Russo-Ukrainian war

• 1. Introduction

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  On the morning of the 24th of February 2022, Russia's president Vladimir Putin announced what he called a “special military operation” to “demilitarise and denazify” Ukraine. He also claimed that Russia had no plans to occupy the country. Minutes later, missiles and airstrikes hit targets across Ukraine, Kyiv included. A large ground invasion along several fronts followed soon after. It opened the current phase of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II. Yet many scholars refuse to treat that morning as the beginning. They argue that the war started eight years earlier.

  So where did the war really begin? How did a stalemate of trenches and broken ceasefires turn into a full-scale invasion? And what has the fighting done to the people who live through it?

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• 2. Cold Peace

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  In 1994, Ukraine signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and agreed to give up the former Soviet nuclear weapons on its soil. The Soviet Union had dissolved in 1991, and Russia and Ukraine had kept ties since. In return, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. They promised to uphold Ukraine's territorial integrity and independence.

  Russia then put its name to several documents about European security. In 1997 it signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act, which stated that “NATO and Russia do not consider each other as adversaries.” In 1999 it signed the Charter for European Security, which affirmed each state's right “to choose or change its security arrangements.” In 2005, Putin himself said that if Ukraine and other former Soviet states wanted to join NATO, “we will respect their choice, because it is their sovereign right to decide their own defense policy.” He later said that Western powers had broken promises about expanding NATO eastward. No agreement or promise of that kind had actually been made.

  The 2004 Ukrainian presidential election shook this uneasy calm. During the campaign, the pro-Western opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with TCDD dioxin, and he later accused Russia of involvement. The more Russia-friendly Viktor Yanukovych was declared the winner, despite allegations of vote-rigging from election observers. Large peaceful protests followed over two months and became known as the Orange Revolution. Ukraine's Supreme Court annulled the result because of widespread electoral fraud, and Yushchenko won the re-run. Russia's government counts the Orange Revolution among the “colour revolutions” in former Soviet states. According to Anthony Cordesman, Russian military officers saw such uprisings as attempts by the United States and European countries to undermine Russia.

  At the 2008 Bucharest summit, Ukraine and Georgia sought to join NATO, and the alliance split. Western European countries opposed offering them Membership Action Plans, fearing it would unsettle Russia. NATO refused the plans but issued a statement that “these countries will become members of NATO” at some point. Putin strongly opposed both bids. In August 2008, Russia invaded Georgia and took control of the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Political scientist Paul D'Anieri notes that the United States “was accused of appeasement and naivete” over its reaction.

  D'Anieri lists four causes behind Russia's wars on Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. The first is a wish to regain control of Ukraine and turn it into a puppet regime. The second is Russia's view of itself as a great power entitled to a sphere of influence over former Soviet republics. The third is a European security dilemma, in which Russia saw NATO's growth as a threat while eastern European states wanted guarantees against Russian expansion. The fourth is that a democratic Ukraine looked like a political danger to Russia's authoritarian regime.

  Political scientist Samuel Ramani argues that the weak Western response in 2008, and again in 2014, encouraged further Russian aggression. It also led Russia to judge Western warnings before the 2022 invasion as not serious.

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• 3. Maidan to Crimea

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  In November 2013, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych suddenly withdrew from signing a free trade and association agreement with the European Union. Earlier that year, Ukraine's parliament had overwhelmingly approved finalising the deal. Yanukovych had won the 2010 presidential election, and now the Kremlin pressed him to reject the agreement. Russia imposed embargoes on Ukrainian goods and threatened further sanctions. Kremlin adviser Sergey Glazyev warned that Russia might stop acknowledging Ukraine's borders if the agreement was signed.

  The reversal sparked mass protests known as Euromaidan. Protesters opposed Russian interference, corruption, abuse of power and human rights violations, including new anti-protest laws. On the 28th of January 2014, Ukraine's government resigned. Between the 18th and the 20th of February, more than 100 protesters were killed in clashes with Berkut special riot police, and most were shot by the Berkut. On the 21st of February, Yanukovych and opposition leaders signed an agreement for an interim unity government, constitutional changes and early elections. That evening, Yanukovych secretly fled the capital and told parliament nothing about where he had gone. The next day, parliament voted to remove him. About 73% of its members backed the vote, including members of his own party and of the pro-Russian Communist Party. He resurfaced in Russia and declared that he was still the president.

  On the 27th of February 2014, soldiers wearing no insignia began to occupy Crimea. Russia first denied they were its troops and called them local “self-defense” units. Putin later admitted they were Russian special forces and said he had decided to “return” Crimea to Russia when the revolution happened. The soldiers seized the parliament and government buildings in Simferopol and set up checkpoints that cut the peninsula off from the rest of Ukraine. They also took airports and communications centres and blockaded Ukrainian military bases.

  Inside the occupied parliament, lawmakers dismissed the Crimean government and installed a pro-Russian one under Sergey Aksyonov, whose party had won only 4% of votes in the last election. Historian Andrew Wilson and journalist Luke Harding called it the “Crimean coup.” No journalists were allowed inside, and some members said votes had been cast in their names although they were absent. Igor Girkin, a rebel commander known as Strelkov, later admitted: “Rebels assembled lawmakers to corral them into the hall so that they could vote. I was one of the commanders of those rebels. I saw that from the inside.”

  On the 1st of March, Russia's Federation Council approved the use of armed force in Ukraine. Ukraine's prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk warned that Russian military intervention would be the beginning of war. Cyberattacks shut down government, news and social media websites. They also gave Russia access to the mobile phones of Ukrainian officials and members of parliament.

  The referendum took place under occupation on the 16th of March 2014. The Russian-installed authorities reported a result in favour of joining Russia, and Russia annexed Crimea on the 18th of March. It was the first time since World War II that a European country had annexed part of another. Ukraine ordered its remaining troops out on the 24th of March. In his Crimean speech, Putin said Crimea had always been Russian and claimed Russia wanted no other region of Ukraine. At that moment Ukraine was a neutral country under its constitution, and its new government was not seeking NATO membership.

  The annexation also brought an economic prize. Russia claimed an exclusive economic zone in the Black Sea around the peninsula, three times bigger than Crimea itself. In seizing Crimea, it took 80% of Ukraine's oil and gas deposits in the Black Sea. In 2012, Ukraine had granted a consortium including Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell the right to extract oil and gas there, and the Exxon-led group outbid the Russian company Lukoil. Forbes reporter Ariel Cohen wrote: “In one fell swoop, Russia ended Ukraine's offshore oil and gas operations and bolstered its own.” Elsewhere, about 80% of Ukraine's oil, natural gas and coal fields lie in the Donbas-Dnipro region. A study published in summer 2022 by the Canadian think tank SecDev put the energy reserves, metals and minerals Russia controlled in the Donbas at no less than $12.4 trillion.

  Scholars still argue over the exact start date. Ukraine's government declared the 26th of February the Day of Resistance to the Occupation of Crimea, marking a Crimean Tatar rally against Russian interference. Political scientist Andreas Umland prefers the 20th of February, the day Russia supposedly ordered preparations for the invasion and the date engraved on the Russian Crimea campaign medal. Historian Serhii Plokhy said in 2023 that he declined to date the war from the 24th of February 2022, because it began on the 27th of February 2014. Paul D'Anieri describes “a limited war in 2014, and then a much less limited war in 2022.”

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• 4. The Donbas War

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  On the 6th of April 2014, hundreds of masked men stormed Security Service buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk and seized weapons. Protesters then occupied the Donetsk regional government headquarters, raised the Russian flag and demanded a referendum on joining Russia. The next day, activists proclaimed the “Donetsk People's Republic” an independent state. On the 29th of April, armed pro-Russian activists occupied the Luhansk regional government headquarters and proclaimed the “Luhansk People's Republic.”

  The ground had been prepared for weeks. In the last census, the Donbas was about 58% ethnic Ukrainian and 38% ethnic Russian. Russian was the mother tongue of 75% of people in Donetsk Oblast and 69% in Luhansk Oblast. A survey from March to April 2014 found that 58% of Donbas respondents wanted to stay in a unitary or federal Ukraine, while 31% wanted to separate. On the 23rd of February, Ukraine's parliament had adopted a bill to revoke Russian's status as an official language. It was never enacted, but it angered some Russian speakers. The region mostly watched Russia-based media, which called Ukraine's new government an illegitimate “fascist junta.” Leaked e-mails and telephone calls later showed that the Russian state funded the separatists and organised their protests, mainly through Kremlin advisers Vladislav Surkov and Sergey Glazyev.

  On the 12th of April, a heavily armed unit of more than 50 militants wearing no insignia crossed the border from Russia and took over Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. The unit had been sent from occupied Crimea and was commanded by Igor Girkin, a former GRU colonel. He later told the newspaper Zavtra: “I'm the one who pulled the trigger of this war. If our unit hadn't crossed the border, everything would have fizzled out, like in Kharkiv or Odesa.”

  The first deaths came on the 13th of April, when Russian paramilitaries fired on Ukrainian officers outside Sloviansk and killed Gennady Bilichenko. Ukraine launched an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” on the 15th, but its forces were poorly prepared and the effort soon stalled. On the 17th, pro-Russian forces kidnapped local councillor Volodymyr Rybak in Horlivka after he tried to raise the Ukrainian flag again. His body was dumped in a river alongside those of the Maidan activists Yuri Popravko and Yuri Diakovskyi. All three had been tortured and mutilated.

  On the 17th of July 2014, Russian-controlled forces shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 civilians. By then Ukrainian forces had retaken Sloviansk, and by the end of July they were pushing into cities and isolating Donetsk. Girkin urged Russia to intervene directly and warned that losing the war on the territory Putin had named New Russia would threaten the Kremlin's power. According to Nikolai Mitrokhin's estimates, between 20,000 and 25,000 troops were fighting on the separatist side by mid-August, and only 40-45% were locals.

  On the 22nd of August 2014, Russia sent a “humanitarian convoy” of trucks across the border. Ukraine's security service called it a direct invasion. Two days later, Russian paratroopers backed by 250 armoured vehicles and artillery pieces occupied Amvrosiivka. A Russian column then crossed near Novoazovsk, and Russia's Defence Ministry said the soldiers had crossed “by accident.” A NATO officer said on the 4th of September that several thousand regular Russian troops were operating in Ukraine.

  The Minsk Protocol ceasefire of the 5th of September drew a line between Ukrainian and separatist-held territory. Fighting nevertheless continued around Donetsk International Airport. Ukrainian defenders besieged in the terminal and control tower earned the nickname “Cyborgs” for surviving repeated assaults in grim conditions. The siege lasted through winter and destroyed most of the airport. Rebels took it on the 21st of January 2015 with help from Russian special forces.

  The Minsk II package was agreed on the 12th of February 2015, with a ceasefire due to begin three days later. Russian-backed forces still attacked the town of Debaltseve. By the 18th, about 8,000 Ukrainian troops were almost surrounded and had to retreat under relentless fire with heavy casualties.

  After that, the war settled into trench warfare along the line of contact. Both sides built networks of trenches, bunkers and tunnels. Between 2014 and 2022 there were 29 ceasefires, each meant to last indefinitely, and none held for more than two weeks. The Battle of Avdiivka began on the 29th of January 2017, hours after a phone call between newly elected US president Donald Trump and Putin. It brought the deadliest clashes in over a year, with more than thirty people killed.

  In May 2019, newly elected president Volodymyr Zelenskyy took office promising to end the war in the Donbas. Around 200 prisoners were exchanged on the 29th of December 2019. Meanwhile, between 2019 and 2021, Russia issued over 650,000 internal Russian passports to Ukrainians living in the region.

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• 5. Invasion Day

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  In March 2021, Russia began a major military build-up near the Ukrainian border, and a second build-up followed from October in both Russia and Belarus. Russia said it was only holding exercises and repeatedly denied plans to attack. In early December 2021, the United States released intelligence on invasion plans, including satellite photographs of troops and equipment near the border. The intelligence also described a Russian list of key sites and individuals to be killed or neutralised. Later US reports accurately predicted the invasion plans.

  On the 9th of December 2021, Putin said that “Russophobia is a first step towards genocide.” The international community dismissed the claim as baseless. During the second build-up, Russia demanded that NATO end all activity in its eastern European member states and ban Ukraine and any former Soviet state from ever joining. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg replied that “Russia has no say” on whether Ukraine joins. NATO offered talks on communication, missile placements and military exercises if Russia withdrew its troops from Ukraine's borders. Russia did not withdraw.

  Along the Donbas line, observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe reported more than 90,000 ceasefire violations during 2021, mostly in Russian-controlled territory. From the 17th of February 2022, shelling by Russian-led militants rose sharply. Ukraine and its supporters saw an attempt to provoke a response that would hand Russia a pretext, and Zelenskyy said his military would not respond. On the 18th, the two separatist republics ordered emergency evacuations of civilians, though observers noted that full evacuations would take months. Russian state media aired videos nearly hourly that purported to show Ukrainian attacks on Russia, and evidence showed Russia was staging false flag attacks.

  At 22:35 (UTC+3) on the 21st of February, Putin announced that Russia would recognise the Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics. He sent troops into the Donbas on what Russia called a “peacekeeping mission.” In a speech that day he questioned the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state and repeated the inaccurate claim that Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood. He also incorrectly said that Vladimir Lenin had created Ukraine, and that in 1954 Nikita Khrushchev had given Crimea to it.

  On the 22nd, Russia's Federation Council unanimously authorised Putin to use military force outside Russia. Ukraine's parliament proclaimed a 30-day nationwide state of emergency and ordered the mobilisation of all reservists. Russia began evacuating its embassy in Kyiv. On the night of the 23rd, Zelenskyy gave a speech in Russian appealing to Russian citizens to prevent war. He rejected the claims about neo-Nazis and said he had no intention of attacking the Donbas.

  The invasion itself struck from a northern front out of Belarus toward Kyiv, a southern front out of Crimea, and a south-eastern front from Luhansk and Donetsk toward Kharkiv. Zelenskyy declared martial law and a general mobilisation of male citizens aged 18 to 60, who were banned from leaving the country. Around Kyiv, heavy Russian losses and strong Ukrainian resistance stalled the advance in March, and by April the troops had retreated.

  On the 8th of April, Russia placed its forces in southern and eastern Ukraine under General Aleksandr Dvornikov, and some units pulled from the north were redeployed to the Donbas. On the 19th, Russia launched a renewed attack across a front 300 miles long, stretching from Kharkiv to Donetsk and Luhansk. By the 13th of May, a Ukrainian counter-offensive had pushed Russian forces back near Kharkiv. By the 20th of May, Mariupol had fallen after a prolonged siege of the Azovstal steel works.

  The invasion created the largest refugee and humanitarian crisis in Europe since the Yugoslav Wars. The UN described it as the fastest-growing such crisis since World War II. More than a million people fled in the first week. The total stood above 7.4 million by the 24th of September, down from over eight million as some refugees returned.

  The invasion was condemned internationally as a war of aggression. A UN General Assembly resolution demanded a full Russian withdrawal, the International Court of Justice ordered Russia to suspend military operations, and the Council of Europe expelled Russia. Many countries imposed sanctions that affected the economies of Russia and the world, and sent humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine.

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• 6. Shifting Front Lines

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  In August 2022, Ukrainian forces launched a counteroffensive in the south, and in September they opened another in the northeast. The northeastern push recaptured most of Kharkiv Oblast. In November, Ukraine retook the city of Kherson, and Russian forces withdrew to the east bank of the Dnieper River.

  On the 30th of September 2022, Russia annexed four partially occupied Ukrainian oblasts. Most countries refused to recognise it and condemned it. Around the same time, Putin announced a conscription drawn from the 300,000 citizens with military training, and potentially from a pool of about 25 million eligible Russians. One-way tickets out of the country nearly or completely sold out. In September, he also signed a law punishing anyone who resists conscription with 10 years in prison. The measure prompted an international push to allow asylum for Russians fleeing the draft.

  By August 2023, nearly 500,000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers had been killed or wounded. A declassified US intelligence assessment said that by December 2023 Russia had lost 315,000 of the 360,000 troops in its pre-invasion ground force. It also said Russia had lost 2,200 of its 3,500 tanks. Afterwards, Russia was assessed to have stepped up its drone and missile attacks between December 2023 and May 2024, firing harder-to-hit weapons such as ballistic missiles. Ukrainian forces were seen to be low on ammunition, particularly for the Patriot systems that had been their best defence against such attacks. Since September 2022, offensives from both sides have gained only small amounts of territory.

  In August 2024, the Ukrainian Armed Forces crossed into Russia's Kursk Oblast. Ukrainian officials said they captured up to 350 square kilometres within days, and by the 19th of August they had taken hundreds of Russian soldiers prisoner. In late October 2024, the United States said it had seen evidence that North Korea had sent 3,000 soldiers to Russia. On the 28th of October, NATO chief Mark Rutte confirmed that North Korean troops were in Kursk Oblast, and the Pentagon reported that 10,000 had been sent to train in Russia and fight. On the 13th of November, the United States and South Korea confirmed that North Korean troops had begun combat against Ukrainian forces. On the 26th of April 2025, Russia officially confirmed their participation and noted their “significant assistance” in Kursk, which it claimed the same day to have retaken.

  The war also changed the diplomatic map. Russia and NATO had cooperated until 2014, and some analysts see the annexation of Crimea as the start of a Second Cold War. In December 2014, Ukraine's parliament voted to end the country's neutral status and later resumed its bid for eventual NATO membership. At the request of the Baltic states and Poland, NATO deployed a small tripwire force there for the first time. Political scientists Michael McFaul and Robert Person argue that Russia's occupation of Crimea and the Donbas since 2014 had already blocked Ukraine's NATO membership, which suggests Putin used the alliance as an excuse. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov calls the conflict a proxy war started by NATO. NATO says it is not at war with Russia and that its members support Ukraine's right to self-defense under the UN Charter.

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• 7. Civilians and Atrocities

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  In the city of Bucha, after Russian troops withdrew from areas north of Kyiv, investigators found overwhelming evidence of a massacre of civilians. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine documented the murder of at least 73 civilians there, mostly men but also women and children. More than 1,200 civilian bodies were found across the Kyiv region, some of them summarily executed. Reports described torture, mutilation, rape and looting, as well as the forced deportation of thousands of civilians, including children, to Russia, mainly from occupied Mariupol.

  The World Health Organization reported 1,422 attacks on Ukrainian medical infrastructure as of the 21st of December 2023. In November 2023, the UN said that more than 10,000 civilians had been killed during the invasion. About half of those deaths in the previous three months happened far behind the front lines, which the UN attributed to Russian long-range missiles and to explosions of abandoned ordnance. Many Russian soldiers confessed to raping, looting and torturing civilians and soldiers in intercepted phone calls. Those calls were published online and featured in a 2024 documentary film called Intercepted.

  The harm began long before 2022. From 2014 to 2021, there were more than 3,000 civilian casualties, most of them in 2014 and 2015. Both sides practised arbitrary detention in the early years. It decreased after 2016 in government-held areas but continued in separatist-held ones. Investigations into abuses by both sides made little progress, and Ukrainian forces have also been accused of war crimes, including mistreatment of detainees.

  Life in occupied territory carries its own pressures. The UN Human Rights Office reported in 2024 that Russia was committing severe violations, including arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, torture, crackdowns on protests, indoctrination of children and suppression of Ukrainian language and culture. Ukrainians are coerced into taking Russian passports. Those who refuse are denied healthcare and other rights and can be imprisoned as “foreign” citizens, while men who accept citizenship can be drafted to fight their own army. Artem Lysohor, head of the Luhansk Regional Military Administration, says that since May 2024 mothers giving birth in occupied Luhansk must prove that a parent holds Russian citizenship or they cannot leave the hospital with their child. Occupation officials are also developing a new textbook under Russian educational standards and enrolling children in “military-patriotic games.”

  In August 2024, UN official Danielle Bell said that 95% of Ukrainian prisoners of war had suffered Russian torture, including beatings, electric shocks and being stripped naked. The International Criminal Court opened an investigation into war crimes and issued arrest warrants for Putin and several other Russian officials.

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• 8. Weapons Beyond Weapons

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  In December 2015, Russian hackers attacked Ukraine's power grid, and they did so again in December 2016. The 2016 strike was the first successful cyberattack on a power grid. In June 2017 came a supply-chain attack that the United States called the largest known cyberattack. Ukrainian operations hit back in October 2016 with the Surkov leaks, which released 2,337 e-mails about Russian plans to seize Crimea and stir separatist unrest in the Donbas.

  The information war has been just as central. The Russian state claims that Ukraine's government and society are dominated by neo-Nazism, a charge widely rejected as part of a disinformation campaign to justify the invasion. Hundreds of historians and scholars of Nazism and the Holocaust signed a statement rejecting it as “factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive to the memory of millions of victims of Nazism.” Ukraine has a far-right fringe like most countries, but analysts say Russia's government and media greatly exaggerate its size and influence. Zelenskyy is Jewish. His grandfather served in the Soviet army against the Nazis, and three of his ancestors were killed in the Holocaust.

  Fake stories have been used to provoke outrage. In April 2014, one Russian news channel showed a man saying a fascist Ukrainian gang had attacked him, while another showed the same man claiming to be a Ukrainian funding far-right radicals. A third portrayed him as a neo-Nazi surgeon. In July 2014, Channel One Russia broadcast a false story about a 3-year-old boy supposedly crucified by Ukrainian nationalists. Amnesty International investigated claims of mass graves of ethnic Russians in 2014 and instead found isolated extrajudicial executions by both sides.

  In announcing the 2022 invasion, Putin baselessly claimed that Ukraine had been committing genocide in the Donbas for eight years. Ukraine took the question to the International Court of Justice, which said it had seen no evidence of genocide by Ukraine. About 14,300 people were killed on both sides in the Donbas war. According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, less than a quarter were civilians, and at least half of those died from mines and unexploded ordnance.

  At home, Russia's censorship agency Roskomnadzor ordered media to use only Russian state sources and to call the war a “special military operation.” On the 4th of March 2022, Putin signed a law punishing “fake news” about the Russian military with up to 15 years in prison, and some outlets stopped reporting on Ukraine. Opposition politician Alexei Navalny said the “monstrosity of lies” in state media was unimaginable, and so was its persuasiveness for those with no access to alternative information.

  Putin has called Russians and Ukrainians “one people” and claimed there is “no historical basis” for a separate Ukrainian nation. A poll by Rating in April 2022 found that 91% of Ukrainians reject that thesis. In 2020, Putin's adviser Vladislav Surkov said: “There is no Ukraine. There is Ukrainianism.” Former president Dmitry Medvedev wrote that Ukrainian “is NOT a language” and said Russia would seize what he called the “Russian cities” of Kyiv and Odesa. The Russian Orthodox Church has backed the war, and Patriarch Kirill issued a prayer for victory. In March 2024, the church's World Russian People's Council called the war a “holy war.” Not one of the roughly 400 Russian Orthodox bishops in Russia has spoken out against it.

  In June 2025, after months of peace negotiations, Putin declared: “I consider the Russian and Ukrainian people to be one nation. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours.” Russia has repeatedly refused calls for a ceasefire.

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