Battle of Kyiv (2022)

Based on Wikipedia: Battle of Kyiv (2022)

In the early morning hours of February 24, 2022, Russian paratroopers descended from the sky over Kyiv with a mission that seemed almost absurdly ambitious: capture or kill the president of Ukraine within forty-eight hours and decapitate the entire government. Vladimir Putin's war planners had convinced themselves that Ukraine would collapse like a house of cards. They were catastrophically wrong.

What followed was one of the most consequential urban battles of the twenty-first century—a thirty-seven-day struggle that would reshape assumptions about modern warfare, expose the Russian military as far weaker than anyone imagined, and transform a comedian-turned-president into a symbol of democratic resistance.

The Opening Gambit

The Russian plan had a certain brutal elegance to it. Seize Hostomel Airport, a small airfield just northwest of the capital, and use it as a staging ground for reinforcements. Simultaneously, drop elite units directly into the city to hunt down President Volodymyr Zelensky and his family. With the leadership gone and the airport secured, the rest of Ukraine would simply give up.

It almost worked.

On that first day, Russian forces captured Hostomel. Paratroopers materialized in the streets of Kyiv itself, triggering chaotic street battles around the presidential compound. The compound was barricaded. Russian forces made two separate attempts to storm it. The United States reportedly offered to evacuate Zelensky to safety.

His response became famous: "I need ammunition, not a ride."

The City Prepares to Fight

What happened next defied the expectations of military analysts worldwide. Rather than fleeing or surrendering, Kyiv mobilized for urban warfare on a scale not seen in Europe since the Second World War.

Mayor Vitali Klitschko—a former heavyweight boxing champion who stood six feet seven inches tall—announced he would personally take up arms. The government distributed eighteen thousand firearms to ordinary citizens on the first day alone. By the second day, that number had swelled to twenty-five thousand assault rifles, along with ten million rounds of ammunition and an arsenal of rocket-propelled grenades and portable rocket launchers.

Zelensky urged residents to make Molotov cocktails—those improvised firebombs of gasoline and cloth that partisans have used against occupiers since the Spanish Civil War. The message was clear: every block would be contested, every street a potential ambush.

The Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces, essentially a reserve militia normally kept in mothballs, was activated en masse. Suddenly, accountants, teachers, and shop owners found themselves manning checkpoints and learning to identify Russian saboteurs.

Saboteurs in the Streets

The Russians had infiltrated small teams into the city ahead of the main assault. These saboteurs wore Ukrainian military uniforms, spoke Ukrainian, and carried Ukrainian identification. Their job was to sow chaos, identify targets, and guide the main assault forces to their objectives.

On February 25, three such saboteurs entered Obolon District, a residential area just ten kilometers north of the Verkhovna Rada—Ukraine's parliament building. Ukrainian forces killed all three. Throughout that day and night, gunfire erupted across multiple neighborhoods as these cat-and-mouse games played out in apartment blocks and metro stations.

Ukrainian officials would later claim they killed around sixty Russian infiltrators in these initial clashes. The exact number remains uncertain, but the message to Moscow was clear: the element of surprise had been lost, and the city was awake and dangerous.

The violence claimed victims on both sides. A Ukrainian fighter jet piloted by Colonel Oleksandr Oksanchenko was shot down over the city and crashed into an apartment building—a grim reminder that modern warfare brings destruction to civilian spaces without discrimination.

The Siege Begins

By February 26, the initial Russian thrust had stalled. Unable to decapitate the government or secure the city quickly, the invaders shifted to a more conventional approach: encirclement and bombardment.

Artillery shells began falling on Kyiv for the first time in over thirty minutes of sustained fire. Russian forces attacked a power plant in the northeastern neighborhood of Troieshchyna, apparently trying to plunge the capital into darkness. Ukrainian defenders drove them back. Heavy fighting erupted near the Kyiv Zoo in Shuliavka, where soldiers defended an army base on Prospect Peremohy—Victory Avenue, ironically named after the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany.

A strict curfew descended on the city: anyone on the streets between 5 PM and 8 AM would be presumed a saboteur. The British Ministry of Defence reported that Russian forces had advanced to within thirty-one kilometers of the city center.

But they could get no closer.

The Convoy That Went Nowhere

On February 28, satellite imagery revealed something remarkable: a Russian military convoy stretching sixty-four kilometers along the highway approaching Kyiv from the north. Sixty-four kilometers—roughly forty miles of tanks, armored vehicles, trucks, and artillery pieces lined up bumper to bumper, waiting.

Military observers initially saw this as a sign of overwhelming force about to crush Ukrainian resistance. Instead, it became a symbol of Russian dysfunction.

The convoy barely moved. Days passed. The British Ministry of Defence noted it had made "little discernable progress." Estonian intelligence estimated it would take at least two more days just to reach Kyiv's outer suburbs—and then the Russians would have to actually fight their way in.

What had happened? The answer lay in a combination of factors that would become themes of the entire war. Russian logistics were a shambles. Vehicles ran out of fuel. Tires—many of them cheap Chinese imports stored improperly—disintegrated on the cold roads. Ukrainian drones and artillery picked off exposed vehicles. Soldiers went hungry. Morale collapsed.

The mighty Russian war machine, which had terrified NATO planners for decades, was choking on its own incompetence.

The Defense in Depth

Ukrainian General Oleksandr Syrskyi, who commanded the defense, later explained the strategy that saved the capital. Rather than trying to stop the Russians at a single line, he organized the city's defense in concentric rings.

An outer circle of forces held positions in the suburbs. An inner ring defended downtown Kyiv itself. The idea was elegant: even if Russian forces broke through the outer defenses, they would find themselves in brutal urban combat while the inner ring remained intact. The fighting would stay in the suburbs, protecting the city center and the government.

On the night of February 24, Syrskyi divided Kyiv into sectors, each with its own commanding general, all reporting up through a clear chain of command. A week before the invasion—showing remarkable foresight—Ukrainian commanders had dispersed all of the region's aviation assets to different locations, preventing them from being destroyed in a single strike.

The defenders faced a stark reality: they had only one available tank brigade to defend a city of nearly three million people. The 72nd Mechanized Brigade would have to make every vehicle count.

Life Under Bombardment

As February turned to March, the battle settled into a grinding pattern. Russian forces couldn't break through, so they bombarded the city from a distance.

On March 1, the Russian Ministry of Defense issued a chilling evacuation notice: they intended to target Ukrainian transmission facilities around Kyiv, and civilians should flee the area. Hours later, a missile struck the Kyiv TV Tower, killing five people and severing all television broadcasts. A second missile, apparently aimed at the same target, struck the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center instead—the site where Nazi forces had murdered over thirty-three thousand Jews in just two days in 1941. The historical resonance was horrifying.

The same day, a Russian airstrike damaged an occupied maternity clinic. Shells fell on residential neighborhoods—Rusanivka, Kurenivka—and on the suburbs of Boyarka and Vyshneve.

More than fifteen thousand civilians took shelter in the city's metro system, spending nights in stations designed during the Cold War to double as nuclear bunkers. The New York Times described the scene: families huddled on platforms, children sleeping on blankets between the tracks, the rumble of trains replaced by the distant thunder of artillery.

Mayor Klitschko banned alcohol sales in the city—an attempt to keep the population clear-headed and ready to respond to attacks. He appealed to shop owners not to gouge prices on food and medicine. Nearly two million people—half of Kyiv's prewar population—fled the city as refugees.

The Turning Point

By early March, something had shifted. The Russian offensive, which had seemed so unstoppable in the first hours, was visibly failing.

On March 8, William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency—the CIA—offered a blunt assessment: "Instead of seizing Kyiv within the first two days of the campaign, which is what Putin's plan was premised upon, after nearly two full weeks they still have not been able to fully encircle the city."

Michael Kofman, a Ukrainian-born military analyst, was even more direct about Russian assumptions: "How could you take Kyiv in three days? The assumptions were ridiculous."

The Russians began adjusting, shifting from rapid armored thrusts to slower combined-arms operations. They established humanitarian corridors to evacuate civilians—partly out of propaganda concerns, partly to clear the battlefield for heavier weapons. But the window for a quick victory had closed.

On March 22, Ukrainian forces retook the town of Makariv, west of Kyiv. This wasn't just a local success; it was strategically decisive. With Makariv back in Ukrainian hands, any Russian attempt to fully encircle the capital became impossible. The siege had failed.

The Retreat

On March 29, Russia announced it was withdrawing forces from the Kyiv area. Russian officials framed this as a goodwill gesture to facilitate peace negotiations. No serious observer believed them.

The Pentagon was unequivocal. Taking Kyiv "was a key objective," a spokesperson stated. "They wanted Kyiv. And they didn't get it."

By April 2, Ukrainian authorities announced that the entire Kyiv region had been recaptured. Mayor Klitschko relaxed the alcohol ban. The city that had braced for annihilation began, tentatively, to breathe again.

The Institute for the Study of War summarized what had happened in its April 3 assessment: "The continued existence of an independent Ukrainian state with its capital in Kyiv is no longer in question at this time."

What the Russians Left Behind

As Ukrainian forces and journalists moved into the areas vacated by Russian troops, they discovered horrors. In the suburb of Bucha, they found streets littered with civilian bodies—some with their hands bound, some showing signs of torture, some apparently shot while riding bicycles.

The Bucha massacre, as it came to be known, triggered international outrage. Additional sanctions fell on Russia. Western nations pledged more military aid to Ukraine. What had begun as a battle for a capital city became a moral reckoning that would define the entire war.

Why Kyiv Held

Military historians will debate the Battle of Kyiv for decades, but some factors stand out clearly.

First, Ukrainian intelligence and preparation. By dispersing aircraft before the invasion and organizing the defense in depth, Ukrainian commanders showed they understood what was coming and had planned for it.

Second, Russian overconfidence. Putin's forces assumed they would face a demoralized population and a fleeing government. Instead, they found a president who refused to leave and citizens willing to fight with improvised weapons if necessary.

Third, Russian logistics failures. The mighty convoy that stretched for sixty kilometers was not a sign of strength but of weakness—an army that couldn't feed itself or fuel its vehicles, let alone fight a major battle.

Fourth, Western intelligence sharing. While NATO forces didn't fight directly, American and European intelligence agencies provided real-time information about Russian movements and plans. Ukraine knew what was coming and where.

Fifth, the nature of urban warfare. Cities devour armies. Even the most powerful military in the world—which Russia was not—struggles to take a defended urban area. The defender knows every street, every building, every shortcut. The attacker is always exposed, always uncertain, always one ambush away from disaster.

The Propaganda Aftermath

More than two years later, in June 2024, Vladimir Putin offered a remarkable reinterpretation of events. Russian troops near Kyiv in March 2022, he claimed, were never actually trying to take the city. "There was no political decision to storm the three-million-strong city," he said. "It was a coercive operation to establish peace."

This revisionism fooled no one who had watched the paratroopers hunt for Zelensky, or seen the convoy stalled on the highway, or counted the missiles falling on residential neighborhoods. But it revealed something important about how the Kremlin processes failure: not through acknowledgment and adjustment, but through denial and reinvention.

A Turning Point in History

The Battle of Kyiv lasted thirty-seven days. In that time, it reshaped assumptions about European security, exposed Russian military weakness to the world, and demonstrated that determined defenders with Western support could resist what had seemed like overwhelming force.

It did not end the war—far from it. As the related Substack article notes, the conflict shows no signs of ending anytime soon. Russian forces withdrew from Kyiv only to redeploy to eastern and southern Ukraine, where grinding warfare continues.

But the battle established something crucial: Ukraine would survive as an independent nation. Its capital would not fall. Its government would not flee. Its people would fight.

In the end, the Russian plan to take Kyiv in two days collapsed against a simple reality that military planners sometimes forget: wars are not won on maps or in spreadsheets. They are won by people who refuse to give up.

The people of Kyiv refused.