The Long War #52

KYIV—I think I first heard of DeepState somewhere around May 2022. The now-ubiquitous mapping project, used by an untold number of Ukrainians as well as by analysts and journalists across the world to track the situation on the frontline, had been launched on the first day of the invasion. I hadn’t heard about it when I covered those first weeks however, relying at the time mostly on the maps made daily by Wikipedia contributors and OSINT accounts on Twitter to stay apprised of the front’s evolution.

It’s only a few months later, when I was driving around Pokrovsk with my fixer, looking for a place to get petrol (a pretty severe shortage had hit the country at that point), that a chat with soldiers led to one of them pulling out his smartphone and showing us the frontline on the DeepState app.

DeepState and a host of other mapping projects have in the past three years become indispensable, used every day by those watching the war or even taking part in it. They were never perfect tools, but they were—and still are—better than anything a non-military observer could get in any previous peer-to-peer conflict. The massive amount of footage released has allowed teams of volunteers to painstakingly map the exact contours of the fighting, day after day and month after month. For more on DeepState, check out this great story the New York Times did last month on the organization.

But, at a frightening speed, the war has changed. In the past few months, manpower shortages and the mass use of drones not just on the frontline (as was already common since 2022) but in the 10-15 kilometers beyond it has made the war a matter of positions rather than lines. On the maps, the grey squeezed between the blue and red territories has swelled to represent areas not truly controlled by any side, where isolated Ukrainian dugouts can be bypassed by small Russian assault teams until they’re detected and hit by drones. Near the Donestk region town of Dobropillya, where Russian forces managed a 10 kilometers-advance last month, what looks like a strictly-enforced operational silence on both sides has only increased the confusion.

The frontline is becoming more and more blurry as Russian forces advance towards the ruins of villages and towns that Ukrainian troops had fought to free back in September 2022 or, as in the case of the Dnipropetrovsk region, progress in regions that had until now been spared from the fighting. It is tempting to extend that bluriness to the situation as a whole, with only three months left in the fourth year of the war. I almost wrote about an increasing uncertainty, but it isn’t really increasing—it is more of a gripping, permanent uncertainty constantly fed by new developments. Maybe blurry is actually a better way to describe it.

NV (in Ukrainian) | “The war is coming to an end”: Venislavsky about negotiations, criminal liability for deserters and lowering of the mobilization age | Sept 16

A surprisingly tough interview of Fedir Venislavskyi, a Ukrainian MP from the presidential party and member of the parliamentary committee on defense and intelligence matters. Venislavskyi has been involved in several bills linked to some of the more difficult political and military issues of the moment: a bill reintroducing criminal liability for deserters (or, rather, removing a 2024 provision that waived this liability if the soldier returned to the military); an effort to recruit more men aged between 18 and 24 (who cannot be forcibly mobilized); and a recent decision to allow men aged 18 to 22 to leave the country.

The discussion, I think, really highlights the lack of a coherent strategy when it comes to the manpower issue in the military.

It’s a long interview, so let’s briefly look at the three points raised in the headline:

• “The war is coming to an end”. Venislavskyi… doesn’t really explain this, despite arguing that it is “obvious”. He seems to be betting it all on a Trump-Zelenskyy-Putin meeting that has never looked more unlikely.

• The bill on criminal liability for desertion is really the trigger for the interview: voted in its first reading in early September (it will likely undergo significant changes before the second reading), it should, among other provisions, reintroduce the standard criminal liability for going AWOL and desertion. Venislavskyi barely admits the law waiving this liability of the soldier returned to the military doesn’t work anymore—but sidesteps the question of whether this will lead to the arrest of tens of thousands of men.

• Then there’s what the journalist describes as an apparent contradiction between creating specific contracts to attract young men into the military, while also allowing men aged 18 to 22 to leave the country. Venislavskyi’s answer to the journalist’s question about the pertinence of letting young men that may be needed in the army leave is, I think, noteworthy: “here it is necessary to understand that there is a strong position amongst all political forces that lowering the mobilization age below 25 years is currently very unlikely. It is unrealistic to think this will happen in the near future, unless there are some generally catastrophic changes.”

Ukrainska Pravda—Zhyttya (in Ukrainian) | The tip of the iceberg. How many abortions did Ukrainian women have during the Great War and what do these statistics show? | September 12

The 2022 Russian invasion didn’t just impact Ukraine’s population—which plummeted as millions of Ukrainians fled abroad—or its birthrate. The country’s health ministry recorded around 43,000 abortions performed in 2024, a sharp drop from the 55,000 abortions recorded in 2021, before the beginning of the invasion.

Do these statistics tell us anything beyond a drop obviously caused by the population decline? It's hard to say, though the article makes a few notes: a slight increase in the share of women older than 35 undergoing abortions (from 28% in 2021 to 32% in 2024), an equally slight increase of abortions in rural areas (from 32% to 35%). In pure percentage terms, there's also been a huge increase in illegal (i.e, not performed by a licensed doctor) abortions, but the raw numbers are still tiny: just one in 2021, 9 in 2023 and 14 last year. Though we don't have the actual statistics, a gynecologist quoted in the article also mentions a strong and sadly unsurprising increase in miscarriages.

Ukrainska Pravda (in Ukrainian) | The place where every drone is hunting you: how Kherson lives under constant Russian attack | September 17

In a war that has affected so many different people in so many different ways, the plight of Kherson is horrifically unique. Kherson is in this singular position of being the closest Ukrainian major city to the frontline (with the closest Russian positions sitting right on the other bank of the river, a handful of kilometers away) while also not being a battlefield, with the river protecting the city from invasion. Rather than a battlefield, Kherson has become a training and hunting ground for Russian forces.

Ukrainska Pravda’s story is a terrifying look at what it means to live in Kherson today.

First, on the sense of isolation that residents now feel:

“When we have four dead and ten wounded, it’s statistics. And when this happens in other regions, they declare mourning. That’s why we have two realities ,” one of the UP interlocutors says. He complains about the feeling of being under siege, not only physically, but also informationally. It seems to him that the people of Kherson are left alone with their pain.

The strained logistics of Kherson:

Logistics have become a daily ordeal: suppliers used to bring goods, but now Vlasov has to travel to Mykolaiv himself with half a ton of cargo. Any shelling of the area means that there will be no customers in the nearest bakery for the day. If a shelling triggers an emergency power cut, the ovens stop, and the day is lost again. But despite everything, Vlasov continues to keep his bakeries open even in the “red zone.” If there was no one to work, he would close them. But people take turns even under fire—one of his bakeries was hit three times.

The driving:

If you drive a car, without music, with the windows open to hear the UAVs. You often drive at speeds under a hundred. Some of the townspeople have installed a drone detector in their cars: it can signal about FPV nearby, and sometimes even show a picture captured from a drone. The scariest thing is to see your own car on it.

(The last time I was in Kherson, four months ago, I witnessed a car crash in the center that was indirectly caused by the drones: cars driving fast to avoid drones, and traffic lights turned off at intersections because it’s too dangerous to sit idle at a red light.)