Russo-Ukrainian war

Based on Wikipedia: Russo-Ukrainian war

A War That Began With Soldiers Without Insignia

On February 27, 2014, something strange happened on the Crimean Peninsula. Armed men in military uniforms—but with no flags, patches, or identifying marks—began appearing at government buildings, airports, and checkpoints. When asked who they were, they said nothing, or claimed to be local "self-defense" volunteers. The world would soon learn they were Russian special forces, but at that moment, their anonymity served a purpose: plausible deniability for an invasion already underway.

This was the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war, a conflict that has since become the largest in Europe since World War II.

The story of how Europe arrived at this moment is a story about broken promises, democratic revolutions, imperial nostalgia, and the dangerous gap between what powerful nations say and what they actually do.

The Agreements That Were Supposed to Prevent This

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine found itself in possession of the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal. These weren't weapons Ukraine had built—they were Soviet missiles that happened to be stationed on Ukrainian soil. The newly independent country faced a choice: keep the weapons as insurance against future aggression, or give them up in exchange for international guarantees.

Ukraine chose to give them up.

In 1994, Ukraine signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. In return, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, pledging to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity and independence. The message was clear: you don't need nuclear weapons because we will protect your borders.

Three years later, Russia signed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-Russia Founding Act. The document declared that "NATO and Russia do not consider each other as adversaries" and would work together. It explicitly acknowledged that NATO—the Western military alliance formed to counter Soviet expansion—"has expanded and will continue to expand."

In 1999, Russia went further. It signed the Charter for European Security, which affirmed the right of every nation to "choose or change its security arrangements" and join whatever military alliances it wished.

As late as 2005, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated publicly 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, and this will not worsen relations between our countries."

Every one of these commitments would eventually be broken.

The Orange Revolution and the View from Moscow

The 2004 Ukrainian presidential election should have been routine. It wasn't.

During the campaign, the pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko was mysteriously poisoned with TCDD dioxin—an industrial chemical that left his face permanently disfigured. He survived, but later accused Russia of involvement. His opponent, Viktor Yanukovych, was friendlier to Moscow and was declared the winner despite widespread reports of vote-rigging.

What happened next surprised everyone.

For two months, massive peaceful protests filled the streets of Kyiv. Ukrainians, wearing orange scarves and ribbons—the color of Yushchenko's campaign—demanded their votes be counted honestly. The Supreme Court of Ukraine annulled the fraudulent result. In the re-run election, Yushchenko won.

This became known as the Orange Revolution, and it terrified the Russian government.

Russian military officers viewed this event as something far more sinister than a domestic political dispute. They saw it as part of a pattern—a series of "color revolutions" in former Soviet states that they believed were orchestrated by the United States and European powers to undermine Russian influence. From Moscow's perspective, these weren't organic democratic movements. They were American operations wearing democratic disguises.

This interpretation would shape everything that followed.

The Bucharest Summit and Its Contradictory Message

In 2008, Ukraine and Georgia formally sought to begin the process of joining NATO. At the alliance's summit in Bucharest, Romania, the request created a split among NATO members.

Western European countries, particularly Germany and France, opposed offering "Membership Action Plans" to Ukraine and Georgia. They worried it would antagonize Russia. The United States pushed for acceptance. Neither side fully prevailed.

The result was a statement that managed to be simultaneously provocative and weak: NATO refused to begin the formal membership process, but also declared that "these countries will become members of NATO" at some unspecified future point.

This was the worst of both worlds. It angered Russia by suggesting eventual membership while denying Ukraine and Georgia any actual security guarantees in the meantime. Putin strongly opposed their membership bids regardless.

Just four months later, Russia invaded Georgia.

The Dress Rehearsal in Georgia

In August 2008, Russian forces rolled into Georgia and seized control of two breakaway regions: Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The war lasted only five days, but its message was clear: Russia was willing to use military force to achieve its political objectives, and the West would do little to stop it.

The United States was accused of "appeasement and naivete" over its tepid response. European leaders issued statements of concern but took no meaningful action. According to political scientist Samuel Ramani, this weak Western response—and the even weaker response to Russia's 2014 actions in Ukraine—contributed directly to Russia's later assessment that Western warnings against a full-scale invasion in 2022 were not serious.

Russia was learning that it could act with impunity.

Yanukovych Returns and the Euromaidan Erupts

Viktor Yanukovych, the candidate whose fraudulent victory had sparked the Orange Revolution, won the 2010 presidential election—this time legitimately. Ukraine was back under Russia-friendly leadership.

By early 2013, Ukraine's parliament had overwhelmingly approved a free trade and association agreement with the European Union. This wasn't about joining the EU or NATO—it was simply a trade deal. But for Russia, it represented Ukraine drifting permanently toward the West.

The Kremlin responded with economic pressure. Russia imposed embargoes on Ukrainian goods and threatened further sanctions. Kremlin adviser Sergey Glazyev went further, warning that Russia might "no longer acknowledge Ukraine's borders" if the agreement was signed.

This was not subtle diplomacy. It was a threat.

Under this pressure, President Yanukovych abruptly reversed course. In November 2013, he announced that Ukraine would not sign the EU agreement after all.

The protests began immediately.

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians gathered in Kyiv's central square, the Maidan, which means "Independence Square" in Ukrainian. The movement became known as "Euromaidan"—a combination of "European" and the square's name. But the protests quickly evolved beyond the EU agreement. Demonstrators demanded an end to government corruption, abuse of power, and human rights violations. When the government passed new laws restricting the right to protest, the crowds only grew larger.

The Revolution of Dignity

On January 28, 2014, Ukraine's government resigned. But Yanukovych remained in power, and the situation grew more violent.

On February 18-20, more than 100 protesters were killed in clashes with the Berkut—Ukraine's special riot police. Most of the dead were shot by snipers firing from rooftops. The images of ordinary citizens being gunned down in a European capital shocked the world.

On February 21, Yanukovych and opposition leaders signed an agreement that seemed to offer a path forward: an interim unity government, urgent constitutional changes, and early elections.

That night, Yanukovych secretly fled the capital without telling anyone—including his own parliament—where he was going.

The next day, Ukraine's parliament voted unanimously to remove him from office. This wasn't a narrow partisan vote: about 73 percent of all parliamentarians supported removal, including members of Yanukovych's own party and members of the pro-Russian Communist Party.

An interim government was established. Early presidential elections were scheduled.

And then Yanukovych reappeared—in Russia—claiming he was still the rightful president of Ukraine.

The Soldiers Without Flags

Within days, unmarked soldiers appeared in Crimea.

Crimea is a peninsula jutting into the Black Sea from Ukraine's southern coast. It had been part of Russia until 1954, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred it to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic—an administrative change that meant nothing when both Russia and Ukraine were part of the same country, but meant everything once the Soviet Union dissolved.

The population of Crimea was predominantly ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking. This gave Russia both a pretext and a potential base of support.

The unmarked soldiers—who Russia initially denied were Russian, before Putin later admitted they were special forces—moved with precision. They seized the Crimean parliament and government buildings. They set up checkpoints that cut the peninsula off from the rest of Ukraine. They surrounded Ukrainian military bases.

While armed men occupied the parliament building, the regional legislators were essentially held at gunpoint. They voted to dismiss the existing Crimean government and install a new one led by Sergey Aksyonov, whose political party had received only 4 percent of the vote in the last election. They announced a referendum on Crimea's future status.

Igor Girkin, a Russian rebel commander who used the nom de guerre "Strelkov," later admitted the reality plainly:

"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."

The referendum was held under military occupation. According to the official results—which no independent body considered credible—97 percent voted to join Russia. Within days, Russia declared Crimea annexed.

The War in the East

Crimea was only the beginning.

In late February 2014, protests by pro-Russian groups erupted in cities across eastern and southern Ukraine. Most were concentrated in the Donbas region—an industrial area comprising Donetsk Oblast and Luhansk Oblast, where "oblast" is the Ukrainian word for province or administrative region.

The demographics of the Donbas were complicated. According to the last census, the population was about 58 percent ethnic Ukrainian and 38 percent ethnic Russian. However, about 75 percent of people in Donetsk and 69 percent in Luhansk spoke Russian as their mother tongue. This wasn't unusual—most Ukrainian citizens spoke both languages—but it created a population that consumed Russian media and was susceptible to Russian narratives.

And Russian media was pushing a very specific narrative: that Ukraine's new government was an illegitimate "fascist junta" and that ethnic Russians were in imminent danger.

The protests initially seemed like organic local discontent. One of the grievances was genuine: just after the revolution, Ukraine's parliament had passed a bill revoking Russian's status as a regional official language. The bill was never enacted, but its passage inflamed tensions.

But the protests quickly transformed into something else entirely. Leaked emails and phone calls later revealed that the Russian state had funded the separatists and organized many of the protests through Kremlin advisers Vladislav Surkov and Sergey Glazyev. When Ukrainian authorities arrested local separatist leaders in early March, they were replaced by men with direct ties to Russian security services.

On April 6, 2014, hundreds of masked men stormed Security Service buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk, seizing weapons. Protesters occupied government buildings and raised Russian flags. They proclaimed two new "independent states": the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic.

The war in the Donbas had begun.

Why Russia Did This

Political scientist Paul D'Anieri identifies four Russian motivations for starting the war in 2014—the same motivations that would drive the full-scale invasion in 2022:

First, Russia wanted to regain control of Ukraine and transform it into a puppet state. Ukraine was the second-largest former Soviet republic by population and had deep historical, cultural, and economic ties to Russia. Losing Ukraine to Western influence was, for Russian nationalists, an intolerable humiliation.

Second, Russia saw itself as a great power entitled to a sphere of influence over former Soviet territories. This wasn't just about Ukraine—it was about Russia's fundamental conception of its place in the world. A Russia that couldn't control its neighbors wasn't really Russia.

Third, there was a genuine security dilemma. NATO had expanded eastward since the end of the Cold War, incorporating countries that had once been Soviet satellites or even parts of the Soviet Union itself. Russia perceived this as a threat, while the newly independent states of Eastern Europe—remembering decades of Soviet domination—saw NATO membership as their only guarantee against future Russian aggression. Each side's defensive measures looked offensive to the other.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, a democratic Ukraine posed a political threat to Russia's authoritarian system. If Ukrainians—culturally similar to Russians, with shared history and intertwined families—could build a functioning democracy with a free press and honest elections, what would that say about Russia's claim that such things were impossible in "our civilization"?

Putin could not allow a successful democratic Ukraine to exist on Russia's border.

The Frozen Conflict

Ukraine's military attempted to retake the Donbas, but Russia covertly supported the separatists with troops, tanks, and artillery. The International Criminal Court later judged that this was both a civil war and an international armed conflict involving Russia directly. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia had controlled the so-called "people's republics" from 2014 onward.

In February 2015, Russia and Ukraine signed the Minsk II agreements, a ceasefire deal brokered by France and Germany. The agreements were never fully implemented. The frontlines stabilized, and the conflict became what analysts called a "frozen war"—a static conflict resembling World War I trench warfare, where ceasefires were repeatedly broken but no territory changed hands.

For eight years, the war continued at low intensity. There were naval incidents. There were cyberattacks. Ukrainian soldiers died almost daily in sporadic shelling. But the world's attention moved elsewhere.

The Buildup

Beginning in 2021, satellite imagery revealed something alarming: a massive Russian military buildup along Ukraine's borders. Troops and equipment massed not only in Russia itself but also in Belarus, Ukraine's neighbor to the north.

Russian officials repeatedly denied plans to attack Ukraine. Western intelligence agencies said otherwise. President Biden publicly released intelligence assessments predicting an invasion, an unusual move intended to deny Russia the element of surprise and rally international opposition.

Putin's rhetoric grew increasingly ominous. He published a long essay questioning Ukraine's right to exist as an independent nation, claiming that Russians and Ukrainians were "one people" artificially divided. He demanded that Ukraine be permanently barred from joining NATO—ignoring that Ukraine had been officially neutral when the conflict began and had only revived its NATO aspirations because of Russian attacks.

In early 2022, Russia formally recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk "people's republics" as independent states. Russian forces surrounded Ukraine on three sides. The separatists stepped up their attacks.

February 24, 2022

At dawn, Putin announced a "special military operation" to "demilitarize and denazify" Ukraine. He claimed Russia had no plans to occupy the country.

Russian missiles struck cities across Ukraine. Tanks rolled across the border from multiple directions. Airborne troops attempted to seize airports near Kyiv. The full-scale invasion had begun.

The international response was swift. Countries around the world condemned the invasion. Western nations imposed unprecedented economic sanctions on Russia. Humanitarian and military aid began flowing to Ukraine.

But the most important response came from Ukrainians themselves.

Russian military planners had apparently expected a quick victory—a decapitation strike that would topple the government in days. Instead, they encountered fierce resistance. The attempt to seize Kyiv failed. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, offered evacuation by the United States, reportedly replied: "I need ammunition, not a ride."

By early April, Russia had abandoned its attempt to capture the capital and withdrawn from northern Ukraine. The war shifted to a grinding attritional conflict in the east and south.

The War Since Then

In August 2022, Ukrainian forces launched counteroffensives that liberated significant territory in the northeast and south. In September, Russia declared the annexation of four Ukrainian provinces it only partially controlled—a declaration that was internationally condemned as illegal.

Since then, the war has become a brutal stalemate. Russian offensives and Ukrainian counteroffensives have gained only small amounts of territory at enormous cost in lives. The conflict has evolved into something resembling the Western Front of World War I: fortified lines, artillery duels, and attacks measured in hundreds of meters gained or lost.

The violence has not remained within Ukraine's borders. Ukrainian and Ukrainian-backed forces have conducted attacks inside Russia itself, including a cross-border offensive into Russia's Kursk region in August 2024.

Russia has repeatedly carried out deliberate attacks on Ukrainian civilians far from any frontline—strikes on apartment buildings, hospitals, train stations, and power infrastructure. The United Nations Human Rights Office has documented severe human rights violations in Russian-occupied territories. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Putin and several other Russian officials for war crimes.

Russia has refused all calls for a ceasefire.

The Costs

The war has killed hundreds of thousands of people—soldiers and civilians on both sides. The exact numbers are uncertain and likely underreported.

It has created the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. Millions of Ukrainians have fled their homes, many to neighboring Poland, Romania, Moldova, and beyond. Cities have been reduced to rubble. The economic damage is incalculable.

For Russia, the invasion has been far more costly than Putin likely imagined. International sanctions have isolated the Russian economy. Thousands of young Russians have fled the country to avoid military conscription. The military has suffered enormous losses in personnel and equipment.

For Europe, the war has shattered assumptions about the post-Cold War order. The continent has rearmed. NATO has expanded to include Finland and Sweden. Energy relationships have been severed. The idea that economic interdependence would prevent major war has been proven wrong.

A War That Began Before It Began

When did this war actually start?

The Ukrainian government observes February 26 as the "Day of Resistance to the Occupation of Crimea," commemorating a 2014 rally by Crimean Tatars opposing Russian interference. Some scholars date the war to February 27, when Russian soldiers seized the Crimean parliament. Others point to February 20, the date Russia allegedly issued orders to prepare for the invasion—also the date engraved on Russian Crimea campaign medals.

Dutch military historian Floribert Baudet argues the war began even earlier, since "Russia had been subverting Ukrainian sovereignty long before" the 2014 annexation.

Ukrainian-American historian Serhii Plokhy puts it most directly: "I decline the temptation to identify the date of February 24, 2022, as its beginning, no matter the shock and drama of the all-out Russian assault on Ukraine, for the simple reason that the war began eight years earlier."

Perhaps the war began when the first unmarked soldiers appeared in Crimea. Perhaps it began when Russia decided that a democratic Ukraine was an existential threat. Perhaps it began when the West failed to respond meaningfully to the invasion of Georgia. Perhaps it began with broken promises about nuclear weapons, or a poisoned presidential candidate, or a president who fled in the night.

What is certain is that it has not ended.