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 select a compact group of states, provinces or regions connected along shared land borders, approaching 20% of the country’s mapped land. Keeping one coherent area takes priority over reaching exactly 20%. Corner-only contacts and distant provincial islands cannot connect otherwise separate groups. Islands belonging to a selected region may still be shown. The resulting percentage is displayed.
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.
Built to bring distant places closer. Names and boundaries are simplified for a global visualisation. Percentages are estimates calculated from the supplied map geometry.