War doesn't start with a gunshot. It starts with an official stamp.
Before panic breaks out and the media start outbidding each other with clickbait, governments quietly change their procedures. czujka analyses 26 public sources around the clock. We cut out the noise and give you a clean signal, so you can secure your home while you still have the time and the calm to do it.
Exposure to conflict can only be measured on objective data.
For everyone
Imagine eight independent satellites permanently trained on one country. The first checks foreign governments' official travel advice. The second measures how often and how seriously those warnings change. The third records actual armed clashes. The fourth analyses defence ministry statements. The fifth measures the distance to the front line. The sixth follows the currency markets. The seventh watches military traffic in the sky. The eighth keeps an eye on the stability of the internet.
Each sensor has a fixed weight, because not every signal means the same. We combine them by strict rules and get one clean result.
This number is not a weather forecast, and it does not tell you whether missiles will fall tomorrow. It is a cool measure of how many warning signals overlap at a given moment. Ukraine is the reference point for an ongoing war. Hence CEI = 100.
For analysts and media
Eight normalised components with fixed, public weights, defined without fitting to past data. A value of 100 is assigned to the country under direct military attack. The result reflects hard institutional procedures, not the mood of the media.
Government travel advice makes up 34% of the index: it is the only component that passed an 11-year backtest, though not without a miss, as in April 2021 it raised an alarm that no invasion followed. Media volume is deliberately weighted at ZERO. In the same backtest it could not tell real escalation from noise, even in the period where it produced its biggest anomaly in a decade.
The values of the individual components are publicly available through the API. The exception is raw airspace data (4% of the index weight), whose licence forbids further distribution; we publish only its partial result. The index measures the level of exposure to conflict. It has no forecast horizon and no probabilistic interpretation, and should not be quoted as having one.
Fig 1The index's weight structure
Ukraine · index 100.0 · main component: travel advice
Move the cursor or your finger to pick another country
The figure shows how much each component contributes to the assessment. The size of an element is that source's fixed weight, and its height is today's reading. Together they make up the country's index relative to the reference point. Hover or touch the screen to see which factors decide a given country's result.
Why it pays to be ready
The first signs of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine were in official documents 70 days before Russian tanks rolled towards Kyiv.
This is the most important lesson of this war. Read it calmly.
An invasion does not start at dawn on breakfast television. It starts months earlier, in government offices. Foreign ministries rewrite their travel advice. Embassies quietly evacuate diplomats' families. Insurers withdraw cover for ships, and airlines route around the airspace. None of these decisions was secret. All of them were posted on government websites, and that is exactly why nobody noticed them.
The war showed in the documents long before the first shotThe map below shows events on the ground. The chart and the cards under it show what was publicly known at the same time. Move along the timeline to follow the sequence step by step.
Russian troops at the border
areas taken in 2014troops massing at the borderlines of attack on 24 February 2022Aevent (details in the cards)
February and March 2014. First unannounced manoeuvres at the border and soldiers without insignia in Crimea, then parliament's consent to use the armed forces, a sham referendum and the annexation. Every one of these steps was public as it happened.
April 2014. War breaks out in Donbas. For the next eight years the front line stays relatively stable.
Russian troops mass at the border, visible on satellite images. But government travel advice does not react yet.
The first document changes: a government warns of the troop build-up. czujka's reading jumps from zero to 75. The invasion is 70 days away.
Embassies evacuate diplomats' families. The reading reaches 99 and will not fall below 76 again before the attack. The invasion is 31 days away.
Joint exercises are under way in Belarus. One government after another calls on its citizens to leave Ukraine immediately. The invasion is 13 days away.
Putin recognises the separatist “republics” in Donbas and officially sends in the regular army. The full-scale attack is 3 days away.
The invasion begins. Armoured columns move out of exactly the areas where troops had been seen massing for months. Official documents had been clearly warning of it for 70 days.
The first weeks of fighting. Russia takes Kherson, seizes the nuclear power plant at Enerhodar and encircles Mariupol. The advance on Kyiv is stopped.
In April Russian forces withdraw from northern Ukraine. In September a counter-offensive liberates most of the Kharkiv region, and in November Kherson. The war goes on.
February – March 2014April 2014March 2022April – November 2022
—Ukraine · czujka's reading of official documentsUkraine · czujka's index (hostilities measured directly = 100)Ukraine · czujka's data archive reaches back to 2018
—Poland · reading of the documents
Information publicly available by this day
czujka's historical reading for UkraineHistorical reading for PolandRegional warningChange to crisis statusOrder to leave, or embassy evacuated1Key world event
Hover over the chart or drag a finger along it to read the data for any day.
Every event, every point on the map, and how the chart is calculated
2014
After the Maidan protests, President Yanukovych flees Kyiv and parliament removes him from office.
Putin orders a snap combat-readiness check of about 150,000 troops at the border with Ukraine.
Armed men without national insignia seize Crimea's parliament and government buildings.
Russia's Federation Council formally approves the use of the armed forces on Ukrainian territory.
An illegal “referendum” in Crimea, held at the gunpoint of Russian soldiers. The international community considers it void.
Vladimir Putin signs the document on Russia's unlawful annexation of Crimea.
Pro-Russian saboteurs seize the regional administration in Donetsk and proclaim a self-styled “republic”.
An armed unit commanded by an FSB officer takes control of Sloviansk. The war in Donbas begins.
International events
1Satellite images confirm an unusual concentration of Russian troops at the border with Ukraine.
2Biden and Putin talk. Washington promises unprecedented sanctions in the event of armed aggression.
3Russia publishes its demands to NATO: it wants the alliance's enlargement blocked and its forces withdrawn from Central and Eastern Europe.
4A series of diplomatic meetings in Geneva, Brussels and Vienna ends with no agreement at all.
5The US State Department orders diplomats' families to leave Kyiv. The next day the UK withdraws some of its embassy staff.
6Russia and Belarus begin large joint military manoeuvres near Ukraine's borders.
7The White House warns that an attack could come at any moment. Country after country urges its citizens to leave immediately.
8Moscow announces that some units are returning to barracks. NATO and allied intelligence see no withdrawal.
9Putin recognises the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, then officially sends Russian troops in.
10The full-scale invasion of Ukraine begins.
Places on the map
A
Belarus, 10–20 February 2022. Joint military manoeuvres at the border. After the exercises the Russian units do not return to base; on 24 February they move straight on Kyiv from here.
B
Donetsk, 21 February 2022. Putin recognises the Donetsk and Luhansk “republics” and sends in the regular army. Three days before the invasion.
C
Chornobyl, 24 February 2022. The area of the power plant is taken on the first day of the war. Russian troops pull out on 31 March.
D
Hostomel, 24 February 2022. A helicopter assault on the strategic airfield outside Kyiv in the first hours of the attack.
E
Kharkiv. Under constant shelling from the first day of the war, never taken.
F
Kherson. Taken on 2 March 2022. Liberated on 11 November, when Russian forces withdrew across the Dnipro.
G
Enerhodar, 4 March 2022. Russian troops seize the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest facility of its kind in Europe.
H
Mariupol. Encircled in early March 2022. After almost three months of heroic defence it is destroyed and taken on 20 May.
I
Kyiv. The advance is halted in the suburbs (Irpin, Bucha). By early April Russian troops have withdrawn from the whole of the north. In Bucha the world learns of mass crimes against civilians.
J
Izium, September 2022. A lightning Ukrainian counter-offensive retakes almost the entire Kharkiv region in a matter of days.
The chart shows the historical component of diplomatic advice, the only one that could be reconstructed precisely after the fact. Each tightening of an advisory raises the reading in proportion to the weight of the notice, and its effect fades gradually (by half every 45 days). From 24 January the reading for Ukraine never fell below 76 again. Poland's reading rose in the autumn of 2021 during the border crisis with Belarus, then fell through the winter. Worth noting: in April 2021 the reading for Ukraine also rose to 75 and fell back without escalation. The system records actual manoeuvres and tensions; it does not prejudge the final political decision.
State borders, regions and rivers: Natural Earth (public domain). Crimea is shown as part of Ukraine, in line with international law. The 2014 front lines, the arrows and the locations are illustrative.
The war is still going on. This map shows the start of the invasion, not where the front line runs today.
0days before the invasion
The first change to crisis status. Just one sentence in a government bulletin that nobody reads.
0days before the invasion
Diplomats' families evacuated. When a state pulls out its own people, it makes the clearest declaration it can, with no need to call a press conference.
0days before the invasion
The first official order to leave the country. Queues form at passport offices, and the time to act shrinks fast.
024 February 2022
Everything you could have sorted out in an afternoon 70 days earlier now becomes almost impossible.
70 days is plenty of time. Enough to get a passport calmly, without standing in tense queues. To set aside a supply of water and put it in the cellar. To put some cash aside, make copies of your documents and agree with your family on one emergency meeting point in case communications fail, and then get back to normal life.
This has nothing to do with building bunkers, panic or hoarding supplies for a decade. It is just two or three afternoons of ordinary organising. You do it once, glance over it twice a year, and close the subject.
A home with a plan ready does not give in to crowd psychosis. It keeps a clear head. That is the whole philosophy of preparation: you don't assume the worst, but you know that the simplest things become fiendishly hard exactly when everyone rushes to do them at once.
czujka exists to point out, without emotion, the start of that 70-day window. Nobody has the time or the patience to go through 26 public sources every day, especially in years of apparent calm. We do it non-stop for you.
Lead time calculated from official diplomatic advice of late 2021 and early 2022, using czujka's methodology. In the control periods studied between 2016 and 2026, no comparable sequence of signals was recorded.
Live reading
measurement in progress
last 24 hoursnow
Data processed live. Our infrastructure polls the sources every 90 seconds. Because most sources do not offer historical archives, czujka archives every reading in real time. A day that was not recorded is lost for good.
How it works
Three hard rules we never break.
01
Determinism instead of opinion.
Artificial intelligence only writes the daily summary. The level of the index is decided solely by fixed mathematical rules. The same input data always gives the same result.
02
No signal is not calm.
When a source stops responding, czujka records it immediately and lowers the confidence of the index. We never read missing data as missing danger.
03
Official communications take precedence.
czujka is an objective analytical tool, not a state institution. Wherever there is any discrepancy, the guidance of national civil protection services always prevails. In Poland that is Rządowe Centrum Bezpieczeństwa (RCB).
What we analyse
26 public sources, polled continuously. All data is updated as it comes in.
Some sources (aircraft and ship positions from their transponders) forbid further distribution of raw measurements, so we publish only the processed index result. Media noise, meanwhile, is measured continuously, but its weight in the index is exactly zero.
The app
A four-step Readiness Ladder and your private plan.
In a crisis we don't suddenly rise to the occasion; we fall to the level of our preparation. The index measures tension in the region, and the Readiness Ladder turns it into concrete, calm steps for your home.
Fig 2The logic of the Readiness Ladder
L1 Normal · no crisis warnings, situation stable
Slide to check the higher levels
Moving to a higher level does not depend on moods or media fever. Each rung of the ladder requires precise, objective criteria to be met at the same time. As long as even one hard condition is missing, the readiness level stays where it is, whatever they say on television.
L1Normal
Look after the basics: documents to hand, a supply of water, a full tank and one honest conversation with your family. Check it twice a year. The rest of the time, don't give it a thought.
L2Notice
Read the report in the app. Top up anything missing (expired medicines or batteries, say). Your normal week goes on unchanged.
L3Elevated
Deal with the things that may soon become a hassle: withdraw cash, fill your regular prescriptions, update passports, drive the emergency route once. This is the last moment before queues form at cash machines and offices.
L4Armed conflict
You put into action the decision you wrote down earlier, in calm conditions. One person in the family makes the decisions. No arguments in a panic: you follow the plan exactly.
czujka
L1Normal
Poland. 9 of 9 sources reporting correctly.
We leave if…
set · stored only on this device
Emergency meeting point
set · stored only on this device
Rotating the water supply
due in 3 weeks
A practical questionnaire
About 30 concrete questions: where you would go, by which route, who makes the final decision and what exactly has to happen before you set off. Most questions come with ready-made options based on civil defence guidance. You don't have to invent anything: you pick the options that fit your life.
Two decisions nobody can make for you
“We leave if…” and “We stay as long as…”. You have to settle these two criteria together, at the table, in complete calm. Writing them down with a cool head is the most important thing the app does. When chaos breaks out around you, there will be no time for arguments or paralysis.
It watches for you, without causing panic
czujka compares hard data with your own criteria, not with a general threshold in the media. You get a notification only when your own condition is met, not when news portals are chasing cheap sensation.
Privacy and security
You store it on your side. We physically have no way to read it.
Your plan holds sensitive information: where your family sleeps, which way you plan to drive and where you keep your documents. This is data that should never leave your home, and we have no use for it. All answers are encrypted locally on your device. This is not a promise in the terms of service but the technical architecture: we do not hold the decryption key, so reading your data is technically impossible for us.
Polish and English at launch. Then Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Finnish and Romanian.
Who keeps your address, and why
The controller of your address is PBF Piotr Białozor-Fiećko, contact: [email protected]. We store only the address, the language of the page and the date you agreed, solely to tell you about testing and the app's launch. The legal basis is your consent (Article 6(1)(a) GDPR). The address sits in a Cloudflare database restricted to the European Union, and the message will be sent through an email provider; both act only on our instructions. We pass it to no one else. We delete it no later than 30 days after the app launches, or sooner if you ask. You can withdraw your consent at any time by writing to [email protected]. You also have the right to access, correct and delete your data, and to complain to the Polish data protection authority (Prezes Urzędu Ochrony Danych Osobowych).