The Invasion of Ukraine

Ukraine was invaded by Russia three years ago. Since the new president of the United States is in full surrender to Putin mode and wants to blame Ukraine for starting the war, I am posting this map, from February 27, 2022. It is to remind anyone that needs reminding of who started this war.

via AP - source: VOA News

This one shows what Russia has gained (in red) in three years of war. Much of that area will likely be ceded to Russia if a “peace” deal is made without Ukraine.

via Institute for the Study of War

 

The War for Ukraine in Maps

I haven't thoroughly researched all media outlets but the maps from the Financial Times depicting the situation in Ukraine are the best I have seen. Click below to see a more readable version.

They are very subtle but effective without showing a large number of intersecting arrows or distracting explosion symbols. Here is their close up of the Kyiv region.

Finally, here is an elegant flow map showing the numbers of refugees and where they have been heading.

If you scroll down the page you can see maps from the last several days. It is interesting how little they have changed in the last few days despite all the carnage.

 

The Russian Military Buildup

Here are a few maps to illustrate the recent arms buildup on the Ukrainian-Russian frontier.

This, from Reuters via The Guardian shows new military units in orange. Switching the orange and red would have made more impact. The article describes the buildup as insufficient for a full scale invasion, and one more likely to result in a more focused attack on the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, possibly targeting the port city of Mariupol.

This is a map from last month via Foreign Policy. I have cropped it to better fit this window. The whole map can be seen here.

There is no legend but the reddish color of the diamonds refers to "hostile" units, the X inside oval refers to combined infantry and armored divisions and the number of x's refer to numbers of units. The map is from a "Ukrane Defense Official". There is a good page of NATO military map symbols on Wikipedia that summarizes several hundred-plus page pdf's.

Thirty Day Map Challenge - Part 3

Here is the final batch of maps for the #30DayMapChallenge. The first ten maps are here. The second installment here.

Day 20 -  Theme: Movement

The first plane trip I ever took. PHL to HOU with an hour layover in Atlanta.

Day 21 -  Theme: Elevation

I learned that you can make quick elevation profiles using Google Earth Pro and was curious what the Finger Lakes, some of which are very deep, would look like. Most of the work was in annotating the hills and valleys.

Day 22 -  Theme: Boundaries

At my day job I was asked to emulate a project from  the City of Columbus. When I first encountered that crazy boundary I didn't know what I was looking at but here it is. Many cities such as Detroit and Los Angeles surround well known enclaves but I've never seen anything close to this. Had some fun with the magnifying glass on the locator map.

Day 23 -  Theme: Data Challenge 3: Global Human Settlement Layers (GHSL)

Like many, I was completely unfamiliar with this data set. I still don't know much about it but I downloaded their built-up areas and drew them as if they were elevation, hills being the settled areas. I looked around for a good pattern and found Quebec City. In retrospect, I could have done a better job lightening the greys and changing the elevation quotient but there's only so much time in a 30-day challenge. I played around with some additional data layers in GIMP to create this image.

Day 24 -  Theme: Historical Map

I did some recent tutorials on how to create a historic looking map in GIS software.  The least historic place I could think of was Las Vegas. I got the buildings layer from the City of Las Vegas upon which I discovered that the main strip (including the casinos) is not even in the city but rather in Paradise, Nevada. Unable to find their buildings, I drew my own. I added an ad for wagon lumber. The text was inspired by other maps from that era. The title block was taken from a map of Las Vegas, New Mexico via the Library of Congress. Some image manipulation was used to change "N.M." to "NV" and the elevation from 6,400 feet to 2,000.

Day 25 -  Theme: Interactive Map

I enjoy hockey so I was curious about the world's second major league, Russia's KHL. Without reinventing the wheel, I made a similar interactive map to my previous ones of transit tokens and for New Year's Eve. Wikipedia was extremely helpful for providing both an already usable data set and the team logos. Above is just a screen shot. The interactive map can be seen here.

Day 26 -  Theme: Choropleth Map

For anyone that doesn't know the jargon, a choropleth is a map with areas colored based on data. In this case I tried my hand at a bivariate (two data variables) choropleth. This was based on a Tweet from the European Commission showing the relationship between COVID-19 vaccination rates and death rates. These maps can be hard to follow but the expected pattern should be yellow (low death rates, high vaccinations rates) to dark blue (opposite). The lack of red or orange shows that countries with high vaccination rates do not have high death rates. The confusion of the map is compounded by needing to flip the legend so that the high vaccination rates are at the bottom of the legend.

Day 27 -  Theme: Heat Map

It took 27 days but I finally thought to reuse a data set and made a heat map of Day 25's KHL data. I did not love the look of the original map (below) so I tried to hand draw it. It looks sort of nice but I misplaced the Moscow area and had to make up for it by adjusting some of the other locations. Here is the original computer generated version.

Day 28 -  Theme: The World is not Flat.

Once again working with the KHL data I tried my hand at a spherical map projection. This data is good for this because of the impressive longitudinal reach of the league. Those players do some long traveling!

Day 29 -  Theme: NULL

Going back to the theme from Day 26, I noticed that certain countries routinely had null data values for their vaccinations. Here they are.

Day 30 - Theme: Metamapping Day

I thought it would be fun to use this theme to show the locations and software used for my other 29 maps. However, the wheels came off the bus or I ran out of gas or some metaphor. I had numerous unexpected technical problems and finally just had to throw up my hands and put this mess out there. A couple of days got buried in the data or otherwise lost, the legend needs work and the US inset map is almost unreadable. 

This has been an excellent learning experience. I can't imagine going through this again which means I'll probably be back at it next November.

I highly recommend checking out other people's entries into the #30DayMapChallenge. There is some beautiful and wonderfully creative stuff out there.

Soviet Map Symbols

National Geographic shows some great 1968 posters from the Soviet Union's United States mapping project. They beautifully illustrate how cartographic symbols translate to their real world features. For example there are numerous bridge types shown with their symbols below. Because this is copyright material, the only way I can legally show this is through Twitter - though that hasn't stopped others from posting these.

Secret Soviet Posters Demystify Map Symbols https://t.co/UueIoRIWGu via @NatGeo

— 🌏Map of the Week (@MapOfTheWeek) July 8, 2020

If you view their article's slide show you can see how different types of highways, railroads, power plants and buildings are represented.

Images from The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped America, by John Davies and Alexander J. Kent, published by the University of Chicago Press

Mapping the Nuclear Fear

I've lived in many different places in the United States and one thing that people in every place seem to have in common is the belief that their region is a primary nuclear target. I came across this map on a Reddit thread that I can no longer locate. The thread was full of anecdotes from all over the country of people being told that their town was one of the top targets of the Soviet Union back in the Cold War days.

The map is from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and dated September, 1990. Though I lost the thread, it was posted by Daniel Reetz. Here is the caption

Reddit is full of these kinds of maps and threads. Some of the maps are based on out of date information and show decommissioned sites. Here is a typical example of one of these maps showing two different scenarios - the black dots are mostly military installations while purple triangles are population centers. The comments are filled with people who are either proud to live in a targeted area or sad that their town isn't important enough to nuke. 

Here is another map focused on the military installations with the colors representing fallout areas.

Here are evacuation routes for St Louis County via Reddit- this assumes an attack on downtown when there may be various other targets throughout the city and county.

Of course, the United States was not the only place threatened. Here is a scary map of a 1970 Warsaw Pact plan for attack on northwestern Europe - highlighting the Copenhagen region of Denmark, via War is Boring.

Australia too-click for link.

Here is a very detailed map of places in Russia (and Manchuria) targeted by the United States in 1945.

This map is from the Nuclear Secrecy blog, a blog that also features Nukemap, where you can choose your bomb and location and see where the  extent of destruction. There are more recent maps showing the primary targets in Russia that I am not authorized to show (though you can Google them) - mostly production facilities for various metals and oil refineries.

Here is a communist propaganda map showing Russia encircled.

Poster made in 1951 by the French Communist Party, depicting "US military bases around the world" and the encirclement of the USSR, Eastern Europe, Mongolia & China. Nota bene: Arctic orientation & appearance of Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, and the Aleutian Islands. #Maps pic.twitter.com/lddG8CV95V

— Steven Seegel (@steven_seegel) May 7, 2019

Finally here is a real estate agent's map of where it is safe to buy real estate in the event of an all out nuclear attack on the U.K.'s to 20 cities - via the Shropshire Star.

See you in Lancaster, or Aberystwyth.

A Plan for a Canadian Attack on Russia, 1919

After World War I, many Allied troops remained in Russia to help anticommunist forces fight against the Bolsheviks. This map was made for Canadian troops to plan a February 1919 surprise attack on Segezha in the northwest corner of Russia.

The map shows terrain features, gun positions, firing ranges, bridges and buildings along with instructions such as "cut wires" and "stop communication between Station and Bridge." Some of the text is hard to read but here is a detail of the area around the bridge over the Segezha River.

Post-war public opinion turned against the Canadian Prime Minister and it was difficult for him to justify keeping troops overseas. Troops were gradually withdrawn from Russia and the planned attack was abandoned. - via Canadian Geographic

Ukraine's Other Border Problem

Russia's annexation of Crimea and occupation of eastern Ukraine have been in the news lately with tensions between the countries escalating again. However, Ukraine is also facing agitation on their western border from Hungary. Zakarpattia Oblast, Ukraine's westernmost province has a large ethnically Hungarian population. The map below, via Euromaidan Press,  shows villages that have a Hungarian speaking majority (in orange) on their councils.

The Hungarian government, while publicly not seeking to control these areas, has been sending development money and encouraging autonomy for these regions. They have also been issuing Hungarian passports to people living in these areas and some residents have been pledging allegiance to Hungary. Russia has also been actively promoting Hungarian claims to the region. In return the Hungarian government is campaigning to lift EU sanctions against Russia for military aggression in eastern Ukraine. For Russia this is also part of a divide and conquer strategy for the region as a whole.

Prior to World War II, Hungary expanded its borders to include minority areas of all of neighboring states and many Hungarian politicians openly dream of reconstructing this "Greater Hungary"

Ukraine has helped this instability by passing a language education law that is unpopular with the Hungarians. This spring Ukrainians will vote in presidential and parliamentary elections with the current government hoping to improve ties with the west while Hungary and Russia are hoping to wield their own influence on the country.

More information and maps can be found on Euromaidan Press, and recent commentary can be found on EU Observer.

Gulag Online

Gulag Online is a virtual museum and interactive set of maps that lets you travel through a labor camp and learn about the daily lives of 

Stalin's prisoners.

A zoom way out shows the hemispheric reach of the gulag system.

Zoom in on an area for details,

including camp diagrams

Some of these are from visits, while some can be seen from aerial photography.

Many of these camps are located along the Dead Road, a trans-polar railway that was to run almost 1,500 kilometers from Salekhard to Igarka (seen below on a military map)

An estimated 100,000 prisoners worked on this railroad between 1947 and 1953. The project was abandoned after Stalin's death. The extreme remoteness of the region has helped preserve many of these camps. Numbers below show dense clusters of camps.

  

 Here is a quote from the site about the Dead Road:

"it was clear to almost everyone in the leadership of the USSR that prisoners’ slave labour in the corrupt Gulag system was wasteful and desperately inefficient. Only Stalin failed to realise this and he was obsessed by similar construction projects. To this day, it is still not completely clear – even to Russian historians – what made him want to link the uninhabited and hostile environment of Siberia’s Polar regions by railway. It was most probably for strategic reasons."

More Map Acquisitions

Map Acquistions - Part Two

Central Leningrad from a city guide by Intourist,  travel service of the U.S.S.R, circa 1976.

Another view of Leningrad, Falk plans, Hamburg, Germany, 1976.

A very schematic map of Moscow from Intourist.

Tourist map of Milan - the eye watering color scheme and overly fussy level of detail make it a treat to try and read.

Bus guide-Barnet, North London

A "Parking Disc" for North Yorkshire - set the time of arrival and display on your windscreen. Fail to display the disc and you have "committed an offence."

Hughes Airwest map of Guadalajara,

and Puerto Vallarta

Here's something I haven't come across before - an uncredited map. There is no publishing info but here's the cover.

There are some nice details on it,

 with this odd inset - I guess showing the extent of streets in 1947. Except where they masked them under "San Francisco"

Finally, a personal favorite since I vacation here, "Damariscotta Boxes the Compass" a map with a ridiculously prominent compass.

The houses and churches are drawn so large you can't tell where they're located. This is from the Damariscotta Information Bureau - we still use their maps but they are much more legible these days.