Donald Trump is reportedly “sick” of seeing maps of the entrance line in Ukraine. Certainly, in line with one Eu respectable’s account, he tossed apart Ukrainian delegation maps right through his newest assembly with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the White Space on Oct. 17, 2025.
As an alternative, Trump is alleged to have aggressively driven Zelenskyy to simply accept Russia’s phrases to finish the struggle and give up the entire Donbas area in Ukraine’s east to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As a political geographer who has studied Jap Europe and post-communist states, I understand how a very powerful maps are to the dynamics of territorial conflicts and peace negotiations. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, for instance, maps had been central to the ethnic cleaning that came about within the early Nineties, using visions of making mono-ethnic house via violence, and likewise to the finishing of the struggle. In a similar fashion, within the Caucasus, cartographic fantasies of homogeneous territories have underwritten campaigns in opposition to ethnic others in Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh.
And it isn’t surprising that maps are a important a part of negotiations now to finish the 3½-year battle in Ukraine.
Inventive cartography
Drawing partition strains on maps has all the time been a function of stalemated territorial conflicts. U.S. negotiators in 1995 cast the settlement that introduced Bosnia’s struggle to an finish via last-minute cartographic changes making sure that the agreement conformed to an already agreed-upon 49-51 proportion break up of the territory between Bosnian-Serb forces and the ones representing the Bosnian Federation.
Dividing territory in proportion phrases, alternatively, is going in opposition to the grain of the way most of the people view their territorial homelands. In his well-known account of countries as “imagined communities,” the Anglo-Irish historian Benedict Anderson described how states create countries in the course of the standard flow of a not unusual territorial map. On this means, map photographs changed into one of those state emblem. Countries no longer simplest imagined themselves as a group however as belonging to a specific recognizable house, a well-known territorial place of birth.
An ornamental map of Ukraine made with plants in Kyiv on Aug. 23, 2025.
Sergei SupinskyAFP by means of Getty Photographs
Territories in as of late’s international have turn into right away recognizable shapes on posters and T-shirts and in textbooks. But they’re additionally skilled as one thing alive and private – a “geo-body,” within the phrases of Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul.
It is a part of what leads electorate, and countries, to really feel deeply attached to their state’s territorial barriers. And it is helping give an explanation for the in most cases chronic resistance of Ukrainians to territorial concessions to Russia – even if there are indicators that in style sentiment is starting to shift after 3½ years of struggle.
Combating and loss of life for a place of birth, as Ukrainian squaddies have accomplished of their hundreds, provides to the emotive energy of territory. To many Ukrainians it isn’t belongings they’re being requested to concede however sacred and indivisible land paid for with blood.
This figuring out of territory is somewhat other from that of Trump and his handpicked cadre of “deal guys” who deal with world battle like non permanent industry transactions.
Misreading the map
As it ended in the postponement of recent U.S. sanctions and a summit proposal, the Russians went at the side of the misconception, in line with the Bild’s reporting.
In a similar fashion, the next Alaska summit was once no longer the leap forward Trump envisioned. Putin were given the red-carpet remedy on U.S. soil however nevertheless subjected Trump to a long historic lecture on why Russia owns Ukraine.
Putin was once unwilling to present Trump the ceasefire deal the U.S. president desired. Putin did, alternatively, make a territorial proposal that stored Trump taken with proceeding to play the peacemaker: If Russia bought the entire territory of the 2 oblasts that made up the Donbas, then Russia would believe freezing its strains in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
Haggling over percentiles
This equipped the background for an abnormal assembly within the White Space on Aug. 18, 2025, when seven Eu leaders joined Zelenskyy in assembly Trump to speak about a imaginable endgame to the struggle.
The Ukrainian delegation was once pictured getting into the White Space with what gave the look of a rolled-up map. Within the Oval Place of business, alternatively, they had been faced with the White Space’s personal inflexible board depicting a map of the “Russia-Ukraine Conflict.”
It featured a choropleth show with the estimated territory underneath Russian career coloured in orange and quantified as a proportion determine of every oblast’s territory. The map indicated that Russia occupied 99% of Luhansk and 76% of Donetsk. Putin sought after 100% of each – a requirement that required Ukraine to give up the fortified territories safeguarding central Ukraine.
An in depth-up of the White Space map appearing percentiles over quite a lot of Ukrainian areas.
The White Space
What the Oval Place of business map supposed to Trump was once transparent the next day in a telephone interview on “Fox and Friends.” Relating to the map, he stated {that a} “big chunk of territory is taken,” implying it’s now misplaced to Ukraine.
In different phrases, the map recorded the ranking in actual property phrases from a regrettable struggle between a small state and a far higher one.
Zelenskyy attempted to argue for a unique way to map problems, person who affirmed the symbolic and strategic significance of preserving Ukraine’s territorial integrity alive as an excellent for Ukrainians and the world group.
He made some development. After assembly Zelenskyy on the United Countries on Sept. 23, Trump recommended that Ukraine may reach its battle to “take back their country in its original form.”
Battlegrounds as actual property
With Trump reputedly drifting towards supporting Ukraine with long-range missiles, Putin seized the initiative via phoning Trump. In an in depth telephone name previous to Zelenskyy’s White Space talk over with on Oct. 17, the Russian chief up to date his be offering for peace, suggesting his forces would withdraw from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in go back for the entire Donbas area.
This set the level for the most recent reported Trump-Zelenskyy shouting fit and the tossing apart of front-line maps.
In a while, Trump posted on social media: “… it is time to stop the killing, and make a DEAL! Enough blood has been shed, with property lines being defined by War and Guts. They should stop where they are.”
This will get at how Zelenskyy and Trump reputedly see various things after they have a look at front-line maps. The Ukrainian chief sees a painful truth, his nation’s geo-body violently reduce aside via an invading, occupying energy. Trump feedback point out he sees it as a belongings dispute through which the most powerful energy has collected some territorial winnings and now must money them in.
