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.