Counting Cars From Space — the National Bank of Ukraine Nowcasts Kyiv's Wartime Economy With Satellite Imagery

Since Russia's February 2022 full-scale invasion disrupted Ukraine's conventional statistical collection, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has funded and published a programme of "alternative data" nowcasting research to keep tracking economic activity without relying solely on official series.
In a November 2025 NBU Occasional Paper (2025/03, DOI 10.26531/vnbu2025.op03), researcher Jan Beering applied very-high-resolution (VHR) optical satellite imagery — globally available in near real time — to count vehicles in Kyiv and used the changes as a proxy for economic activity, a method explicitly aimed at "regions with limited conventional data, especially those affected by crises."
The paper found that vehicle-count changes accurately reflected the shift in Kyiv's economic activity immediately after the full-scale invasion, and attributed the observed change primarily to population displacement rather than to a collapse in underlying production. This builds on the NBU's own 2024 Working Paper, "The Warcast Index" (Constantinescu, Kappner & Szumilo), which combined nightlight intensity, Google Trends and social-media activity to estimate that Ukrainian economic activity fell to roughly 65% of its pre-war level at the war's outset and recovered to about 75% by April 2022 — a finding independently discussed in a CEPR/VoxEU column on estimating the short-term economic impact of the war.
Both papers are methodological research outputs in the NBU's own working/occasional paper series rather than a fully operationalised, nationwide monitoring system, and the vehicle-count method has so far been demonstrated for Kyiv only; the authors themselves frame the approach as a complement to, not a replacement for, official statistics once those resume.

Read the full analysis: https://visnyk.bank.gov.ua/en/article/2025/occasional-papers/03