The Military Geography of Ukraine

One of the biggest letdowns of the coverage of the recent Ukraine Crisis is the lack of military geography. There are phenomenal maps by the Institute for the Study of War, but these are really political maps. They do not account for the terrain and why the terrain being held is militarily defensible or indefensible. Logistics determine these wars, which they and every expert I know in the defense-innovation space comments on, but without geography the successful defense of Kyiv, and the successful, but small gains of Russia lack context. The whole goal of the war for the Russians is also obscured. It looks suicidal, stupid, even crazy, and sloppily planned from the highest to the lowest ranks. But the goal reflects a primordial geopolitical impulse of Russia, one forged in the steppes of fractious barely medieval Ukraine, when the Pechenegs, the Cumans, the Mongols, and the Turks would emerge on horseback and destroy the societies of the Ukrainian. One such invasion, the Mongol invasion of 1241, left Kyiv a cairn. The peace loving Rus started the path to being transformed into the most aggressive people on the planet.

So I decided to redo this beautiful map above. I wanted to show the Bessarabian Gap, the Carpathian Mountains that shield Hungary from the consequences of doing business with Russia, the Transnistria and the real threat to both Moldova and Ukraine, and I wanted to show why and how specific salients match the local terrain.

Here is a river!

Here is the Bessarabian Gap. In WWII, the Germans swung right to go and attack Odesa. It is a critically vulnerable invasion path to Russia, and it is one of the main reasons Russia invaded Ukraine. Closing defensible gaps like this and in Crimea, Georgia, Armenia, and other places explains Russia's seemingly irrational plans.

Transdniestria

Crimea controls several critical junctures and weak points.

In the beginning of the war, with the foreign policy consensus suggesting a quick collapse of Ukraine, the NATO special operations community was ready to support an insurgency based out of either a rump state around Lviv, or out of the surrounding countries (Hungary, Poland, Romania) with main insurgent camps in and around Galicia. Western Ukraine has several advantages for running an insurgency that Central or Eastern Ukraine does not, and this is why Western Ukraine has been the traditional camp for Ukrainian insurgencies, including during the Cold War with "forest brother" types.

Data Sources: Institute for the Study of War, Esri Living Atlas (World GMTED, country boundaries),

Military Geography of Ukraine.pdf

Here's my final masterpiece. My third iteration shows the dangers of the rivers, railroads, mountains, and the liberated/occupied territiories.

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