Russia's War in Ukraine

At 5:00 in the morning on 24 February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed his nation to announce a “special military operation” in Ukraine. Within minutes, missiles were falling on Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and dozens of other Ukrainian cities. Russian armoured columns crossed the border from Belarus in the north, from Russia in the east, and from the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula in the south. What the Kremlin expected to be a swift decapitation strike — days, perhaps weeks — became instead the largest and most devastating land war Europe had seen since 1945, a conflict that was still raging three years later and had fundamentally reshaped the continent’s security architecture, redefined the limits of American power, and exposed the fragility of the rules-based international order that the postwar decades had constructed.

The Road to February 2022¶

Understanding the 2022 invasion requires tracing a trajectory that runs through decades of post-Cold War mismanagement, mutual misunderstanding, and deliberate escalation. The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 left behind fifteen successor states and an enormous legacy of unresolved questions about borders, minorities, military bases, and the future of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Ukraine — the second-largest successor state, with a population of 52 million and an economy of significant potential — was at the centre of most of these questions.

Ukraine’s independence came with an extraordinary gesture of nuclear restraint: the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Kyiv surrendered the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal (inherited from the Soviet Union) in exchange for security assurances from Russia, the United States, and Britain. The assurances were soft — not treaty commitments, not Article 5 guarantees — and would prove worthless when tested two decades later. But in the optimistic atmosphere of the early 1990s, when the West was talking about a “peace dividend” and Russia seemed a genuine candidate for liberal democratic transformation, the Budapest Memorandum seemed adequate.

The relationship between Russia and the West deteriorated through the 2000s in ways that both sides have parsed according to their preferred narratives. Putin’s 2007 Munich Security Conference speech was a turning point in the public record: the Russian president openly denounced American “unipolar” dominance, NATO expansion, and the interventions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq as evidence of a Western order indifferent to Russian interests. The 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit, at which the alliance declared that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO” without offering a clear membership timeline, was received in Moscow as simultaneously threatening and contemptuous — a commitment to encirclement without the clarity that would allow Russia to plan around it.

Georgia 2008 was the first test. Russia’s brief war with Georgia demonstrated that the West would not intervene militarily to defend a country it had encouraged towards Western integration. The lesson Putin drew — contested by Western analysts but clearly operative in his subsequent behaviour — was that military force could revise the post-Soviet map without triggering a Western military response.

The 2014 Maidan revolution was the pivot point. Viktor Yanukovych’s flight from Kyiv and Russia’s almost immediate annexation of Crimea — accomplished through a hybrid operation combining unmarked Russian troops (“little green men”), a hastily organised referendum, and a fait accompli that the West declined to reverse by force — demonstrated that Putin was willing to use direct military action to prevent Ukraine’s westward drift. The subsequent support for separatist forces in the Donbas regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, where Russian-backed militants had seized government buildings and declared independence, created a frozen conflict that simmered for eight years.

The Minsk I and Minsk II agreements (2014 and 2015) were meant to resolve the Donbas conflict through a negotiated autonomy arrangement, but they satisfied no one. Ukraine resisted implementing political provisions it saw as Russian vetoes over its foreign policy; Russia treated the agreements as tools to maintain pressure rather than as a framework for genuine settlement. By 2021, the conflict in eastern Ukraine had killed some 14,000 people and displaced millions, while Ukrainian public opinion had shifted decisively towards NATO and EU membership — the precise outcome Moscow had sought to prevent through the Donbas intervention.

In December 2021, Russia escalated its demands publicly. Moscow delivered draft treaty proposals to Washington and NATO demanding legally binding guarantees that Ukraine would never join NATO, that the alliance would pull back its forces and infrastructure to 1997 positions, and that a list of other security measures be implemented. The proposals were less a serious negotiating platform than an ultimatum: they demanded concessions that no Western government could accept without destroying NATO’s credibility entirely. American and European diplomats engaged in consultations through January 2022 while simultaneously warning publicly that Russia appeared to be preparing for invasion. Putin interpreted Western engagement as weakness and Western warnings as bluff.

The Invasion and the Failed Kyiv Offensive¶

The opening phase of Russia’s invasion was premised on a catastrophic intelligence failure — or rather, on the Kremlin’s substitution of political wishful thinking for intelligence assessment. Putin and his inner circle appear to have genuinely believed that Ukrainian national identity was fragile, that the government in Kyiv would collapse quickly, that large segments of the Ukrainian population would welcome Russian forces as liberators, and that the United States and European Union would be too divided to mount an effective response.

Every one of these assumptions was wrong.

The northern thrust towards Kyiv, involving Russian forces crossing from Belarus and advancing through Chernobyl, was the most dramatic early failure. Russian armoured columns advanced rapidly along highways, bypassing Ukrainian resistance in a way that initially suggested overwhelming momentum. But the columns were logistically catastrophic: fuel trucks did not follow the lead elements; ammunition resupply broke down; vehicles ran out of petrol and were abandoned on country roads. Ukrainian territorial defence forces, armed with shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles (Javelin and NLAW systems supplied by Western countries in the weeks before the invasion), inflicted severe losses on Russian armour attempting to operate without adequate infantry or fire support. The famed 40-mile convoy north of Kyiv — visible on satellite imagery for the world to see — sat immobile for weeks as logistics collapsed.

Russian forces attempted to seize Hostomel Airport near Kyiv in the opening hours, landing special forces by helicopter in what was meant to be the first step of a coup-de-main operation that would allow heavier forces to fly in directly to the capital. The operation failed: Ukrainian forces retook the airport, destroying the transport aircraft that were meant to follow. Without Hostomel, the swift decapitation of the Ukrainian government became impossible.

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to remain in Kyiv — his filmed selfie walking the streets of the capital became one of the war’s iconic images — denied Russia the propaganda of a fleeing government and galvanised both domestic and international resistance. The Americans had reportedly offered to evacuate him; his reported response — “I need ammunition, not a ride” — captured a moment when Ukrainian defiance crystallised into something extraordinary. By late March 2022, Russia announced a withdrawal from the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions, framing the pullback as a “gesture of goodwill” towards negotiations. It was, in reality, a military defeat — the first of the war.

What Russian forces left behind in areas they had occupied around Kyiv — Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel — shocked the world. Images of civilian bodies in streets, evidence of summary executions, mass graves, and systematic sexual violence produced a wave of international outrage that collapsed whatever diplomatic space had remained for a negotiated settlement. The Bucha massacre effectively ended the brief flurry of Ukrainian-Russian negotiations that had taken place in Istanbul, and it hardened Western resolve to supply Ukraine with heavier weapons.

The War of Attrition: Donbas and Beyond¶

With the Kyiv offensive defeated, Russia restructured its forces and pivoted to the Donbas, where it had more coherent objectives — completing the seizure of Donetsk and Luhansk regions — and where its greater artillery mass could be applied more effectively. The character of the war shifted dramatically: from the rapid manoeuvre warfare of the opening weeks to an attritional grinding that more closely resembled the First World War than any conflict in recent memory.

Mariupol, the strategic port city on the Sea of Azov, became the symbol of Ukrainian resistance in this phase. The city fell to Russian forces in May 2022 after a siege of nearly three months, during which the Azov steel plant became the last redoubt of Ukrainian fighters and a transfixing focal point for international attention. The fall of Mariupol gave Russia a land corridor connecting the Donbas to Crimea — one of its primary strategic objectives — but the cost in Russian lives and the time consumed eliminated any prospect of a rapid decisive campaign elsewhere.

The Donbas fighting through the summer of 2022 consumed both sides at enormous rates. Russian forces, using massed artillery — sometimes firing tens of thousands of shells per day — systematically destroyed Ukrainian defensive positions town by town. The battles for Severodonetsk, Lysychansk, and eventually Bakhmut became synonymous with an attritional logic in which territorial gains were measured in metres and paid for in thousands of lives. Ukrainian forces, often outgunned in artillery, relied on Western-supplied rocket artillery — particularly the American HIMARS multiple-launch rocket systems, which arrived in June 2022 and immediately demonstrated their capacity to strike Russian command posts, ammunition depots, and logistics nodes far behind the front line — to degrade Russian fire superiority.

The Counteroffensives of 2022¶

Two Ukrainian counteroffensives in the autumn of 2022 transformed the war’s strategic picture and demonstrated that Russia’s military capacity was far below what its paper order of battle suggested.

The Kharkiv counteroffensive in September 2022 was the more spectacular. Ukrainian forces, attacking in the Kharkiv region in the northeast, broke through Russian defensive lines with startling speed, liberating more than 6,000 square kilometres in a matter of days. Russian forces collapsed in some sectors, abandoning equipment, ammunition, and — crucially — documents that revealed the extent of Russian military dysfunction. The speed of the advance suggested that Russian forces in the region were severely undermanned and that morale had shattered in ways that paper numbers did not capture.

The Kherson counteroffensive in October-November 2022 was slower but equally significant in strategic terms. Kherson city — the only Ukrainian regional capital Russia had captured in the invasion — sits on the right bank of the Dnipro River. Ukrainian forces isolated it by systematically destroying the bridges and pontoon crossings over which Russian forces received supply, rendering the right-bank position logistically untenable. In November 2022, Russian forces withdrew across the river, abandoning Kherson in what was both a military defeat and a propaganda catastrophe for Moscow. Zelensky visited the liberated city in scenes that became one of the war’s most powerful images.

Putin’s response to the military setbacks included several escalatory steps. In September 2022, he announced the partial mobilisation of 300,000 reservists — a politically significant step that had previously been avoided — and the formal annexation of four Ukrainian regions (Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson) through hastily organised referendums that were widely condemned as fraudulent. The annexation declarations, which claimed regions that Russia did not fully control, created a political trap: they made any future withdrawal from Ukrainian territory an implicit violation of Russian constitutional order.

Western Support and Its Limits¶

The Western response to the invasion was more decisive and more sustained than most observers had expected in the pre-war period — and more constrained than Ukrainian officials consistently requested. The broad architecture of Western support rested on three pillars: military assistance, economic sanctions, and political solidarity expressed through NATO cohesion and EU unity.

Military assistance escalated in steps that reflected a consistent pattern of Western caution: each category of weapons was initially refused on grounds of escalation risk, then eventually supplied after Ukrainian pressure and demonstrated Russian restraint in escalatory response. The HIMARS that had been deemed too escalatory in the spring were supplied in June; the tanks (Leopard 2, M1 Abrams) that were refused through 2022 were approved in January 2023; the F-16 fighter jets that seemed unthinkable in early 2023 were committed by summer and began arriving in Ukraine in 2024. The pattern suggested that Western escalation thresholds were driven more by domestic politics and institutional caution than by serious analysis of Russian red lines.

The sanctions regime imposed on Russia was the most extensive ever applied to a major economy. It targeted Russian central bank reserves held abroad (approximately $300 billion was frozen), cut major Russian banks from the SWIFT financial messaging system, imposed export controls on technology with military applications, and closed European and American airspace to Russian aircraft. Energy sanctions were more complicated: Europe’s deep dependence on Russian natural gas meant that a full energy embargo was economically devastating in ways that European governments were initially unwilling to accept. The process of reducing European energy dependence on Russia — accomplished through emergency LNG imports (primarily from the United States), demand reduction, and accelerated renewable buildout — took much of 2022, imposing significant economic costs on European countries even as it ultimately succeeded in making the continent less vulnerable.

The sanctions’ effects on Russia were real but less catastrophic than Western optimists predicted. Russia avoided the financial collapse that some forecast in 2022, partly through capital controls, partly through its energy revenues from customers who did not join the sanctions regime, and partly through the resilience of an economy that had spent years preparing for exactly this scenario. Russian trade reoriented towards Asia: China, India, and Turkey became crucial conduits for goods and technology that the West sought to deny. Russian GDP contracted by around 2 percent in 2022 — significant, but not the 10-15 percent predicted in worst-case Western analyses — before recovering in 2023 as war spending pumped demand into the economy.

The Nuclear Dimension¶

Nuclear threats became a regular feature of Russian strategic communication almost from the invasion’s opening days. Putin’s first public statement on 24 February included a direct reference to Russia’s nuclear forces; subsequent statements by senior Russian officials and state media commentators periodically suggested that Russia might use tactical nuclear weapons if it faced decisive military defeat. The threats served a dual purpose: deterring Western intervention (no Western leader was willing to risk a nuclear exchange) and constraining Ukrainian operational choices.

The Biden administration took the nuclear threats seriously and managed escalation with notable caution. American officials repeatedly declined to supply weapons that could strike Russian territory, insisted on restrictions on how US-supplied weapons could be used, and refused to provide reconnaissance support for certain offensive operations. This escalation management was criticised by Ukrainian officials and some Western analysts as unnecessarily constraining Ukrainian effectiveness, but it reflected a genuine calculation that provoking Russian nuclear use — even a demonstrative detonation — would create unpredictable and potentially catastrophic consequences.

By mid-2023, the pattern suggested that Russia’s nuclear threats functioned primarily as coercive rhetoric rather than genuine operational planning. Russian nuclear doctrine allowed for nuclear use in scenarios of existential threat to the Russian state; losing the war in Ukraine, while serious, did not obviously meet that threshold. But the uncertainty was genuine, and it meaningfully shaped the war’s conduct.

China, the Global South, and the Fracturing of International Order¶

China’s position in the Ukraine war evolved from cautious neutrality towards something closer to active support for Russian economic resilience, without crossing the threshold of military assistance that would trigger Western sanctions on Chinese companies. Chinese-Russian trade expanded enormously: China became Russia’s largest trading partner, its primary source of consumer electronics and manufactured goods, and a crucial buyer of the Russian energy that Europe no longer wanted. Chinese banks that remained outside SWIFT processed transactions that Western banks had refused. Chinese satellite imagery was reportedly shared with Russian forces.

Beijing’s “no limits” partnership declaration with Moscow in February 2022, just weeks before the invasion, created a presumption of Chinese complicity that Chinese officials spent the subsequent months attempting to manage. China voted to abstain rather than condemn Russia at the UN General Assembly, positioning itself as a neutral party. Chinese diplomats promoted a vague peace framework that accepted Russian territorial gains — a position Ukraine found unacceptable. The relationship served Chinese interests: Russia was weakened, dependent, and increasingly amenable to Chinese terms on energy pricing and strategic cooperation, while the war distracted American attention and resources from the Pacific.

The “Global South’s” response demonstrated the limits of the Western narrative about a rules-based international order. Countries across Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America declined to join sanctions regimes and maintained commercial relationships with Russia. India, the world’s largest democracy and a crucial strategic partner for the West, dramatically increased its purchases of discounted Russian oil. The UN General Assembly votes condemning Russia attracted large majorities among member states, but the countries that abstained or voted against represented more than half the world’s population. The contrast between formal condemnation and practical accommodation illustrated the gap between Western moral frameworks and the interests of countries that had not been consulted when those frameworks were constructed.

NATO Enlargement: The Strategic Irony¶

Perhaps the greatest strategic irony of Russia’s invasion was that it produced precisely the outcome Putin had launched the war to prevent. NATO enlargement, which had proceeded in fits and starts since the 1990s and had been politically contested for years, accelerated dramatically in response to the invasion. Finland — which had maintained strict neutrality for eight decades and shared a 1,340-kilometre border with Russia — joined NATO in April 2023, adding to the alliance a significant military capacity and dramatically extending its border with Russia. Sweden ended its even longer tradition of neutrality and joined in March 2024.

The invasion also triggered a surge in European defence spending that had been resisted for years. Germany announced the Zeitenwende — a historic “turning point” — with a special €100 billion defence fund and a commitment to reach NATO’s 2 percent of GDP spending target. Poland, already significantly increasing its defence spending before 2022, accelerated its programme to build one of the largest armies in Europe. The Baltic states requested and received permanent NATO combat units. European defence industrial production — long atrophied from post-Cold War cuts — began the painful process of expansion.

Whether these changes represented a durable transformation of European security culture or a temporary response to an emergency remained to be seen. European defence spending had surged after previous crises and then declined as memories faded. But the presence of Russian forces conducting daily attacks on Ukrainian cities, the stream of Ukrainian refugees across Europe, and the practical experience of weapons shortages created by the effort to supply Ukraine all argued for the durability of the change.

2024-2025: Pressure for Negotiation¶

The political landscape of the conflict shifted significantly with Donald Trump’s return to the American presidency in January 2025. Trump had throughout his campaign expressed scepticism about continued American support for Ukraine and sympathy for a rapid negotiated end to the conflict. His administration entered office in January 2025 signalling a desire for a ceasefire negotiation, pressuring Ukraine to accept terms that would include Russian retention of occupied territories.

The pressure created a crisis in the transatlantic relationship: European governments, which had followed American leadership throughout the war, faced the prospect of continuing significant military and financial support for Ukraine without American backing — a burden they were not fully prepared to assume. Emergency European defence consultations produced commitments to increase support and discussions of a potential European security guarantee for Ukraine, but the fundamental question of whether Europe could substitute for American strategic leadership remained unresolved.

By early 2026, the front lines had changed little from late 2023, with Russia holding approximately 20 percent of Ukrainian territory. A ceasefire remained possible but contested: any arrangement that locked in Russian territorial gains would be seen in Kyiv as defeat and by many European governments as a precedent for future Russian aggression elsewhere on the continent. The fundamental tension — between Ukraine’s insistence on territorial integrity and the exhaustion that made indefinite support politically difficult in Western capitals — remained the war’s central unresolved dynamic.

Strategic Legacy¶

The Ukraine war’s implications will be debated for decades. At its most fundamental level, it demonstrated that major-power conventional warfare — the scenario that Western defence establishments had spent the post-Cold War decades progressively discounting — remained a real possibility in Europe. The military lessons — the importance of artillery ammunition stocks, the vulnerability of armoured vehicles to cheap drones, the decisive value of real-time intelligence — reshaped defence procurement programmes across NATO and beyond.

The war also demonstrated the limits of economic coercion: sanctions severe enough to impose real costs on Russia were not sufficient to change Russian behaviour, partly because Russia had prepared for exactly this scenario and partly because much of the world declined to participate. The dollar-based financial system remained powerful but not omnipotent. And it demonstrated that even a conventionally inferior military could resist a superior invader if armed, motivated, and integrated into a system of Western support — a lesson with obvious implications for potential conflicts elsewhere.

For Ukraine itself, the war created a national identity forged in resistance. The political scientist Samuel Huntington had classified Ukraine as a “cleft country” — divided between its Ukrainian-speaking west and Russian-speaking east — and had predicted it might be torn apart. The invasion instead appeared to accelerate national consolidation: Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Kharkiv and Odessa proved as resistant to Russian forces as Ukrainian-speakers in Lviv. The war did not merely test Ukrainian nationhood; it created it.

Sources & Further Reading¶

• “The Russo-Ukrainian War” by Serhii Plokhy (2023) — A leading historian of Ukraine and Russia provides the essential historical context for the invasion, tracing the conflict’s roots from 1991 to 2022.

• “Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West” by Catherine Belton (2020) — Investigative reporting on the Putin system’s origins and logic, essential for understanding the decision-making environment that produced the invasion.

• “The Shortest History of Russia” by Mark Galeotti (2023) — A compact but rich historical overview that situates the Ukraine war within the longer arc of Russian imperial ambition and post-Soviet identity crisis.

• “War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century” by David Patrikarakos (2017) — Examines how information warfare and narrative competition have become central to modern conflict, a dynamic the Ukraine war exemplified more dramatically than any previous case.

• “The Return of Great Power Competition” edited by Ashley Tellis (2023) — Essays from leading strategic analysts examining what the Ukraine war reveals about the changing structure of international competition between major powers.