Mapping detention cases from court texts: border signs, oblast boundaries, offline maps
Posted by NoEscapeMap on 26 September 2026 in English. Last updated on 27 September 2026.We maintain NoEscape 2.0 (https://nemap.fyi/), a public map built from Ukraine’s open court registry: decisions describing border-crossing attempts (mostly article 204-1) are geocoded and published as derived points - never exact coordinates, never personal data.

Overview of derived detention-case clusters, 2022-2026. Points are aggregated from court texts; no exact locations or personal data. Map data (c) OpenStreetMap contributors; basemap (c) CARTO / HOT per layer; screenshot (c) NoEscapeMap (nemap.fyi), 2026.
Three mapping-side notes:
1. Geocoding uses oblast boundaries plus border-sign numbers with distances
from decision texts; settlements are the fallback. Cases without any anchor
stay off the map - incompleteness is explicitly stated, not hidden.

Tisza river valley - the Hungary-Ukraine border follows the Tisza valley. Photo: Cezar Suceveanu, CC BY-SA 4.0. 2. Our offline checklist (https://nemap.fyi/offline-map) sends users to pre-downloaded OsmAnd / Organic Maps terrain: there is no honest operator-coverage offline map, so we say so instead of faking one. 3. Method and dataset notes are public: https://nemap.fyi/methodology and https://nemap.fyi/dataset. Questions on the geocoding trade-offs welcome.
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