The U.S. and other Western governments may doggedly refuse to recognize Crimea’s annexation by Russia, but one prominent American mapmaker will.
“We map de facto, in other words we map the world as it is, not as people would like it to be,” Juan José Valdés, the National Geographic’s geographer and director of editorial and research for National Geographic Maps, tells U.S. News.
“As you can only surmise, sometimes our maps are not received in a positive light by some individuals who want to see the world in a different light,” Valdés says.
