Ukraine is the open plain, and Crimea remains its territory

Ukraine is the broad plain between the Carpathians and the Black Sea, with Kyiv on the Dnipro. Crimea belongs to this state. Occupation does not rewrite the recognised map.

The capital lies on the Dnipro, which crosses the country from north to south and runs toward the Black Sea. West of the plain the Carpathians rise, toward Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. To the east and south the land becomes steppe. The Sea of Azov and the Black Sea close the south, and between them Crimea hangs on the Perekop isthmus. This profile follows that recognised territory, not a line of whoever holds control at a given moment.

Plain, river and two seas

The TerraTally country data give 38,980,376 inhabitants and 603,500 square kilometres. The population figure is a statistical series, not a count of people the war has driven from their homes. No such count is given here. The area is the one recorded for Ukraine, and this profile counts Crimea inside that territory. Kyiv does not sit on the coast but on the river, about where the forest steppe and the routes from the west come together. The south is the sea, not the capital.

The steppe in the south and east carries black earth. That is a fact of soils, not an export balance. Land neighbours are Belarus, Russia, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland. The borders with Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania are borders with states of the European Union. Belarus lies to the north, Russia to the east and, across Crimea, on the Black Sea as well. The plain is political for that reason: it has few natural bars between these edges.

The recognised map and the occupied one

In 2014 Russia occupied Crimea and incorporated it by a procedure that Ukraine does not recognise. The United Nations General Assembly affirmed the territorial integrity of Ukraine within its recognised borders. In the east lie the basins of Donetsk and Luhansk, the Donbas. War has been fought there too since 2014. The peninsula and the basin are not footnotes to the plain. They are parts of the same state territory, disputed by occupying them.

In February 2022 Russia began a large-scale attack on Ukrainian territory and has since held further areas besides Crimea. This profile draws no front. It records what Ukraine and the General Assembly treat as state territory: Crimea remains Ukraine, and the areas occupied later remain Ukraine as well. Describe only the zone controlled at a given time and you describe a situation of the war. Describe the country and you describe the recognised area.

Crimea is a peninsula of Ukraine. Occupation changes who administers it. It does not change where the peninsula belongs in the recognised territory.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

Ukrainian as the language of this state

Ukrainian is the state language. Russian is widely spoken, above all in the south and east and in cities that were long bilingual. The constitution does not make Russian a second official language. It protects the free development of Russian and of other languages of national minorities. The war has made that distinction sharper; it did not invent it. The state is named in Ukrainian, the capital is Kyiv, and the map it holds to is the map of the recognised borders.

Payment is in hryvnia, issued by the national bank. Since 1991 Ukraine has been its own state, come out of the Soviet Union, with this currency and with Kyiv as capital. The currency applies to the recognised territory, not to a selection of unoccupied oblasts. Thus the last sentence returns to the thesis. The plain, the river and the peninsula are one country. The war is the dispute over control, not a permission to draw the profile along the occupation.

Read Ukraine as a plain and you find the Dnipro, the steppe and the Black Sea. Read it only as a situation report and you forget that the recognised area still includes the peninsula.