, field burning and forest fires. The board counts how often each spot was hot in the last 30 days, so a flare that burns every night fades into the background, while a new hot spot near a border, a depot, an airbase or a port stands out. A fire after a strike or sabotage shows up the same way, hours later, unless clouds hide it.
Seismic events come from the University of Helsinki's Institute of Seismology (automatic and reviewed bulletins) and the European EMSC. The region has few natural earthquakes, so nearly everything the networks locate here is a blast: quarries, mines and building sites, by day, on land, at the same places week after week. What deserves attention is a blast where none is expected: at sea, at night, unusually large, or close to a pipeline, cable or other facility (the 2022 Nord Stream explosions were recorded by Swedish and Danish seismographs). Those are flagged and drawn stronger.
Some areas of interest are places where something already happened: drone crashes and debris, shoot-downs, airspace violations, sabotage and arson, cable and pipeline damage, explosions. They are drawn as small muted symbols with the month and year, so a new report near one of them can be read against the history of the place; they are never live reports. They fade with age (clear for three months, faint after a year, faintest for 2022) and never disappear; while an incident at the same site is live or cooling, its ring surrounds the symbol, so the place and the incident stay one object. Defence-industry sites (plants, factories, depots) carry a factory glyph with the operator and products in the popup. Both come from the curated list of areas, each with its confidence (confirmed, or reported: named in the press or by officials but not independently confirmed) and a source.
A report can arrive weeks after the event: an attribution, an arrest, a court ruling. Each incident is dated by when it happened, as precisely as the reports allow (the hour, the day or only the month), and every substantive development keeps its own date. From these moments the board computes the incident's heat: strongest when it happens, raised again by a new development, a confirmation or fresh reports, and halving every 12 to 72 hours depending on its severity. A hot incident is live, drawn as a ring at full strength; as the news fades it cools and the ring fades with it; once quiet it settles into history and only its symbol stays, kept as context like the older past incidents. A new development brings it back to life, marked by a white ring that pings once. Reports of the same incident are merged into one event, and an incident at a known site is drawn around the site's symbol, never as a second marker. Until officials clear it, an incident looks and alerts like any other; once it is confirmed harmless (an old shipwreck, a stray balloon) or debunked, it becomes a small grey check with a CLEARED or DEBUNKED badge, is no longer counted as an incident, and leaves the map within about 13 hours without ever becoming history. Unconfirmed reports that go quiet leave the map but stay in the records and the lanes. The replay shows each incident's heat at the time of the frame.
Developing situations are ordered by severity, the most important first: each story takes the severity of the worst incident linked to it that is listed on the map (a cleared report, a statement or a forecast does not count), shown as a coloured bar and a SEV badge (5 red, 4 coral, 3 amber, 2 muted, 1 or not rated grey); stories of equal severity follow by confirmation and by their newest report. In the Official, Media and Developing lanes an article that belongs to a story carries a "story" chip that opens the story's timeline, and one about an incident that is on the map carries an "on map" pin that flies to the incident (or to the past incident site it belongs to) and opens its popup. The incident popup and the event detail list the articles about the incident, newest first, with links. Aggregators sometimes serve an old article again with a fresh date: on 4 Oct 2026 Google News re-served LSM's report of a drone shot down over eastern Latvia on 8 Jun 2026, which briefly looked like a new incident. Such an article is dated by its first publication everywhere (lanes, incidents, stories), marked "republished, first published ..." and dimmed, so it never makes an old incident look new.
States are derived from simple medians per signal, not from the Phase 1 rubric; there are no scenarios yet; developing situations start as groups of related items by topic and place within 72 hours; a model check of the headlines then splits each group into single stories with an English title and summary and leaves out items that belong to no security story (until it has run, a group shows as one situation), and each story's confirmation state is derived from how many independent sources carry it. AIS comes from two receiver networks, Fintraffic's Finnish coastal stations (Digitraffic) and aisstream.io's volunteer stations around the Baltic. Neither reaches the Kaliningrad coast or the port of Riga: on 2026-10-04 a whole day brought no vessel at Kaliningrad port or Riga port, five off Baltiysk, and thin coverage of the rest of the Gulf of Riga. Those waters are AIS-blind, and a vessel count of zero there means nothing was received, not that nothing sails. The Coverage layer (LAYERS, off by default) fills every cell where an AIS position arrived in the last hour, or an ADS-B position, or either, as switched there; sea or land without the fill is blind, not quiet. ADS-B comes from adsb.fi's volunteer receivers, and there are almost none in Russia and Belarus: aircraft over Leningrad oblast, Pskov, Kaliningrad or Belarus are seen only when a receiver across the border catches them, military counts there are written only when an aircraft is seen (never as zeros), and Russian military aircraft mostly do not broadcast ADS-B at all. An empty sky over Russia or Belarus is blind, not quiet.