Graham Allison
Ukrainian president Zelensky brought a map of Ukraine to his meeting with President Trump last week. But he need not have bothered. When he entered the Oval Office, he found that Trump had already mounted a much larger map on an easel next to the Resolute Desk. The US Department of Defense map clearly shows Ukraine’s border with Russia, the 750-mile front line on the battlefield along which Ukrainian and Russian troops are currently fighting, and the areas of each Ukrainian province that Russia now controls. Altogether, Russia has now occupied most of five Ukrainian provinces, which amounts to roughly one-fifth of the country.
To assist in visualizing the options laid out in the various peace proposals, Harvard’s Russia Matters team has produced a second map that overlays the Ukrainian territory Russia currently holds on a map of New England. That 44,000 square miles of Ukraine amounts essentially to the combined area of the northern New England states of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire.
In considering alternative Ukrainian futures, it is useful to begin by recognizing that, territorially, it is a big country. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine emerged along with 14 other newly independent states. Its borders encompassed 233,000 square miles—which is equivalent to all of New England (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut), plus New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland.
In 2014, Putin seized Crimea, along with parts of two other provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk—some 17,000 square miles of territory. In February 2022, Putin’s armies launched a full-scale invasion aimed at capturing the remainder of the country. Over the past three and a half years, its troops have succeeded in taking control of most of two adjacent provinces (Luhansk and Donetsk) and about two-thirds of two other provinces (Zaporizhzhia and Kherson), which provide a land bridge from Russia to Crimea and Russia’s major naval base at Sevastopol.
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