See what losing one fifth of a familiar country would look like. Choose yours, then discover what occupation means for Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova.
Red shows occupied Georgian territories. Boundaries remain Georgian.
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Created by Nini and Levan, a Georgian couple who witnessed the 2008 war in Georgia. We built this website to help people understand the scale of occupation through places they know.
This project makes the scale of territorial occupation tangible through familiar places. Red areas in Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova describe real situations. The 20% comparison for other countries is a hypothetical illustration.
Areas are calculated on the Earth’s surface. We prefer a compact group of neighbouring states, provinces or regions along an outside border or coast, approaching 20% of the displayed map unit’s land. The red area and the remaining main landmass must each stay connected where the geography allows. Keeping coherent areas takes priority over reaching exactly 20%. Corner-only contacts and distant provincial islands cannot connect otherwise separate groups. The resulting percentage is displayed.
Small boundary adjustments align the regional data with the displayed country outline. Where a selected region has distant outlying pieces, those may be omitted to retain one coherent area; this is labelled and the displayed percentage is recalculated. Where suitable neighbouring regions are missing or too coarse, a connected geographic area on one landmass is used and explicitly labelled. Regions are illustrative choices, not forecasts or military scenarios.
Land area cannot measure lives lost, displacement, repression or the importance of a particular place. This comparison does not equate the human experiences of different conflicts.
Story mode starts with Moldova in 1992, then Georgia in August 2008; the Georgian conflicts and displacement predate that war. Crimea is shown in the 2014 chapter; the occupied parts of the Donbas are described but not reconstructed without dated boundary data. The 2022 chapter marks the full-scale invasion and does not show an exact 2022 frontline. The story then plays the explicitly dated recent Ukraine snapshots in order.
Recent Ukraine shapes come only from explicitly dated DeepState archive entries. Undated records are excluded. The recent map is the latest supplied snapshot, not a live feed. Territorial-control maps have uncertainty and may lag events. Georgia and Moldova’s shapes are cartographic regional outlines, not surveyed daily control lines; the Transnistria outline does not resolve every controlled locality around Bender and elsewhere.
Crimea and Sevastopol remain part of Ukraine; Abkhazia and South Ossetia remain part of Georgia; Transnistria remains part of Moldova. Occupation does not change sovereignty.
The chooser includes countries, overseas territories and disputed geographic areas. A separate entry does not imply independence or recognition. Northern Cyprus, Somaliland, Siachen and other sensitive map units have status notes beside their comparisons. Highlighted disputed-area outlines are cartographic boundaries, not declarations of sovereignty.
The basemap comes from Natural Earth, which generally maps de facto administration. It is not a uniform map of internationally recognised sovereignty. We retain Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova’s territorial outlines; show Western Sahara’s full territorial outline separately from Morocco without settling its final status; and include the Golan Heights within Syria, in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 497. This project documents russian occupation in its factual chapters and does not attempt a worldwide inventory of occupations.
Comparisons use the land within the displayed map unit. Some overseas areas are included in a parent country while others are separate entries, reflecting the source’s administrative groupings. For example, France includes mapped overseas regions such as Martinique and Réunion, while French Polynesia is a separate territory entry. Percentages are of that stated map unit, not necessarily all land under a state’s sovereignty.
Built to bring distant places closer. Names and boundaries are simplified for a global visualisation. Percentages are estimates calculated from the supplied map geometry.