The removal of gas by ram pressure stripping of galaxies is treated by a purely kinematic description. The solution has two asymptotic limits: if the duration of the ram pressure pulse exceeds the period of vertical oscillations perpendicular to the galactic plane, the commonly used quasi-static criterion of Gunn and Gott is obtained that uses the maximum ram pressure that the galaxy has experienced along its orbit. For shorter pulses, the outcome depends on the time-integrated ram pressure. This parameter pair fully describes the gas mass fraction that is stripped from a given galaxy. This approach closely reproduces results from smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations. We show that typical galaxies follow a very tight relation in this parameter space corresponding to a pressure pulse length of about 300 Myr. Thus, the Gunn and Gott criterion provides a good description for galaxies in larger clusters. Applying the analytic description to a sample of 232 Virgo galaxies from the GoldMine data base, we show that the intracluster medium provides indeed the ram pressures needed to explain the deficiencies. We also can distinguish current and past strippers, including objects whose stripping state was unknown.