Data Vis Dispatch,
March 1

Last Thursday, Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine. Since then graphics reporters around the world have been busy explaining the situation with maps and charts — I collected maps from 47 different sources in this Twitter thread last week. News organizations like The New York Times, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Financial Times, BBC, El País, The Times, Washington Post, Reuters, Bloomberg, The Guardian, Público, USA Today, and Al Jazeera have updated map collections on the conflict. Here are a few of the maps they and others created over the last few days:

Many newsrooms also tried to provide context on the war and on Ukraine. How did we get here? What was the situation before last Thursday? Why would Russia choose to invade? What does Ukraine have to work with?

Already in the days before the 24th of February, the Donbas region of Ukraine was in focus. It’s been disputed by Russian-backed forces for years, and the ceasefire in place there was repeatedly broken in the last two weeks:

Many news organizations focused on Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, which Russian forces are trying to enter:

Approximately 660,000 people have already fled Ukraine by train, bus, or car, and many more are still trying to escape:

People all over the world have protested and demonstrated against the invasion — including in Russia, where protesters are being detained by the police:

Most Western countries immediately condemned Putin’s invasion. Now of most interest are the consequences the war will have on the relationship between Russia and China:

Many countries were quick to impose sanctions on Russia. War and sanctions have already started to affect the Russian economy:

But sanctions are not without risk for European countries that rely on Russian gas:

As Vox and Quartz explain, the war could also have consequences for countries that rely on imports of Russian and Ukrainian wheat:

The pandemic hasn’t stopped for the war. The New York Times shows new research on the origins of the virus, while others dug deeper into death numbers, why Republicans are less vaccinated, and how much Brits have saved in the past two years:

In climate and environmental news, the IPCC released their latest report yesterday, and it’s worth a read. We’ve also seen reports on more drought, more wildfire events, more gas flaring, and more clothing — yes, clothing — which, as Bloomberg explains, is “an environmental crisis”:

In other news, the U.S. finds that drawing borders is hard:

In politics, women are still underrepresented in most countries, French presidential candidates are still in campaign mode (which creates a lot of garbage), and Boris Johnson is still widely considered incompetent:

That was a heavy Dispatch so far — let’s end it a bit lighter. First: More Olympics! (Probably for the last week for quite a while.) Two days after the Winter Olympics ended, three newsrooms independently released beautiful visualizations on how unrepresentative the games really are:

And in our famous “data visualizations that just don’t fit any other category” category (one of our favorites), we’ve seen how NBA teams should have drafted, and how to best solve Portugese Wordle. (For a fun data vis on English Wordle, visit Rose’s Weekly Chart from three weeks ago!)