World in Photos: One week after Vladimir Putin’s ‘annexation,’ Ukrainian forces have changed the maps

One week ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin made it official: He was annexing four swathes of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine, declaring it Russian land by decree and justifying the act with the results of a plainly flawed set of referendums. The residents of the four provinces, Putin said, “are becoming our citizens — forever.”

In some of these places, “forever” lasted less than a week.

Beyond the legally problematic nature of Putin’s declarations, there are now the problematic (for Russia) issues of what might be called “facts on the ground.” Even as Putin spoke last Friday, chunks of this new Russian territory were in Ukrainian hands. By the weekend, Ukrainian forces had captured Lyman, a key town in Donetsk, and moved through several miles of Russian-held territory in Kherson province. And their momentum has continued since — in the east and south alike. Over the past week, the Ukrainian army has recaptured at least 11 villages in the Kherson region in southern Ukraine.

Putin’s newly claimed slices of Russia have shrunk, and they may well shrink further.

In his nightly address Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that his forces had retaken nearly 500 square kilometers of territory, or almost 200 square miles, in the Kherson region alone. The Economist quoted Igor Girkin, who led Russia’s 2014 invasion of the Donbas, as saying, “the enemy has superiority in everything.”

Photographs cannot fully tell the story of a military advance, but they help convey both the trouble for the Russians and elation on the Ukrainian side: the detritus of Russian tanks and other armored vehicles in Lyman; a Ukrainian woman returning to her home in the recently recaptured town of Yampil; queuing for World Food Programme relief supplies in Drobysheve; and while reports from these various front lines make clear how violent and difficult the recent advances have been, there is a photo of Ukrainians taking selfies near the town of Siversk that gives a sense for the exuberance some soldiers are feeling.

Ukraine now has the momentum on several fronts. Strategically, the counteroffensive aimed at Kherson is perhaps most significant; as Grid has reported, the region provides Russia a land bridge to the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia took in 2014.

None of this means an easy road ahead for the Ukrainians. Russia still holds at least 15 percent of Ukrainian territory. But it’s worth pausing to consider that one week ago, Putin announced with fanfare that Kherson and the three other regions belonged to Russia. The global protests that day were of the legal variety. One week later, there are changes on the ground that no Kremlin decrees can alter.