Ukraine Satellite Map of Unharvested Crops Reveals Current Front Line

A new satellite map shows how the frontline in southern Ukraine is traced with unharvested crops as Kyiv pushes on with its summer counteroffensive against Russian troops.

In a new image, the dried-up Kakhovka reservoir in southern Ukraine, which traces part of the current front lines, can be seen west of a swath of green. This green shows unharvested crop fields located in Ukraine's southeast, where the war makes farming too dangerous, according to a post to social media by Berlin-based open source journalist, Michael Cruickshank.

"It's extraordinary to see how clearly defined the frontline now is in Ukraine, even when viewed from space at a macro scale," Cruickshank wrote.

The shape of the reservoir, starting in the occupied southern Ukrainian city of Nova Kakhovka and stretching up towards the city of Zaporizhzhia, marks the boundaries of Ukrainian and Russian-controlled territories, according to a second map drawn up by the U.S. think tank, the Institute for the Study of War. The patches of green, as seen in the satellite image, cuts through the southern Zaporizhzhia region and eastern Donetsk region, coinciding with updated maps of the front line.

The war in Ukraine, known as the breadbasket of Europe, has prompted fears over global food shortages, exacerbated by Moscow pulling out of a grain deal earlier this month that had allowed Ukrainian grain to leave from Black Sea ports to the rest of the world.

But an explosion on June 6 at the Kakhovka dam caused the water levels of the Kakhovka reservoir—one of Europe's largest—to drop, with satellite images quickly revealing a sharp decrease in water supplies for many of the agricultural regions in southern Ukraine.

Close to the past and present front lines, agricultural workers have had to contend with fields riddled with mines.

"Ukraine faces the heaviest landmine contamination the world has seen since the Second World War," the Halo Trust, a U.K.-based charity involved in clearing away landmines from the areas flooded by the Kakhovka dam explosion, said in June.

"Many families and small-scale farmers in front-line regions are not planting this season because they know their fields are dangerous or they are risking their lives to plant on mined lands or contaminated soils," according to Pierre Vauthier, from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization.

Shortly after Kyiv marked the first anniversary of all-out war, a Ukrainian official said that over one million hectares (2.47 million acres) of agricultural land in the northeastern Kharkiv and southern Kherson regions were sown with mines.

Many of the areas in southern and eastern Ukraine are in the spotlight of Ukraine's counteroffensive, soon to reach the two-month mark. Ukrainian troops have managed to regain some territory along the front lines, although experts say Russia has had time to build up tough defenses.

Source: Institute for the Study of War and AEI's Critical Threats Project.