Keeping up with Putin's war

 

It took me a while, but I have discovered the Institute for War Studies (ISI) website with its detailed and up-to-date map of Putin's conquests in eight years of hot and frozen aggression against his neighbor. Above is a screenshot of the situation as of yesterday, excluding the Crimean Peninsula to the south which no doubt is the underlying cause of the war. (Khruschev in a careless moment handed it over to the government in Kyiv; it had previously been part of the Russian soviet republic. In 1954, this seemed of no great consequence, since both were firmly controlled by the Kremlin.) In pink is the 20 percent of Ukraine's territory that Russia now claims to control. In blue are claimed Ukrainian advances, and the blue cross-hatching is reported Ukrainian guerrilla activity. The areas outlined by a heavy black border (Crimea and Donetsk) were seized by Russia in 2014 and after.

Each day, ISW posts a short bulletin on the war situation. Up today,  under date of June 14, is an assessment of military exercises in Belarus, whose dictator has allied himself with Putin but in ISW's judgment is unlikely to join the combat.