Estonia abstained from UN vote on maps because of Crimea. On the Russian version of Equal Earth, the peninsula is Russian, on the English one it is not

In the Equal Earth projection, which the UN General Assembly recommended for wider use on Friday, there are freely available wall maps of the world in several language versions. On the English one, Crimea is colored gray, that is, differently from both Ukraine and Russia. On the Russian-language version, it has the same color as neighboring Russian regions and bears a sentence directly on the map "Under the administration of RUSSIA, sovereignty disputed by UKRAINE". It was precisely to this difference that Estonia's Foreign Ministry referred when explaining why Estonia abstained from voting. ERR ↗The vote itself took place on Friday, September 4, and Slovak and Czech media reported on it. The "Correct the Map" resolution was submitted by Togo on behalf of African states, passed with a vote of 164 to one, and recommends to states, schools, international organizations and technology companies to use area-accurate projections where the proportion of sizes matters. It is not legally binding and does not prohibit Mercator's depiction, which remains appropriate for navigation. Only the United States voted against it and six countries abstained: Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia, and Ukraine. TASR ↗

The reason for Ukraine's abstention made it into Slovak news coverage. Ukraine's permanent representative to the UN, Andriy Melnyk, stated that the depiction of temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories contradicts the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity and is at odds with General Assembly resolutions on non-recognition of the attempt to annex Crimea in 2014. According to him, attempts to agree with the submitters on a compromise wording on September 3 and 4 were unsuccessful, and he warned that accepting the text without safeguards could open a "Pandora's box" and introduce ambiguity into maps regarding disputed territories. Interfax-Ukraine ↗

In the Slovak and Czech articles we reviewed, Estonia appears mainly as an item in the list of abstaining countries. Its own explanation, which is more specific than Ukraine's, we did not find in any of them. "Estonia supports adequate representation of the African continent. However, on the English sample map of the Equal Earth projection that the resolution promotes, Crimea is depicted neutrally, while on the Russian-language version it is even shown as part of Russia. Therefore, Estonia, together with Ukraine, abstained in the vote," the Estonian ministry told public broadcaster ERR. "According to our assessment, it was the right and principled choice: the correction of one historical injustice cannot be done at the expense of another nor can it jeopardize the territorial integrity of states." The ministry added that it will now push for the resolution to respect the territorial integrity of states and for Ukraine to be depicted on maps within internationally recognized borders including Crimea. ERR ↗

We verified this claim by comparing both maps, which are publicly available. The wall maps in the Equal Earth projection were published by American cartographer Tom Patterson, one of the projection's co-creators, and released as a work in the public domain. On the English version, Crimea is gray and without any description, thus distinguished from both Ukraine and Russia. On the Russian-language version, it has the same yellowish-brown color as Krasnodar Krai and Rostov Oblast and bears the description "Under the administration of RUSSIA, sovereignty disputed by UKRAINE". The difference is also acknowledged in the file description on Wikimedia Commons, according to which the Russian version depicts some disputed territories as Russia. Wikimedia Commons ↗

Read also: Putin's secret decree allowed people to be imprisoned without trial. According to an investigation, there are hundreds of cases on occupied Crimea

The remaining four countries did not publicly explain their abstention in such detail. Georgia does not control Abkhazia or South Ossetia, Moldova does not control Transnistria, and Serbia does not recognize Kosovo's independence. Lithuania does not have its own territorial dispute, but in the context of the Russian annexation of Crimea, it has long been among the most consistent advocates of a non-recognition policy. UN ↗

It is worth noting, however, that the resolution does not mention borders at all. It does not recommend a specific political map or borders, but area-accurate projections, particularly Equal Earth — that is, a mathematical way to transfer a round surface onto a flat surface. The projection has nothing to do with how states are colored on a specific map. Anyone can use the projection for a map with arbitrarily drawn borders. This is precisely why Melnyk demanded safeguards and Estonia now speaks of supplementing the text: the resolution recommended a tool, but said nothing about what should be drawn with it. UN News ↗

Read also: The UN supported maps that more accurately show the size of Africa

Photo: An excerpt from a wall map of the world in the Equal Earth projection in the Russian language version. Crimea has the same color as neighboring Russian regions and bears the description "Under the administration of RUSSIA, sovereignty disputed by UKRAINE". Author Tom Patterson, equal-earth.com, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. The image is cropped and reduced.