Russia covers 4.3 times the land of the five Central Asian states put together. On the map on your phone it covers 10 times as much. The whole difference is the projection.
On Friday 4 September the General Assembly adopted resolution A/80/L.104, "Correct the map", by 164 votes to 1 with 6 abstentions. Togo's foreign minister Robert Dussey presented it for the African Group, and the argument was Africa's: the Mercator projection, drawn in 1569 and still the base of almost every web map, shows the continent at roughly the size of Greenland, which is 14 times smaller. The text encourages member states and international organisations to adopt, disseminate and use the Equal Earth projection, an equal-area map published in 2018 by Bojan Ε avriΔ, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny. It binds nobody and bans nothing.
The United States voted against. Yaryna Ferencevych, a deputy US representative at the UN, called the text "barnacles on our work here" and said it promotes "an ideological agenda". The six abstentions carry the regional detail: Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine. Ukraine's envoy Andriy Melnyk told the hall that Equal Earth maps show Ukrainian territory in a way that is unacceptable and contrary to the Charter, and the delegation warned, in the UN's own summary of the sitting, that the vote was opening a Pandora's box. TASS and Argumenty i Fakty reported the same day that Crimea on an Equal Earth map is coloured as Russia, with a footnote calling it under Russian control and disputed by Ukraine. Russia's deputy permanent representative Maria Zabolotskaya told the assembly that the territories "a number of delegations mentioned" are "part of the Russian Federation". Moscow was not among the seven that withheld support.
Georgia gave no reason that reached the UN's summary or the wires we read. Its own criminal code, since July 2020, punishes the production, transport, promotion and use of maps that show the country without Abkhazia and South Ossetia, with up to 2 years in prison. The EU's explanation of vote, delivered by Ireland, says the text touches no border and "does not endorse any specific website, such as equal-earth.com".
So inside one sitting the argument moved from how big a country is drawn to where its edges go. That is the part of Friday the region should keep, and we return to it below. First, the arithmetic.
A premium that grows with latitude
Mercator keeps angles true and pays for it in area. At any point the map's area scale is the square of the secant of the latitude: 1 at the equator, 2 at 45 degrees north, 4 at 60, 8 at 69.3. Karachi, at 24.9 degrees, is drawn at 1.2 times its true area. Kabul gets 1.5, Tashkent 1.8, Bishkek 1.9, Astana 2.5, Moscow 3.2, St Petersburg 4.0, Yakutsk 4.5 and Norilsk 8.0.
The premium runs inside a single country too. Between Kazakhstan's southern border near 40.6 degrees north and its northern border near 55.4, the map's area scale rises by 79%. A square kilometre at Petropavl, on the northern border, takes 1.7 times the pixels of a square kilometre at Saryagash, on the southern one.
Points illustrate; countries integrate. CAW took the Natural Earth 1:10m country polygons, projected each into the spherical Mercator that serves web map tiles (EPSG:3857) and divided the result by the same polygon's area on an equal-area projection of the same sphere. The quotient is a pure projection factor, with no official statistics in it: how many times larger than life a country appears on the map most people look at.
Figure 1 has the ladder. Russia comes out at 4.90; the phone shows nearly 5 Russias for every real one. Kazakhstan is 2.26 and Mongolia 2.14. The four states south of Kazakhstan sit between 1.63 for Tajikistan and 1.80 for Uzbekistan, with Kyrgyzstan at 1.78 and Turkmenistan at 1.66. Georgia is 1.82, Azerbaijan and Armenia 1.72. Then the neighbours: Turkey 1.66, China 1.59, Afghanistan 1.45, Iran 1.42, Pakistan 1.34, India 1.19. Nigeria is 1.03 and the Democratic Republic of Congo 1.01; Africa as a whole is 1.1. Greenland, the famous case, is 16.4, and our polygons return the same 14 to 1 against Africa that UN News cited on Friday.
The premium has a direction
Everyone north of the equator collects some premium. What a reader sees is the ratio between neighbours, because a map is read by comparison, and the ratios split the region's neighbourhood in two.
North, the premium is paid. Russia's 4.90 against Kazakhstan's 2.26 means Russia gains a factor of 2.17 on Kazakhstan before a single fact is placed on the map. On the ground Russia is 6.2 Kazakhstans; on Web Mercator it is 13.5. Against Uzbekistan, 38 to 103. Against the five Central Asian states together it goes from 4.3 to 10. Central Asia's share of the land that it and Russia occupy between them is 19% on the ground and 9% on the phone. Mongolia fares the same: Russia is 10.8 Mongolias in reality and 24.8 on the map.
Southward it is collected. Kazakhstan is smaller than India, at 0.86 of its area; on Mercator it appears 1.6 times India's size. Kazakhstan is 29% of China's area and appears as 41%. Iran is 3.5 Turkmenistans and appears as 2.9. Afghanistan is 1.4 Uzbekistans and appears as 1.2, Pakistan is nearly 2 Uzbekistans and appears as 1.5, and inside the region the ladder tilts as well: Kazakhstan is 2.15 times the other four states combined and appears as 2.8 times.
The complaint one hears, that Mercator shrinks Central Asia, is therefore half right. It flatters the region against India, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and China, and it diminishes the region against Russia. The correction the UN endorsed removes both halves at once. Central Asia gives up an inflated edge over the south and recovers the weight the north took from it. Which half matters more depends on the map in front of you, and in the region's strategic storytelling the map in front of you almost always has Russia across the top.
Where the map does its work
The obvious objection is that nobody measures anything on a Mercator map. True, and beside the point. Engineers work in GIS, where area is computed on the ellipsoid whatever the screen shows. The premium does its work one step earlier, in the eye of the person deciding what is worth measuring.
On the ground Russia is 6.2 Kazakhstans; on Web Mercator it is 13.5.
Two facts fix where that happens. Web Mercator is the tile standard: EPSG:3857, scope "web mapping and visualisation" in the registry's words, is the projection of Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, Bing and Esri's ArcGIS, and TASS's own 2019 explainer on Mercator adds Yandex to the list. Google's globe, switched on in August 2018, appears only when the desktop map is zoomed far out; the tiles under a country, a corridor or a pipeline stay Mercator. Corridor decks and ministry slides carry, as a rule, exports of those tiles, because that is what the tools serve by default.
The swollen Russia is, for Russia itself, a foreign import. Russian atlases often draw the country in Krasovsky's projection, a conic design made for maps of the USSR, and the TASS explainer concedes that without Mercator's distortion the country's real size "turns out far more modest than we are used to thinking", and that on the Gall-Peters equal-area map Russia becomes "a strip of land stretched along the Arctic Ocean". Friday's commentary in Moscow read the resolution in exactly that key. Expert's headline asked why the UN had voted to shrink Russia on the world's maps, and Mail.ru's news feed announced that Russia "shrank" on the map the UN approved.
For Central Asia the direction is reversed. The Bishkek Declaration of the SCO's anniversary summit, adopted on 1 September, called Central Asia the core of the organisation. On the map every delegate carried in a pocket, that core sits in the smallest cells of the graticule, under a Russia drawn at twice its relative size. The Middle Corridor is sold on the same map: a line through a compact-looking region, beneath a northern mass that dwarfs it.
What the correction fixes and what it leaves
Equal Earth restores area and nothing else. It keeps no distances and no bearings. Mercator, whatever its sins, keeps a compass bearing straight, which is why navigators adopted it and why the resolution, which bans nothing, asks for equal-area maps only where relative size is the point. A corridor argument is about distance, transit time and tariff, and no world projection settles those. A map centred on Tashkent that keeps every distance from Tashkent true answers a question about Tashkent's reach; the railway's own kilometres answer the rest. Different questions need different maps, and the UN chose the one for area because area was Africa's grievance.
Nor does area measure weight. Uzbekistan's preliminary census counted 39.0 million people in January; Kazakhstan's statistics bureau counted 20.5 million on 1 January. On any area map, Mercator or Equal Earth, the more populous country is the smaller one, and a cartogram that scaled countries by people would flip them. Nobody proposes to teach geography from cartograms.
And the resolution changes tiles not at all. It is addressed, in UN News's summary, to governments, schools, organisations and technology companies, and the companies were not in the room. Google's tiles will be Mercator on Monday, and so will Yandex's. The classroom wall map is where Equal Earth will arrive first, which means a cohort of Central Asian schoolchildren may grow up with a Russia half the relative size of the one their parents were taught.
Where the borders went
Return to the abstentions. The resolution corrects size; the projection it names arrives with published maps, and published maps carry borders. Ukraine objected to them aloud; Serbia spoke of inaccuracies; the other four said nothing the record kept. Equal Earth is a formula, and a formula can draw any border a publisher wants. The wall map published on equal-earth.com, which the EU declined to endorse by name, chooses one set of borders; the Equal Earth map that TASS examined colours Crimea as Russia with a footnote. The moment a projection acquires a reference map, the projection inherits the map's politics.
That mechanism is our reading of Georgia's silent abstention. A state whose criminal code punishes maps drawn without its occupied regions cannot vote for a text whose reference map may draw them the wrong way, and cannot vote against a correction its own geography profits from: Georgia collects a premium of 1.82, and a Russia at 4.90 sits across its northern border. Abstention was the arithmetic.
For the five Central Asian states and Mongolia the question is simpler, because their borders are not contested on the map the way Ukraine's and Georgia's are. None of the six appears among the seven states the record lists outside the majority, and none, in the UN's summary or the wires we read, said a word about a map that halves Russia's visual advantage over them.
The test of whether anyone in the region noticed is a slide. The first corridor presentation in Astana or Tashkent drawn on an equal-area base will show a Middle Corridor crossing a region the size of the one it actually crosses, under a Russia the size of the one that actually exists. Until then the map in every pocket keeps its northern premium, and every argument about Central Asia's weight in Eurasia starts a factor of 2 behind.