One year ago today, Russians were officially kicked out from the right bank of Dnipro, which remains the latest truly large-scale movement of the front lines. This is how the occupied area of Ukraine has changed over the past year:
Immediately after their withdrawal from Kherson, Russians started advancing on Bahmut, making steady gradual progress throughout the winter and culminating in spring. In June, the Ukrainian counter-offensive started making gains at several points of the frontline. That has mostly stopped since September, giving way to another grinding Russian offensive towards Avdiivka. It looks like Russia will have made net gains of a couple of hundred square kilometers of occupied Ukrainian territory this year.
However, all of this yearâs offensives and counter-offensives basically disappear when you zoom out:
The full-scale invasion in February 2022 quickly occupied more than 107 thousand kmÂČ, on top of about 44k that had been occupied since 2014. A month later, the battle for Kyiv liberated about 30k, then another 20k in Kharkiv and Kherson. And in the past year, all the fighting has been over less than 1k. (The detailed data for the solid line in the graphs comes from DeepStateMap, and the few data points for the start of the invasion are based on War Mapper.)
Last year we could hope that counter-offensives would continue at the same pace, earning a victory to Ukraine that would bring justice not only to Ukrainians, but also to Syrians, Georgians, Moldovans, etc. It looked like EU (and the broader âWestâ) was finally about to grow a moral spine and stop cozying up to dictators out of some misguided notion of realpolitik. Things were tough, but an improvement felt imminent. Now weâre facing a long, grinding war stretching out into the foreseeable future. A growing number of conflicts around the world (Nagorno-Karabakh, GazaâŠ) seem to be both partly influenced by the indecisive nature of the war in Ukraine, as well as feeding back some of their own instability to it. Thereâs no certainty how or when the war will end.
Last year the optimistic position was âwe can endure this and emerge into a better worldâ. Now the optimistic position is âthere is yet a chance that the world wonât become a much, much worse placeâ. Still, I cling to it, because what else can you do.
