World map must display Crimea as Ukraine

Bug reports
1

I'm using World Map visualization and for some perverted reason, Crimea is highlighted as a part of Russia. It should be highlighted as a part of UA region, since it is a part of ISO 3166-2:UA, here's a relevant excerpt from SAP support

ISO 3166-2:RU contains no codes for the Russian-administered 'Republic of Crimea' and the Federal City of Sevastopol, which are internationally recognized as part of Ukraine. Crimea is a region of Ukraine and its code is UA-43 in the ISO 3166-2:UA.

Considering that Metabase uses ISO Alpha2 codes to display regional data on the map, this is a bug, and also outrageous.
I'm running v.0.41.4, and you can reproduce this by visualizing SELECT * FROM UNNEST ARRAY['UA', 'RU'],ARRAY[2, 1]) on a world map.

Please fix this ASAP.

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2

Hi @alex2
There are a lot of conflict areas in the world. We tried to avoid most of them by excluding them completely (https://github.com/metabase/metabase/pull/11436).
Our map is sourced from https://www.naturalearthdata.com/ so you should report the problem there.

3

Thanks for the quick reply!

Despite the good intentions, the conflicted area wasn't excluded from the map, but attached to the aggressor instead, thus perpetuating the conflict and going against UN recognized boundaries. I can see how your team might have overlooked this by relying on a 3rd party dataset, and how this isn't an explicit approval of territorial aggression, but this still hurts.

I've checked the linked resource and seems that Natural Earth focuses on "de-facto" status of disputed territories https://www.naturalearthdata.com/about/disputed-boundaries-policy/.

However, for one, Crimea territory is not disputed, it's temporarily occupied and internationally considered as part of Ukraine. Secondly, even if we consider this territory as disputed it should be marked as such, but not as a part of a terrorist state waging war and committing genocide at the very moment.

The problem is well reported in their GitHub issues, with most of the discussion in this thread https://github.com/nvkelso/natural-earth-vector/issues/391

There, creator suggests using POV geographies, which were introduced in version 5 of Natural Earth to adapt boundaries for different viewers. Judging from the linked Metabase PR you're using v4.1.0.

Alternatively it's possible to switch to another dataset altogether: https://www.geoboundaries.org/downloadCGAZ.html

Hope you can find a solution that works for Metabase :+1:

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4

Hi!
Crimea is not a "conflict area". It's absolutely clear to every country in the world except for Russia, Belarus, and Eritrea, that Crimea is a part of Ukraine.
You should consider sourcing some other library for your product if you want to save your face.
Thank you for understanding.

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