Imagine your hometown being wiped off the map.
Imagine a city where no one lives.
Imagine the landmarks in your life — where you went to school, where you were married, where you worked and played and loved and prayed — erased.
This is what happened to Marinka, a small town in Ukraine’s east with nearly 200 years of history. Photos of it look like those of Hiroshima. Its destruction has become a symbol of Ukraine’s war.
It’s hardly the only Ukrainian town like this. The Times worked with researchers to measure every town, street and building in Ukraine blown apart since the Russians invaded in 2022. In today’s newsletter, we’ll explain how we did it — and what we found.
Measuring a nation’s destruction wasn’t an easy thing to do. It was possible only by viewing Ukraine from space. Radar-equipped satellites took frequent images of the country during the war. Then, researchers from the City University of New York Graduate Center and Oregon State University analyzed years of data — more than 10,000 images of Ukraine in total — to track small changes in blocks or even discrete buildings. The project took more than a year.
More buildings have been wrecked in Ukraine than if every building in Manhattan were leveled four times over. In some places, like Marinka, not a single resident is left.
Beyond the debris, what interested us most was the impact on people. So many Ukrainians have lost not just their homes but their entire communities. Marinka represents this loss. I walked its streets while it was under siege in July 2022. Not many people still lived there; I didn’t see how any could. But I stepped into an apartment building and found, in light so dim that it was hard to see, a mom, her 13-year-old daughter and their cat sitting in a quiet, half-destroyed room. The front line between Russia and Ukraine was on their doorstep.
They eventually left, along with everyone else. The Russians took control of the city last year. But there wasn’t much left. As one soldier put it, “Whatever could burn, burned.”
Our story, published today, visualizes the scope of Ukraine’s annihilation.
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