How The Times Has Mapped the War in Ukraine

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Maps have played a critical role in The New York Times’s coverage of the war in Ukraine — and nearly every graphics journalist at the organization, from New York to Seoul to London, has helped with the mapping effort.

The maps give Times readers a clear and accurate depiction of movements in Ukraine. They display the Russian military’s advances and Ukrainian counterattacks; they show recent fighting and destruction in Ukrainian cities.

But mapping a war is complicated, said Josh Keller, a deputy international editor who works on visual projects. False information proliferates and governments lie. Misleading imagery spreads on social media. Assessing what is true and what can be mapped, he added, is a complex task.

So, before representing anything in maps, The Times confirms news, such as troop positions or new rocket attacks, by corroborating reports from various sources. This includes working with Times journalists on the ground in Ukraine and members of The Times’s Visual Investigations team, which verifies incidents with satellite imagery and video. The Graphics team also scrutinizes statements released by the Russian and Ukrainian militaries. If they can be verified, eyewitness accounts, often posted on social media, also help confirm details.

Military analysts, including from organizations such as the Institute for the Study of War and Rochan Consulting, have also been important sources.

“There is no perfect information in a war. We seek to independently understand the nature of the fighting and draw the clearest picture we can,” Mr. Keller said.

For example, a series of maps published last week depicted the Russian siege on the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol. The maps reported Russian encroachment on Ukrainian troops over the course of a month. What they did not report were claims by the Russian military that its troops had taken full control of the port area. Josh Holder, a graphics editor based in London, scoured Twitter and Telegram for posts showing large-scale fighting near the port that he could geolocate. He couldn’t find any. Mr. Holder and Marc Santora, an international editor who has been covering the war, doubted the veracity of the Russian military.

On Tuesday, the team published a map of the area around the Azovstal steel plant, the last stronghold for Ukrainian troops in the city.

Once information is verified, the challenge is mapping the situation accurately without overloading readers, many of whom are looking at the maps on their phones.

“The goal is: Look at this map and you can have a quick idea of what’s going on,” said Scott Reinhard, an editor on the Graphics desk.

Mr. Reinhard began working on the project after Russia started to build up its presence near Ukraine. First, the team created base maps of Ukraine and its borders, which are informed by geographic data with waterways and population centers. Graphics editors then entered that data into a cartography program; to add The Times’s annotations, the map is also put through a graphics software.

Throughout the conflict, Mr. Reinhard and his colleagues have continued to develop the project’s symbology, the markings and icons that communicate new information to readers. For example, arrows show troop movement, and dotted arrows display where Russia might push in the future. Shellings are marked by icons that resemble explosions. Each map is accompanied by a corresponding key to help readers understand what they’re seeing.

The goal is to create clarity and avoid clutter, to “take this complexity and put it into some kind of digestible form” for readers, Mr. Reinhard said.

As the war has changed, so have the maps. At the outset of the invasion, as the Russian military poured into Ukraine, its gains were a key aspect of war reporting and the biggest piece of information available to journalists. Russian-controlled areas were shaded in a deep red color…