Hospitals Under Fire? Causal Evidence from Satellite Imagery in Ukraine
28.01.2026
Lecture with Professor Thomas Chadefaux (Professor in Political Science at Trinity College Dublin)
Hospitals Under Fire? Causal Evidence from Satellite Imagery in Ukrain
Abstract:
We test whether Ukrainian hospitals are disproportionately targeted by Russian strikes. We do this by treating satellite imagery itself as the treatment in a causal estimator that captures how terrain and urban form around each facility influence attack risk. A two-stage model first learns how socioeconomic covariates relate to conflict outcomes, then embeds the multispectral scenes into a latent space. Swapping a hospital’s embedding with matched counterfactual sites shows how much the expected strike rate would change. The difference between observed and counterfactual outcomes isolates deliberate targeting while keeping the local drivers explicit. We also introduce an interpretable layer that translates the influential image embeddings into plain-language land-use features, so investigators can see which surroundings drive each hospital’s risk estimate.