By Ekaterina Janashia | 2025-12-30

The soldier thought he had landed a safe desk job: trace the front line, update the maps, keep the paperwork moving. Then he realized the maps were lying.

From a dugout near Avdiivka, he watched Russian units "capture" towns that were still contested -- and saw those invented gains climb the chain of command all the way to Moscow.

Inside Russia's military, battlefield maps help manufacture so-called progress. Reports from the front are nudged upward, distances stretched, and shaded "advances" passed along as proof of success. The result is a feedback loop in which commanders plan operations around victories that exist only on paper, while the risks for the units sent forward keep rising.

From parade unit to bunker

The conscript, who spoke with Mediazona in November, requested to conceal his identity for security reasons. He began service on November 1, 2024, in the Volgograd honor guard. In December, he signed a contract after being promised a 2.5 million RUB ($31,000) payout and assurances he would not be sent to the "special military operation."

Those assurances vanished. After bullying from sergeants and months of exhausting duty, he transferred into an operations office.

By July 2025, he was told he would be deployed to Donetsk to "work with maps," supposedly from a protected bunker.

"I was scared to go," he said, noting the 8th Army command post had just been hit.

Instead, he was rerouted to a forward post near Avdiivka, close to the front line. The command shelter was a timber-lined dugout. There, he maintained three versions of the battlefield: a physical map, an electronic map and the general's tablet, shading in reported changes square by square.

Shading 'on credit'

The work soon revealed how far expectations strayed from reality.

"Most of the time, the command gives completely unrealistic orders during an offensive," he said. "They might plan for soldiers to advance 18 kilometers [11 miles] in five days, even though everyone understands that's absurd."

He described "shading on credit": units declared locations such as Rusyn Yar or Poltavka fully captured, and he marked them accordingly, even as open sources showed they remained "gray zones." Officers would privately complain their own data was "total bullshit."

Minimal presence still counted as control.

If "two Russian soldiers sit at one end and two more sit at the other" along a strip of forest roughly a kilometer long (0.6 miles), the whole area appeared seized on the map.

"Two people sit somewhere and suddenly 300–400 meters... get shaded in as 'secured,' even though there's no real fortified presence there at all."

The distortions widened up the hierarchy. Headquarters maps regularly extended gains by 1.5 to 2 kilometers (1-1.3 miles) beyond what frontline reports showed.

"The army maps were wildly off -- pure fabrication," he said.

The most glaring case came in September, ahead of a visit by Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. The post received a revised situation map from Moscow that bore little resemblance to reality.

"The division sends one set of data, but ahead of Gerasimov's arrival, we were given a different one from the General Staff. And I had to print maps based on that version just for him. Absurd."

When fiction meets the front

Evidence from captured Russian maps in the Donetsk region shows commanders presenting desired outcomes as accomplished facts, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told journalists in September.

"During a briefing on our operation [the counteroffensive in Dobropillia], I saw the electronic version of the location of our forces and equipment and saw the Russian maps. So, their reports differ greatly from reality. Where we have regained our positions, the Russians' maps show the opposite," he said, as quoted by Ukrinform. "The reports from middle management to the top in Russia differ from the real situation."

Outside analysts see the same pattern. President Zelenskyy's visit to Kupiansk, a city Russian commanders had claimed to occupy, showed how far those claims can drift from fact.

"These falsified maps actually pose a great danger to Russian soldiers, as they allow the Armed Forces of Ukraine to predict exactly where the next Russian attack will occur," Shota Utiashvili, a senior fellow at the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, told Kontur.

"However, for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, the lives of his own soldiers mean nothing; it is far more important for him to convince President [Donald] Trump of the Russian army's invincibility."

For troops, the gap between map and reality can be fatal.

The former soldier described units sent into supposedly cleared areas only to face intact Ukrainian defenses. He pointed to a September episode near Toretsk, where marines and special forces were wiped out after moving into territory portrayed as secured.

Most officers he encountered believed the war was "criminal and unwinnable," he said, but stayed in uniform for lack of alternatives. Others appeared radicalized, including a mobilized captain who boasted about brutalizing prisoners.

Shelling framed daily life at the post. A HIMARS strike felt perpetually possible. Convinced that the Russian army represented the "modern equivalent of the Third Reich," he planned his exit -- and did not return from leave when the chance came.

He escaped Russia but remains haunted. "At night I keep dreaming of the bunker, of walking through its hallways and offices."