Ukraine's Subregions — Not East and West

A map of Ukraine’s subregions, created for an article in the Japanese media by Takashi Hirano. The article confronts disinformation circulating in Japan — above all the framing of Ukraine as a country irreparably “split between East and West” — and the self-styled experts who, knowingly or not, relay Russian propaganda to a Japanese audience.

That framing is not a geographic fact but an ideological device. Reducing Ukraine to two opposing halves presents the country as an artificial, unviable construct — a narrative that conveniently serves to justify outside interference. The map answers this oversimplification with actual complexity: Galicia in the west, the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the east, and occupied Crimea are each shown as distinct entities with their own histories and borders, rather than as two blocs pulling apart.

The map also addresses a quieter problem — the names themselves. In Japanese, as in many languages, Ukrainian place names entered through Russian rather than Ukrainian: hence the long-standing キエフ (from Russian “Kiev”) instead of キーウ (Kyiv), or “Kharkov” and “Lugansk” in place of Kharkiv and Luhansk. The map carries Ukrainian transliterations and, for Kyiv, shows both forms side by side — making the shift from the inherited Russian spelling to the Ukrainian one visible on the map itself.

Draft version by Takashi

A third confusion the map untangles is the mixing of historical and administrative units. Galicia is a historical and cultural region, not a present-day oblast; Donetsk and Luhansk are administrative regions. Russian narratives often blur these levels deliberately, so that “regions” appear to be ready-made candidates for secession. The map keeps the categories visually distinct, and marks temporarily occupied territories — Crimea and parts of the Donbas — with hatching.

Taken together, the project is less an illustration than a tool for taking disinformation apart: it takes the very terms the debate runs on — “the split,” “the regions,” the names of cities — and gives them a correct geographic and terminological footing, built on OpenStreetMap data and administrative boundaries from geoBoundaries.

Published by JBpress (2022).