Grass fire in Druzhkivka direction, Donetska Oblast, eastern Ukraine 2026

Some info with time stamps: 00:20 Usually id use only emergency lights here but due to the reduced distance to the front and my knowledge of losses in that area i only used the siren. 01:05 Here I bent my plastic bumper and potentially a sub frame, now the right wheel grinds against the wheel arch on corners... Nothing serious though. 01:24 Parked as close as I could to the tree line and between some brush to blend into the landscape as much as I could. In retrospective i should have driven to the fire on the other side of the valley right beside the tree line or on the farmers field. Later I neglected my visibility. 01:35 My fire fighting backpack broke, or rather it's hand pump, this was the third for 80 bucks so I refuse to buy yet another, it is a bad design, the aluminum threads seize as aluminum likes to do. Then you can no longer open the hand pump to service it. Mind you it has no filter either. So I bought this electric sprayer that takes power batteries I already have for half the cost and it works great, less effort, less stress. Less heat strain. I'll need this even when the fire truck is fully built again since it can not possibly reach everywhere. 02:20 The camera overheated to no surprise, I did extinguish that front though. 03:00 I noticed I was running completely out of water, so I decided to cool this front at it's whole length and return as quick as possible. Though when I returned the meadow was more problematic so I did end up doing that first. The end: The remaining fire is inside the defense line and unreachable, you can't see the inconspicuous wire obstacle I really do not want nor should walk through. Neither can I stick around forever in this location watching this. Fire retardant would be nice in this situation. When I point out the fires in the distance you can see several too close at the front to work on. The biggest fire you can see is all the way east of Izium, a several hour drive. I ended up showing only 60% of my work, highly sped up. This took hours in the heat. But it was worth it, we do not want those tree lines to burn down, or even just burn the ground, we want this to be usable by the military and they need to be able to hide in them. Further, there was a village pretty close. I recently talked with fire fighters and they do not work this close to the front, even much further away from it, they won't. That leaves only me to work on these fires in the remaining Ukrainian controlled Donbas. I am watching over an area of well over 2100 square kilometer, already without the area too close to the front, and unfortunately most of this alone. I do this using Nasa's satellite data fed fire map, which is not optimized for all land mass outside north America and heavily delayed, as well as visual identification, I actively patrol the area in the fire truck from a reasonable distance which unfortunately burns quite a bit of fuel. There is no other way though, the fire departments do not know about these fires, and I do not have the financial resources to set up a small call center for the military and farmers. When we started fire fighting on the side, 2 years ago, none of us would have possibly guessed how important it would become.