On Jan. 5, 2025, my volunteer platoon attached to the 23rd Special Purpose Battalion of the Presidential Brigade entered a 1-kilometer-long tree line called CHAI, on the outskirts of Kotlyne, a few kilometers west of Pokrovsk, Ukraine. Our task was to occupy a position whose status on DeepState, an open-source map tracking military operations in the Russo-Ukrainian war, had been shifting out of gray for five days. On DeepState’s map, different colors illustrate the fighting situation: the red area is held by the aggressor, while green or blue areas show territory successfully defended or recaptured by the Ukrainian army. The The post The Strange Transformation of the Front Line in Ukraine appeared first on War on the Rocks .