In April 2018, President Putin felt the world was not Russian enough. The problem, he told a St Petersburg crowd at the city’s geographical society, was that lands discovered and named by Russian navigators in places such as Antarctica were being renamed with western monikers.
The solution? A new atlas of the world — one that did not distort “geographical and historical truth”. Only this would stop the “erasing [of] the memory of Russia’s contribution to the study of the planet”, he said.
Cartophilia is a common trait of the powerful, according to Jerry Brotton, historian and map lover. “It’s the image of the emperor holding the globe. By creating, holding or being seen with a map, it’s almost suggesting you own it.”
Since Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, we too have become obsessed with maps. They have become the new Covid charts, shown every day on TV news as barometers of how the invasion is going: the outline of Ukraine, with a border of red creeping inwards.
Yet how well do these maps really explain what’s going on in this war – and can we really trust them?
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Maps of the region certainly help to explain Putin’s aims. For the past three decades many former Soviet states have joined Nato: his aggression is part of the story behind the defensive alliance creeping slowly towards Russia.
Within Ukraine, maps show why some cities are more strategic than others. “Look at the map if you want to try to understand what seems to be the cruellest of campaigns being waged by Russia,” the BBC’s Lyse Doucet told Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday.
The city of Mariupol is facing such a persistent onslaught because it lies between Crimea and eastern Ukraine. It is in the way of the land bridge that the Russian army is desperate to create between its two footholds.
Mapping this changing front, however, is a huge challenge. For each of the past 22 days, George Barros, a mapmaker for the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), has faced the daunting task of updating the world’s media on the Russian advance — with a little help.
“We use satellite imagery, and photos and videos from TikTok, Twitter, Telegram, Instagram and so forth. There’s a whole litany of open-source researchers helping out,” he said.
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On Wednesday he was studying a video of a purported tank near Kharkiv. “We see a little red house in the video — and there’s an apartment block behind it — and we see the road the Russian tank was moving on.”
With help from Twitter, he was able to locate the troops in the town of Izyum, southeast of Kharkiv – and could mark the town as an area of Russian advance.
Although there are new tricks of the trade, mapping this war has come with all kinds of problems.
One is the distrust of sources on the ground. “The Russians prematurely claim they’ve captured things they have not,” said Barros.
“They straight-up lie about their front line. Then they do not make a distinction between where they actually control, and where their troops have gone forward but then been killed or captured.”
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The ISW is making the distinction between areas that the Russians actually control and where they can set up command units, and places where they have advanced but the Ukrainians are able to contest.
Troops tend to move forward as columns along roads, rather than across the country as flat lines. If the ISW sees two parallel lines of troops moving through the country, and the land between them is within artillery range, then it considers that land Russian territory.
Yet other mapmakers have taken a different approach. Nathan Ruser, a cyberpolicy researcher, has been publishing maps showing Russian advances as skinny arteries spreading through the country. This minimises the invaders’ control.
“Maps can be misleading if they make things too simple,” said Tim Marshall, author of the bestselling book Prisoners of Geography. “If you shade ‘Russia-controlled’ when actually they have just gone into an area and not fully taken it, it might be misleading. They can also be out of date quickly.”
In the early hours of February 24, one of the first signs that Putin’s troops were crossing the border with Ukraine was a Google Maps traffic alert on the road from Belgorod to Kharkiv.
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The company collects data from millions of moving smartphones on road networks around the world, which means it can track in real time where traffic is building up. This information is shown as a green, orange and red overlay on its road maps.
The traffic jam shown on Google Maps was probably cars stuck behind military convoys and roadblocks, rather than Russian troops themselves.
Google Maps has origins in military warfare. In the early 2000s, Keyhole, a software company, was bought by the CIA’s venture capitalist firm to make EarthViewer. This virtual world was used to help plan bombing raids during the Iraq war.
In 2004 EarthViewer was bought by Google, which turned it into Google Earth and, later, Google Maps. Today, the tool hosts a range of real-time data, from traffic jams to train lines.
“Mapping online is all about time,” said Brotton, a professor. “In the past decade, cartography as we understand it as a graphic abstraction of territory really came to an end. Google has gone beyond a map — it’s a photo-real experience that you can move, flick national boundaries on and off, switch between political and natural geography. It depends what data the user wants to see. But generals like Putin still want a paper map.”
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The age of generals standing over static maps may be over. But where is cartography headed — could maps of the future show conflict playing out in real-time?
“We could soon get to a stage where multinational companies could monetise watching conflicts in real time,” said Brotton. “It could become a ghoulish spectacle for those willing to pay.”
