Five Maps of the War (Ukraine)
The front line, occupied territory and the deep-strike map, the Russia–Ukraine war read through cartography.
Interactive Frontline Map (ArcGIS StoryMap)
Source: Independent ArcGIS StoryMap (community-maintained)
An independent, community-maintained ArcGIS StoryMap offering a time-lapse visualization of frontline changes in the Russia-Ukraine war since 2022. It is useful for a quick geographic overview of how the line of contact has moved, but it carries no institutional authorship and no formal verification process. For authoritative daily control-of-terrain assessments, consult the Institute for the Study of War’s own published maps directly; for structured event data, use ACLED below.
ArcGIS StoryMaps are designed for embedding and redistribution, which is why this resource can be viewed inline here.
DeepStateMap.Live, Crowdsourced Real-Time Frontline
Source: Deep State UA (Ukrainian OSINT)
The most-viewed digital map of the war, with over one billion cumulative views and 900,000 daily users by August 2025. DeepStateMap is a Ukrainian open-source intelligence project that aggregates battlefield reports, geolocated combat footage, and official military communications to produce near-real-time frontline updates. The map’s symbology distinguishes between recently liberated territory, contested zones, confirmed Russian positions, and areas of active combat.
What makes DeepStateMap exceptional is its crowdsourced verification methodology. Reports from Ukrainian military personnel, civilian observers, and open-source analysts are cross-referenced before frontline positions are updated. This produces a map that is often more current than official military briefings, during the fall 2024 Russian offensive in Donetsk, DeepStateMap documented territorial changes hours before they appeared in ISW or official Ukrainian General Staff reports. The mobile app allows frontline monitoring in real time.
As a volunteer-led Ukrainian initiative dedicated to transparency about the war, DeepStateMap encourages broad distribution of their mapping data.
LiveUAMap, Ukraine Real-Time News Map
Source: LiveUAMap
The original real-time conflict map, launched in 2014 during the initial Russian incursion into Donbas. LiveUAMap has tracked the Ukraine conflict longer than any other platform, providing unbroken coverage from the first separatist movements through the 2022 full-scale invasion to the present attritional phase. The map aggregates geolocated news alerts from wire services, Ukrainian and Russian military channels, and verified social media, placing every event on an interactive map.
LiveUAMap’s eight-year archive constitutes an invaluable historical record. Users can scroll back through time to see how the conflict’s geography evolved: the initial multi-axis Russian invasion, the retreat from Kyiv, the Kharkiv and Kherson counteroffensives, and the grinding Donetsk front of 2024-2026. The chronological news feed captures the war’s tempo in a way that static maps cannot.
LiveUAMap explicitly supports embedding through their dedicated frame endpoint, and has been embedded by hundreds of news organizations, educational institutions, and research platforms.
ACLED, Ukraine Conflict Monitor
Source: Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED)
ACLED’s dedicated Ukraine monitor provides the most methodologically rigorous conflict dataset available, with near-real-time event-level coding that captures not just frontline combat but political violence, protests, civilian targeting patterns, and strategic developments. The standardized coding schema enables statistical analysis across time, geography, and event type, capabilities that news-based maps cannot match.
The Ukraine Conflict Monitor includes an interactive map, curated data files for download, and weekly situation updates by ACLED’s research team. The event-level granularity allows researchers to answer questions that aggregate maps obscure: How has the ratio of artillery to drone strikes changed over time? Which oblasts experience the highest rates of civilian targeting? How do protest patterns in Russian-occupied territories correlate with military operations? The open data license means any researcher can download the full dataset and conduct independent analysis.
ACLED publishes under terms explicitly designed to encourage redistribution and academic use.
International Crisis Group, CrisisWatch Ukraine
Source: International Crisis Group
Crisis Group’s CrisisWatch database and visual explainers map frontline changes alongside the policy analysis and diplomatic context that purely military maps lack. Their Ukraine coverage connects territorial developments to ceasefire negotiations, humanitarian corridors, and escalation risks, providing the analytical bridge between the military situation and its political implications.
Crisis Group’s monthly CrisisWatch assessments track whether the conflict is escalating, stable, or showing openings for resolution, based on indicators that go beyond territorial changes: diplomatic activity, weapons transfers, civilian casualty patterns, and internal political dynamics on both sides. This longitudinal tracking has made CrisisWatch a standard reference for policymakers seeking to understand trajectory rather than just position.
As a nonprofit research organization, Crisis Group produces its public analysis to inform international policy and encourages citation and distribution.
Further cartographic resources
- The New York Times, Visual Investigations: Ukraine (Paywalled), The NYT’s Pulitzer-winning visual investigations team has produced dozens of deeply reported map-based investigations of the Ukraine war, including satellite imagery analysis of Russian war crimes and destruction of civilian infrastructure. Requires a NYT subscription. link
- IISS, Armed Conflict Survey: Ukraine (Subscription), The International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Armed Conflict Survey provides comprehensive military-balance analysis with detailed mapping of force dispositions, equipment losses, and capability assessments. The most authoritative defense research source. Requires an IISS institutional or individual subscription. link
- The Economist, Ukraine War Tracker (Paywalled), The Economist’s data team maintains an interactive tracker using satellite fire detection data to map the intensity and location of fighting along the entire front line. The methodology, using NASA FIRMS thermal anomaly data as a proxy for combat intensity, is innovative and provides a view of the conflict’s heat map independent of official reporting. Requires an Economist subscription. link