<
https://theconversation.com/when-it-comes-to-ukraine-peace-negotiations-its-all-over-the-map-265798>
"Donald Trump is reportedly “sick” of seeing maps of the front line in Ukraine.
Indeed, according to one European official’s account, he tossed aside Ukrainian
delegation maps during his latest meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at
the White House on Oct. 17, 2025.
Instead, Trump is said to have aggressively pushed Zelenskyy to accept Russia’s
terms to end the war and surrender all of the Donbas region in Ukraine’s east
to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As a political geographer who has studied Eastern Europe and post-communist
states, I know how crucial maps are to the dynamics of territorial conflicts
and peace negotiations. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example, maps were
central to the ethnic cleansing that took place in the early 1990s, driving
visions of creating mono-ethnic space through violence, and also to the ending
of the war. Similarly, in the Caucasus, cartographic fantasies of homogeneous
territories have underwritten campaigns against ethnic others in Abkhazia,
South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh.
And it is no surprise that maps are a critical part of negotiations now to end
the 3½-year conflict in Ukraine."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
