short essay on russia and ukraine war

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Russia - Ukraine Conflict [UPSC Notes]

Latest Developments in Russia – Ukraine Conflict

On Feb 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine . Know more about this in the link given. This page gives a background of the issue with an analysis of the developments before the invasion.

The tensions on Ukraine’s border with Russia are at their highest in years. Fearing a potential invasion by Russia, the US and NATO are stepping up support for Ukraine. In this article, we explain the reason for tensions between Russia and Ukraine, the latest developments, the stand of various stakeholders in the region, and the way forward for the UPSC exam IR segment.

Russia – Ukraine Conflict Background

Post the disintegration of the Soviet Union , Ukraine gained independence in 1991.

Ukraine was a member of the Soviet Union until 1991 when it disintegrated, and Russia has tried to maintain the country in its orbit since then.
In 2014, a separatist insurgency started in Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland, Donetsk Basin, also known as,
Russia further gained a maritime advantage in the region due to its invasion and annexation of Crimea.
As a result, both the US and the EU have pledged to safeguard the integrity of Ukraine’s borders.

Image Source: Al Jazeera

Importance of Ukraine to Russia

Ukraine and Russia have shared cultural and linguistic ties for hundreds of years.
Ukraine was the most powerful country in the Soviet Union after Russia.
Ukraine has been a hub for commercial industries, factories and defence manufacturing.
Ukraine also provides Russia with access to the Black Sea and crucial connectivity to the Mediterranean Sea.

Reasons for Russian Aggression

The chief reasons for Russian aggression are discussed below.

Russia, considering the economic significance of Ukraine, sought Ukraine’s membership in the Eurasian Economic Community (EAEC), which is a free trade agreement that came into being in 2015.
With its huge market and advanced agriculture and industrial output, Ukraine was supposed to play an important role. But Ukraine refused to join the agreement.
Russia claims that the eastward expansion by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which they call “ enlargement ”, has threatened Russia’s interests and has asked for written security guarantees from NATO.
NATO, led by the U.S., has planned to install missile defence systems in eastern Europe in countries like Poland and the Czech Republic to counter Russia’s intercontinental-range missiles.

, and that share borders with Russia. , , and , all of them were a part of the former Soviet-led .

Russia – Ukraine Latest Developments

Russia has been indulging in military build-up along its border with Ukraine, an aspiring NATO member. Russia has stated that its troop deployment is in response to NATO’s steady eastward expansion. Russia argues that its moves are aimed at protecting its own security considerations.

Russia has mobilised around 1,00,000 troops on its border with Ukraine.
Russia seeks assurance from the US that Ukraine shall not be inducted into NATO.
This has resulted in tensions between Russia and the West which have been supportive of Ukraine. The U.S. has assured Ukraine that it will “respond decisively” in case of an invasion by Russia.

Image Source: The Hindu

Russia’s demands

Russia has demanded a ban on further expansion of NATO that includes countries like Ukraine and Georgia that share Russia’s borders.
Russia asked NATO to pull back its military deployments to the 1990s level and prohibit the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in the bordering areas.
Further, Russia asked NATO to curb its military cooperation with Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.

The response from the West

The U.S. has ruled out changing NATO’s “open-door policy” which means, NATO would continue to induct more members.
The U.S. also says it would continue to offer training and weapons to Ukraine.
The U.S. is said to be open to a discussion regarding missile deployment and a mutual reduction in military exercises in Eastern Europe.
Germany has also warned Russia that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline would be stopped if Russia were to invade Ukraine.
The U.S. threatens Russia by imposing new economic sanctions in case of attempts of invasion against Ukraine.

Russia – Ukraine Crisis: Implications on India

What implications does the Russia – Ukraine crisis have on India? This is discussed in this section.

Maintaining strong relations with Russia serves India’s national interests. India has to retain a strong strategic alliance with Russia as a result, India cannot join any Western strategy aimed at isolating Russia.
There is a possibility of CAATSA sanctions on India by the U.S. as a result of the S-400
A pact between the US and Russia might affect Russia’s relations with China. This might allow India to expand on its efforts to re-establish ties with Russia.
The issue with Ukraine is that the world is becoming increasingly economically and geopolitically interconnected. Any improvement in Russia-China ties has ramifications for India.
There is also an impact on the strong Indian diaspora present in the region, threatening the lives of thousands of Indian students.

UPSC Questions related to Russia – Ukraine Conflict

What is the relation between russia and ukraine.

Ukraine was a member of the Soviet Union until its disintegration in 1991. Post the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Ukraine gained independence in 1991 and Russia has tried to maintain its influence on the country in its orbit since then.

Why did Ukraine not join NATO?

Although Ukraine has no membership offer from NATO, it has been closer to the alliance since its establishment in 1997. Plans for NATO membership were dropped by Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych, who preferred to keep the country non-aligned.

Is Crimea a part of Russia?

The majority of the world considers Crimea to be a part of Ukraine. Geographically, it is a peninsula in the Black Sea that has been battled over for ages due to its strategic importance. In 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea which was a part of Ukraine due to its declining influence over the region and emerging insecurities.

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Ukraine: Conflict at the Crossroads of Europe and Russia

A protester sits on a monument in Kyiv during clashes with riot police in February 2014.

Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has set alight the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II.
A former Soviet republic, Ukraine had deep cultural, economic, and political bonds with Russia, but the war could irreparably harm their relations.
Some experts view the Russia-Ukraine war as a manifestation of renewed geopolitical rivalry between major world powers.

Introduction

Ukraine has long played an important, yet sometimes overlooked, role in the global security order. Today, the country is on the front lines of a renewed great-power rivalry that many analysts say will dominate international relations in the decades ahead.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 marked a dramatic escalation of the eight-year-old conflict that began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and signified a historic turning point for European security. A year after the fighting began, many defense and foreign policy analysts cast the war as a major strategic blunder by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)
United States
Military Operations

Many observers see little prospect for a diplomatic resolution in the months ahead and instead acknowledge the potential for a dangerous escalation, which could include Russia’s use of a nuclear weapon. The war has hastened Ukraine’s push to join Western political blocs, including the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Why is Ukraine a geopolitical flash point?

Ukraine was a cornerstone of the Soviet Union, the archrival of the United States during the Cold War. Behind only Russia, it was the second-most-populous and -powerful of the fifteen Soviet republics, home to much of the union’s agricultural production, defense industries, and military, including the Black Sea Fleet and some of the nuclear arsenal. Ukraine was so vital to the union that its decision to sever ties in 1991 proved to be a coup de grâce for the ailing superpower. In its three decades of independence, Ukraine has sought to forge its own path as a sovereign state while looking to align more closely with Western institutions, including the EU and NATO. However, Kyiv struggled to balance its foreign relations and to bridge deep internal divisions . A more nationalist, Ukrainian-speaking population in western parts of the country generally supported greater integration with Europe, while a mostly Russian-speaking community in the east favored closer ties with Russia.

Ukraine became a battleground in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and began arming and abetting separatists in the Donbas region in the country’s southeast. Russia’s seizure of Crimea was the first time since World War II that a European state annexed the territory of another. More than fourteen thousand people died in the fighting in the Donbas between 2014 and 2021, the bloodiest conflict in Europe since the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. The hostilities marked a clear shift in the global security environment from a unipolar period of U.S. dominance to one defined by renewed competition between great powers [PDF].

In February 2022, Russia embarked on a full-scale invasion of Ukraine with the aim of toppling the Western-aligned government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

What are Russia’s broad interests in Ukraine?

Russia has deep cultural, economic, and political bonds with Ukraine, and in many ways Ukraine is central to Russia’s identity and vision for itself in the world.

Family ties . Russia and Ukraine have strong familial bonds that go back centuries. Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, is sometimes referred to as “the mother of Russian cities,” on par in terms of cultural influence with Moscow and St. Petersburg. It was in Kyiv in the eighth and ninth centuries that Christianity was brought from Byzantium to the Slavic peoples. And it was Christianity that served as the anchor for Kievan Rus, the early Slavic state from which modern Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians draw their lineage.

Russian diaspora . Approximately eight million ethnic Russians were living in Ukraine as of 2001, according to a census taken that year, mostly in the south and east. Moscow claimed a duty to protect these people as a pretext for its actions in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014.

Superpower image . After the Soviet collapse, many Russian politicians viewed the divorce with Ukraine as a mistake of history and a threat to Russia’s standing as a great power. Losing a permanent hold on Ukraine, and letting it fall into the Western orbit, would be seen by many as a major blow to Russia’s international prestige. In 2022, Putin cast the escalating war with Ukraine as a part of a broader struggle against Western powers he says are intent on destroying Russia.

Crimea . Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 to strengthen the “brotherly ties between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples.” However, since the fall of the union, many Russian nationalists in both Russia and Crimea longed for a return of the peninsula. The city of Sevastopol is home port for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the dominant maritime force in the region.

Trade . Russia was for a long time Ukraine’s largest trading partner , although this link withered dramatically in recent years. China eventually surpassed Russia in trade with Ukraine. Prior to its invasion of Crimea, Russia had hoped to pull Ukraine into its single market, the Eurasian Economic Union, which today includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.

Energy . Moscow relied on Ukrainian pipelines to pump its gas to customers in Central and Eastern Europe for decades, and it paid Kyiv billions of dollars per year in transit fees. The flow of Russian gas through Ukraine continued in early 2023 despite the hostilities between the two countries, but volumes were reduced and the pipelines remained in serious jeopardy.

Political sway . Russia was keen to preserve its political influence in Ukraine and throughout the former Soviet Union, particularly after its preferred candidate for Ukrainian president in 2004, Viktor Yanukovych, lost to a reformist competitor as part of the Orange Revolution popular movement. This shock to Russia’s interests in Ukraine came after a similar electoral defeat for the Kremlin in Georgia in 2003, known as the Rose Revolution, and was followed by another—the Tulip Revolution—in Kyrgyzstan in 2005. Yanukovych later became president of Ukraine, in 2010, amid voter discontent with the Orange government.

What triggered Russia’s moves in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014?

It was Ukraine’s ties with the EU that brought tensions to a head with Russia in 2013–14. In late 2013, President Yanukovych, acting under pressure from his supporters in Moscow, scrapped plans to formalize a closer economic relationship with the EU. Russia had at the same time been pressing Ukraine to join the not-yet-formed EAEU. Many Ukrainians perceived Yanukovych’s decision as a betrayal by a deeply corrupt and incompetent government, and it ignited countrywide protests known as Euromaidan.

Putin framed the ensuing tumult of Euromaidan, which forced Yanukovych from power, as a Western-backed “fascist coup” that endangered the ethnic Russian majority in Crimea. (Western leaders dismissed this as baseless propaganda reminiscent of the Soviet era.) In response, Putin ordered a covert invasion of Crimea that he later justified as a rescue operation. “There is a limit to everything. And with Ukraine, our western partners have crossed the line,” Putin said in a March 2014 address formalizing the annexation.

Putin employed a similar narrative to justify his support for separatists in southeastern Ukraine, another region home to large numbers of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers. He famously referred to the area as Novorossiya (New Russia), a term dating back to eighteenth-century imperial Russia. Armed Russian provocateurs, including some agents of Russian security services, are believed to have played a central role in stirring the anti-Euromaidan secessionist movements in the region into a rebellion. However, unlike Crimea, Russia continued to officially deny its involvement in the Donbas conflict until it launched its wider invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Why did Russia launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022?

Some Western analysts see Russia’s 2022 invasion as the culmination of the Kremlin’s growing resentment toward NATO’s post–Cold War expansion into the former Soviet sphere of influence. Russian leaders, including Putin, have alleged that the United States and NATO repeatedly violated pledges they made in the early 1990s to not expand the alliance into the former Soviet bloc. They view NATO’s enlargement during this tumultuous period for Russia as a humiliating imposition about which they could do little but watch.

In the weeks leading up to NATO’s 2008 summit, President Vladimir Putin warned U.S. diplomats that steps to bring Ukraine into the alliance “would be a hostile act toward Russia.” Months later, Russia went to war with Georgia, seemingly showcasing Putin’s willingness to use force to secure his country’s interests. (Some independent observers faulted Georgia for initiating the so-called August War but blamed Russia for escalating hostilities.)

Despite remaining a nonmember, Ukraine grew its ties with NATO in the years leading up to the 2022 invasion. Ukraine held annual military exercises with the alliance and, in 2020, became one of just six enhanced opportunity partners, a special status for the bloc’s closest nonmember allies. Moreover, Kyiv affirmed its goal to eventually gain full NATO membership.

In the weeks leading up to its invasion, Russia made several major security demands of the United States and NATO, including that they cease expanding the alliance, seek Russian consent for certain NATO deployments, and remove U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe. Alliance leaders responded that they were open to new diplomacy but were unwilling to discuss shutting NATO’s doors to new members.

“While in the United States we talk about a Ukraine crisis , from the Russian standpoint this is a crisis in European security architecture,” CFR’s Thomas Graham told Arms Control Today in February 2022. “And the fundamental issue they want to negotiate is the revision of European security architecture as it now stands to something that is more favorable to Russian interests.”

Other experts have said that perhaps the most important motivating factor for Putin was his fear that Ukraine would continue to develop into a modern, Western-style democracy that would inevitably undermine his autocratic regime in Russia and dash his hopes of rebuilding a Russia-led sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. “[Putin] wants to destabilize Ukraine , frighten Ukraine,” writes historian Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic . “He wants Ukrainian democracy to fail. He wants the Ukrainian economy to collapse. He wants foreign investors to flee. He wants his neighbors—in Belarus, Kazakhstan, even Poland and Hungary—to doubt whether democracy will ever be viable, in the longer term, in their countries too.”

What are Russia’s objectives in Ukraine?

Putin’s Russia has been described as a revanchist power, keen to regain its former power and prestige. “It was always Putin’s goal to restore Russia to the status of a great power in northern Eurasia,” writes Gerard Toal, an international affairs professor at Virginia Tech, in his book Near Abroad . “The end goal was not to re-create the Soviet Union but to make Russia great again.”

By seizing Crimea in 2014, Russia solidified its control of a strategic foothold on the Black Sea. With a larger and more sophisticated military presence there, Russia can project power deeper into the Mediterranean, Middle East, and North Africa, where it has traditionally had limited influence. Some analysts argue that Western powers failed to impose meaningful costs on Russia in response to its annexation of Crimea, which they say only increased Putin’s willingness to use military force in pursuit of his foreign policy objectives. Until its invasion in 2022, Russia’s strategic gains in the Donbas were more fragile. Supporting the separatists had, at least temporarily, increased its bargaining power vis-à-vis Ukraine.

In July 2021, Putin authored what many Western foreign policy experts viewed as an ominous article explaining his controversial views of the shared history between Russia and Ukraine. Among other remarks, Putin described Russians and Ukrainians as “one people” who effectively occupy “the same historical and spiritual space.”

Throughout that year, Russia amassed tens of thousands of troops along the border with Ukraine and later into allied Belarus under the auspices of military exercises. In February 2022, Putin ordered a full-scale invasion, crossing a force of some two hundred thousand troops into Ukrainian territory from the south (Crimea), east (Russia), and north (Belarus), in an attempt to seize major cities, including the capital Kyiv, and depose the government. Putin said the broad goals were to “de-Nazify” and “de-militarize” Ukraine.

However, in the early weeks of the invasion, Ukrainian forces marshaled a stalwart resistance that succeeded in bogging down the Russian military in many areas, including in Kyiv. Many defense analysts say that Russian forces have suffered from low morale, poor logistics, and an ill-conceived military strategy that assumed Ukraine would fall quickly and easily.

In August 2022, Ukraine launched a major counteroffensive against Russian forces, recapturing thousands of square miles of territory in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions. The campaigns marked a stunning setback for Russia. Amid the Russian retreat, Putin ordered the mobilization of some three hundred thousand more troops, illegally annexed four more Ukrainian regions, and threatened to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia’s “territorial integrity.”

Fighting in the subsequent months focused along various fronts in the Donbas, and Russia adopted a new tactic of targeting civilian infrastructure in several distant Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, with missile and drone strikes. At the first-year mark of the war, Western officials estimated that more than one hundred thousand Ukrainians had been killed or wounded , while Russian losses were likely even higher, possibly double that figure. Meanwhile, some eight million refugees had fled Ukraine, and millions more were internally displaced. Ahead of the spring thaw, Ukraine’s Western allies pledged to send more-sophisticated military aid, including tanks. Most security analysts see little chance for diplomacy in the months ahead, as both sides have strong motives to continue the fight.

What have been U.S. priorities in Ukraine?

Immediately following the Soviet collapse, Washington’s priority was pushing Ukraine—along with Belarus and Kazakhstan—to forfeit its nuclear arsenal so that only Russia would retain the former union’s weapons. At the same time, the United States rushed to bolster the shaky democracy in Russia. Some prominent observers at the time felt that the United States was premature in this courtship with Russia, and that it should have worked more on fostering geopolitical pluralism in the rest of the former Soviet Union.

Former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, in Foreign Affairs in early 1994, described a healthy and stable Ukraine as a critical counterweight to Russia and the lynchpin of what he advocated should be the new U.S. grand strategy after the Cold War. “It cannot be stressed strongly enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire,” he wrote. In the months after Brzezinski’s article was published, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia pledged via the Budapest Referendum to respect Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty in return for it becoming a nonnuclear state.

Twenty years later, as Russian forces seized Crimea, restoring and strengthening Ukraine’s sovereignty reemerged as a top U.S. and EU foreign policy priority. Following the 2022 invasion, U.S. and NATO allies dramatically increased defense, economic, and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, as well as ramped up their sanctions on Russia. However, Western leaders have been careful to avoid actions they believe will draw their countries into the war or otherwise escalate it, which could, in the extreme, pose a nuclear threat.

Ukraine’s Struggle for Independence in Russia’s Shadow

What are U.S. and EU policy in Ukraine?

The United States remains committed to the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. It does not recognize Russia’s claims to Crimea or the other regions unlawfully annexed by Russia. Prior to the 2022 invasion, the United States supported a settlement of the Donbas conflict via the Minsk agreements [PDF].

Western powers and their partners have taken many steps to increase aid to Ukraine and punish Russia for its 2022 offensive. As of February 2023, the United States has provided Ukraine more than $50 billion in assistance, which includes advanced military aid, such as rocket and missile systems, helicopters, drones, and tanks. Several NATO allies are providing similar aid.

Meanwhile, the international sanctions on Russia have vastly expanded, covering much of its financial, energy, defense, and tech sectors and targeting the assets of wealthy oligarchs and other individuals. The U.S. and some European governments also banned some Russian banks from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a financial messaging system known as SWIFT; placed restrictions on Russia’s ability to access its vast foreign reserves; and blacklisted Russia’s central bank. Moreover, many influential Western companies have shuttered or suspended operations in Russia. The Group of Eight, now known as the Group of Seven , suspended Russia from its ranks indefinitely in 2014.

The invasion also cost Russia its long-awaited Nord Stream 2 pipeline after Germany suspended its regulatory approval in February. Many critics, including U.S. and Ukrainian officials, opposed the natural gas pipeline during its development, claiming it would give Russia greater political leverage over Ukraine and the European gas market. In August, Russia indefinitely suspended operations of Nord Stream 1, which provided the European market with as much as a third of its natural gas.

What do Ukrainians want?

Russia’s aggression in recent years has galvanized public support for Ukraine’s Westward leanings. In the wake of Euromaidan, the country elected as president the billionaire businessman Petro Poroshenko, a staunch proponent of EU and NATO integration. In 2019, Zelensky defeated Poroshenko in a sign of the public’s deep dissatisfaction with the political establishment and its halting battle against corruption and an oligarchic economy.

Before the 2022 offensive, polls indicated that Ukrainians held mixed views on NATO and EU membership . More than half of those surveyed (not including residents of Crimea and the contested regions in the east) supported EU membership, while 40 to 50 percent were in favor of joining NATO.

Just days after the invasion, President Zelenskyy requested that the EU put Ukraine on a fast track to membership. The country became an official candidate in June 2022, but experts caution that the membership process could take years. In September of that year, Zelenskyy submitted a formal application for Ukraine to join NATO, pushing for an accelerated admission process for that bloc as well. Many Western analysts say that, similar to Ukraine’s EU bid, NATO membership does not seem likely in the near term.

What triggered Russia’s moves in 2014?
Why did Russia launch an invasion in 2022?

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Russia, One Year After the Invasion of Ukraine

By Keith Gessen

Illustration of calendar with military footsteps stomping across it.

A year ago, in January, I went to Moscow to learn what I could about the coming war—chiefly, whether it would happen. I spoke with journalists and think tankers and people who seemed to know what the authorities were up to. I walked around Moscow and did some shopping. I stayed with my aunt near the botanical garden. Fresh white snow lay on the ground, and little kids walked with their moms to go sledding. Everyone was certain that there would be no war.

I had immigrated to the U.S. as a child, in the early eighties. Since the mid-nineties, I’d been coming back to Moscow about once a year. During that time, the city kept getting nicer, and the political situation kept getting worse. It was as if, in Russia, more prosperity meant less freedom. In the nineteen-nineties, Moscow was chaotic, crowded, dirty, and poor, but you could buy half a dozen newspapers on every corner that would denounce the war in Chechnya and call on Boris Yeltsin to resign. Nothing was holy, and everything was permitted. Twenty-five years later, Moscow was clean, tidy, and rich; you could get fresh pastries on every corner. You could also get prosecuted for something you said on Facebook. One of my friends had recently spent ten days in jail for protesting new construction in his neighborhood. He said that he met a lot of interesting people.

The material prosperity seemed to point away from war; the political repression, toward it. Outside of Moscow, things were less comfortable, and outside of Russia the Kremlin had in recent years become more aggressive. It had annexed Crimea , supported an insurgency in eastern Ukraine , propped up the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, interfered in the U.S. Presidential election. But internally the situation was stagnant: the same people in charge, the same rhetoric about the West, the same ideological mishmash of Soviet nostalgia , Russian Orthodoxy , and conspicuous consumption. In 2021, Vladimir Putin had changed the constitution so that he could stay in power, if he wanted, until 2036. The comparison people made most often was to the Brezhnev years—what Leonid Brezhnev himself had called the era of “developed socialism.” This was the era of developed Putinism. Most people did not expect any sudden moves.

My friends in Moscow were doing their best to wrap their minds around the contradictions. Alexander Baunov, a journalist and political analyst, was then at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank. We met in his cozy apartment, overlooking a typical Moscow courtyard—a small copse of trees and parked cars, all covered lovingly in a fresh layer of snow. Baunov thought that a war was possible. There was a growing sense among the Russian élite that the results of the Cold War needed to be revisited. The West continued to treat Russia as if it had lost—expanding NATO to its borders and dealing with Russia, in the context of things like E.U. expansion, as being no more important or powerful than the Baltic states or Ukraine—but it was the Soviet Union that had lost, not Russia. Putin, in particular, felt unfairly treated. “Gorbachev lost the Cold War,” Baunov said. “Maybe Yeltsin lost the Cold War. But not Putin. Putin has only ever won. He won in Chechnya, he won in Georgia, he won in Syria. So why does he continue to be treated like a loser?” Barack Obama referred to his country as a mere “regional power”; despite hosting a fabulous Olympics, Russia was sanctioned in 2014 for invading Ukraine, and sanctioned again, a few years later, for interfering in the U.S. Presidential elections. It was the sort of thing that the United States got away with all the time. But Russia got punished. It was insulting.

At the same time, Baunov thought that an actual war seemed unlikely. Ukraine was not only supposedly an organic part of Russia, it was also a key element of the Russian state’s mythology around the Second World War. The regime had invested so much energy into commemorating the victory over fascism; to turn around and then bomb Kyiv and Kharkiv, just as the fascists had once done, would stretch the borders of irony too far. And Putin, for all his bluster, was actually pretty cautious. He never started a fight he wasn’t sure he could win. Initiating a war with a NATO -backed Ukraine could be dangerous; it could lead to unpredictable consequences. It could lead to instability, and stability was the one thing that Putin had delivered to Russians over the past twenty years.

For liberals, it was increasingly a period of accommodation and consolidation. Another friend, whom I’ll call Kolya, had left his job writing life-style pieces for an independent Web site a few years earlier, as the Kremlin’s media policy grew increasingly meddlesome. Kolya accepted an offer to write pieces on social themes for a government outlet. This was far better, and clearer: he knew what topics to stay away from, and the pay was good.

I visited Kolya at his place near Patriarch’s Ponds. He had married into a family that had once been part of the Soviet nomenklatura, and he and his wife had inherited an apartment in a handsome nineteen-sixties Party building in the city center. From Kolya’s balcony you could see Brezhnev’s old apartment. You could tell it was Brezhnev’s because the windows were bigger than the surrounding ones. As for Kolya’s apartment, it was smaller than other apartments in his building. The reason was that the apartment next to his had once belonged to a Soviet war hero, and the war hero, of course, needed the building’s largest apartment, so his had been expanded, long ago, at the expense of Kolya’s. Still, it was a very nice apartment, with enormously high ceilings and lots of light.

Kolya was closely following the situation around Alexey Navalny , who had returned to Russia and been imprisoned a year before. Navalny was slowly being tortured to death in prison, and yet his team of investigators and activists continued to publish exposés of Russian officials’ corruption. There was still some real journalistic work being done in Russia, though a number of outlets, such as the news site Meduza, were primarily operating from abroad. Kolya said that he worried about outright censorship, but also about self-censorship. He told me about journalists who had left the field. One had gone to work in communications for a large bank. Another was now working on elections—“and not in a good way.” The noose was tightening, and yet no one thought there’d be a war.

What is one to make, in retrospect, of what happened to Russia between December, 1991, when its President, Boris Yeltsin, signed an agreement with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus to disband the U.S.S.R., and February 24, 2022, when Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, ordered his troops, some of whom were stationed in Belarus, to invade Ukraine from the east, the south, and the north? There are many competing explanations. Some say that the economic and political reforms which were promised in the nineteen-nineties never actually happened; others that they happened too quickly. Some say that Russia was not prepared for democracy; others that the West was not prepared for a democratic Russia. Some say that it was all Putin’s fault, for destroying independent political life; others that it was Yeltsin’s, for failing to take advantage of Russia’s brief period of freedom; still others say that it was Mikhail Gorbachev’s, for so carelessly and naïvely destroying the U.S.S.R.

When Gorbachev began dismantling the empire, one of his most resonant phrases had been “We can’t go on living like this.” By “this” he meant poverty, and violence, and lies. Gorbachev also spoke of trying to build a “normal, modern country”—a country that did not invade its neighbors (as the U.S.S.R. had done to Afghanistan), or spend massive amounts of its budget on the military, but instead engaged in trade and tried to let people lead their lives. A few years later, Yeltsin used the same language of normality and meant, roughly, the same thing.

The question of whether Russia ever became a “normal” country has been hotly debated in political science. A famous 2004 article in Foreign Affairs , by the economist Andrei Shleifer and the political scientist Daniel Treisman, was called, simply, “A Normal Country.” Writing during an ebb in American interest in Russia, as Putin was consolidating his control of the country but before he started acting more aggressively toward his neighbors, Shleifer and Treisman argued that what looked like Russia’s poor performance as a democracy was just about average for a country with its level of income and development. For some time after 2004, there was reason to think that rising living standards, travel, and iPhones would do the work that lectures from Western politicians had failed to do—that modernity itself would make Russia a place where people went about their business and raised their families, and the government did not send them to die for no good reason on foreign soil.

That is not what happened. The oil and gas boom of the last two decades created for many Russians a level of prosperity that would have been unthinkable in Soviet times. Despite this, the violence and the lies persisted.

Alexander Baunov calls what happened in February of last year a putsch—the capture of the state by a clique bent on its own imperial projects and survival. “Just because the people carrying it out are the ones in power, does not make it less of a putsch,” Baunov told me recently. “There was no demand for this in Russian society.” Many Russians have, perhaps, accepted the war; they have sent their sons and husbands to die in it; but it was not anything that people were clamoring for. The capture of Crimea had been celebrated, but no one except the most marginal nationalists was calling for something similar to happen to Kherson or Zaporizhzhia, or even really the Donbas. As Volodymyr Zelensky said in his address to the Russian people on the eve of the war, Donetsk and Luhansk to most Russians were just words. Whereas for Ukrainians, he added, “this is our land. This is our history.” It was their home.

About half of the people I met with in Moscow last January are no longer there —one is in France, another in Latvia, my aunt is in Tel Aviv. My friend Kolya, whose apartment is across from Brezhnev’s, has remained in Moscow. He does not know English, he and his wife have a little kid and two elderly parents between them, and it’s just not clear what they would do abroad. Kolya says that, insofar as he’s able, he has stopped talking to people at work: “They are decent people on the whole but it’s not a situation anymore where it’s possible to talk in half-tones.” No one has asked him to write about or in support of the war, and his superiors have even said that if he gets mobilized they will try to get him out of it.

When we met last January, Alexander Baunov did not think that he would leave Russia, even if things got worse. “Social capital does not cross borders,” Baunov said. “And that’s the only capital we have.” But, just a few days after the war began, Baunov and his partner packed some bags and some books and flew to Dubai, then Belgrade, then Vienna, where Baunov had a fellowship. They have been flitting around the world, in a precarious visa situation, ever since. (A book that Baunov has been working on for several years, about twentieth-century dictatorships in Portugal, Spain, and Greece, came out last month; it is called “The End of the Regime.”)

I asked him why it was possible for him to live in Russia before the invasion, and why it was impossible to do so after it. He admitted that from afar it could look like a distinction without a difference. “If you’re in the Western information space and have been reading for twenty years about how Putin is a dictator, maybe it makes no sense,” Baunov said. “But from inside the difference was very clear.” Putin had been running a particular kind of dictatorship—a relatively restrained one. There were certain topics that you needed to stay away from and names you couldn’t mention, and, if you really threw down the gauntlet, the regime might well try to kill you. But for most people life was tolerable. You could color inside the lines, urge reforms and wiser governance, and hope for better days. After the invasion, that was no longer possible. The government passed laws threatening up to fifteen years’ imprisonment for speech that was deemed defamatory to the armed forces; the use of the word “war” instead of “special military operation” fell under this category. The remaining independent outlets—most notably the radio station Ekho Moskvy and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta —were forced to suspend operations. That happened quickly, in the first weeks of the war, and since then the restrictions have only increased; Carnegie Moscow Center, which had been operating in Russia since 1994, was forced to close in April.

I asked Baunov how long he thought it would be before he returned to Russia. He said that he didn’t know, but it was possible that he would never return. There was no going back to February 23rd—not for him, not for Russia, and especially not for the Putin regime. “The country has undergone a moral catastrophe,” Baunov said. “Going back, in the future, would mean living with people who supported this catastrophe; who think they had taken part in a great project; who are proud of their participation in it.”

If once, in the Kremlin, there had been an ongoing argument between mildly pro-Western liberals and resolutely anti-Western conservatives, that argument is over. The liberals have lost. According to Baunov, there remains a small group of technocrats who would prefer something short of all-out war. “It’s not a party of peace, but you could call it the Party of peaceful life,” he said. “It’s people who want to ride in electric buses and dress well.” But it is on its heels. And though it was hard for Baunov to imagine Russia going back to the Soviet era, and even the Stalinist era, the country was already some way there. There was the search for internal enemies, the drawing up of lists, the public calls for ever harsher measures. On the day that we spoke, in late January, the news site Meduza was branded an “undesirable organization.” This meant that anyone publicly sharing their work could, in theory, be subject to criminal prosecution.

Baunov fears that there is room for things to get much worse. He recalled how, on January 22, 1905—Bloody Sunday—the tsar’s forces fired on peaceful demonstrators in St. Petersburg, precipitating a revolutionary crisis. “A few tens of people were shot and it was a major event,” he said. “A few years later, thousands of people were being shot and it wasn’t even notable.” The intervening years had seen Russia engaged in a major European war, and society’s tolerance for violence had drastically increased. “The room for experimentation on a population is almost limitless,” Baunov went on. “China went through the Cultural Revolution, and survived. Russia went through the Gulags and survived. Repressions decrease society’s willingness to resist.” That’s why governments use them.

For years after the Soviet collapse, it had seemed, to some, as if the Soviet era had been a bad dream, a deviation. Economists wrote studies tracing the likely development of the Russian economy after 1913 if war and revolution had not intervened. Part of the post-Soviet project, including Putin’s, was to restore some of the cultural ties that had been severed by the Soviets—to resurrect churches that the Bolsheviks had turned into bus stations, to repair old buildings that the Soviets had neglected, to give respect to various political figures from the past (Tsar Alexander III, for example).

But what if it was the post-Soviet period that was the exception? “It’s been a long time since the Kingdom of Novgorod,” in the words of the historian Stephen Kotkin . Before the Revolution, the Russian Empire, too, had been one of the most repressive regimes in Europe. Jews were kept in the Pale of Settlement. You needed the tsar’s permission to travel abroad. Much of the population, just a couple of generations away from serfdom, lived in abject poverty. The Soviets cancelled some of these laws, but added others. Aside from short bursts of freedom here and there, the story of Russia was the story of unceasing government destruction of people’s lives.

So which was the illusion: the peaceful Russia or the violent one, the Russia that trades and slowly prospers, or the one that brings only lies and threats and death?

Russia has given us Putin, but it has also given us all the people who stood up to Putin. The Party of peaceful life, as Baunov called it, was not winning, but at least, so far, it has not lost; all the time, people continue to get imprisoned for speaking out against the war. I was reminded of my friend Kolya—in the weeks after the war began, as Western sanctions were announced and prices began rising, he was one of the thousands of Russians who rushed out to make last-minute purchases. It was a way of taking some control of his destiny at a moment when things seemed dangerously out of control. As the Russian Army attempted and failed to take Kyiv , Kolya and his wife bought some chairs. ♦

Understanding Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Aaron Stein
Maia Otarashvili
February 24, 2022
Eurasia Program

Introduction

On February 24, 2022 Russia began its invasion of Ukraine.

In times of crisis, balanced, in-depth analysis and trusted expertise is paramount. The Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) remains committed in its mission to provide expert analysis to policy makers and the public on the most pressing foreign policy challenges.

To help you understand this evolving crisis, we have compiled a list of publications, event recordings, and podcasts to help explain current events in Ukraine. FPRI has also included resources about other protracted conflicts, the neighboring Baltic states, and the role of NATO in managing the fallout from the war.

If you have not already done so, be sure to follow the FPRI fellows listed below for further reading and resources. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected]

Russian Aggression in Ukraine & Russian Defense

Moscow’s Mind Games: Finding Ideology in Putin’s Russia – February 2023
The Confrontation with Russia and US Grand Strategy – February 2023
Tanks a Lot (Well, Actually Not That Many for Ukraine) – February 2023
Wagner Group Redefined: Threats and Responses – January 2023
‘Let’s Make a Deal’? Ukraine and the Poor Prospects for Negotiations with Putin – January 2023
Will Russia Survive Until 2084? – December 2022
How the Battle for the Donbas Shaped Ukraine’s Success – December 2022
Ecological Path to Peace Is Possible in Ukraine – November 2022
Putin’s Philosophers: Reading Vasily Grossman in the Kremlin – November 2022
The Russian-Ukrainian War Triggers an Energy Revolution – September 2022
Ukraine’s Defense Industry and the Prospect of a Long War – September 2022
Understanding Russia’s Efforts at Technological Sovereignty – September 2022
Watching the War on Russian Television – August 2022
War Crimes in Ukraine: In Search of a Response – August 2022
Why Russian Elites Are Standing By Putin – July 2022
Climate Action Meets Energy Security: The Russian Invasion of Ukraine Adds a New Dimension to Energy Transition – June 2022
The War’s Impact on Russia’s Economy and Ukrainian Politics – June 2022
The Evolving Political-Military Aims in the War in Ukraine After 100 Days – June 2022
How Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine has Affected Kazakh Politics – June 2022
Russia’s Use of Cyberattacks: Lessons from the Second Ukraine War – June 2022
What’s Next for Ukraine’s (and its Neighbors’) Domestic and Foreign Policy? – June 2022
Reviving the Prospects for Coercive Diplomacy in Ukraine – May 2022
Food Prices, Elections, and the Wagner Group in Africa – April 2022
Appraising the War in Ukraine and Likely Outcomes – April 2022
Ukraine War Sparks Suspicion over Russia’s Designs on Kazakhstan – April 2022
Do Russians Really “Long for War” in Ukraine? – March 2022
Kadyrov’s Ukraine Gamble – March 2022
Lukashenka’s Fatal Mistake – March 2022
What We Can Learn about Russian Strategy from Ivan III – March 2022
The Russian Navy in the Russia-Ukraine War Scare – February 2022
How Will China Respond to the Russia-Ukraine Crisis? – January 2022
Moscow’s Compellence Strategy – January 2022
Zapad 2021 and Russia’s Potential for Warfighting – September 2021
Russia’s Coercive Diplomacy – August 2021
Russia’s Forever Wars: Syria and Pursuit of Great Power Status – September 2021
Understanding Russia’s Cyber Strategy – July 2021
Russia’s Nuclear Strategy: A Show of Strength Despite COVID-19 – May 2021
Even Thieves Need a Safe: Why the Putin Regime Causes, Deplores, and Yet Relies on Capital Flight for its Survival – November 2021
Five Years of War in the Donbas – October 2019
Coal Mines, Land Mines and Nuclear Bombs: The Environmental Cost of the War in Eastern Ukraine – September 2019
Volodymyr Zelensky: Ukraine’s Servant of the People? – September 2019
Russia’s Tragic Great Power Politics – March 2019
Ukraine’s Presidential Election and the Future of its Foreign Policy – March 2019
Bond of War: Russian Geo-Economics in Ukraine’s Sovereign Debt Restructuring – September 2018
The Ukrainian Military: From Degradation to Renewal – August 2018
Reflecting on a Year of War – February 2023
Will Russia Survive Until 2084? – January 2023
The Russia-Ukraine War and Implications for Azerbaijan – July 2022
Russia’s War in Ukraine: Uncompromising Objectives and an Uncertain Future – June 2022
The State of Play in Ukraine – May 2022
Russia’s War in Ukraine: Nukes, Negotiations, and Neutrality – April 2022
Russia’s War in Ukraine: Implications for China – March 2022
What the West Needs to Know About Russia’s War in Ukraine – March 2022
Russia’s War in Ukraine: Analyzing the Western Military and Economic Response – March 2022
Russia’s War in Ukraine: The Humanitarian Crisis and Prospects for Resolution – March 2022
Russia’s Long Shadow and the Future of Europe – February 2022
Russia-Ukraine Tensions: Will Moscow’s Compellence Strategy Work? – January 2022
Interview with Russian Dissident Ilya & Former Duma Member Ilya Ponomarev – January 2022
Russia’s Coercive Diplomacy – August 2021
FPRI Special Briefing: U.S. Sanctions Against Russia – March 2021
FPRI Special Briefing: Alexeyi Navalny and U.S.-Russia Relations – February 2021
Don’t Mention the War – April 2023
Torn in the USA: How Important is the War in Ukraine for the United States? – March 2023
Ukraine One Year In: The Helpers – March 2023
Reflecting on a Year of War – February 2023
Mobilize This – January 2023
War in Ukraine: A Firsthand Account – December 2022
Public Opinion in Russia: What Do We Know, What Can We Know? – November 2022
Russia’s War in Ukraine: The Strategic Picture – September 2022
Russia’s Manpower Conundrum in Ukraine – May 2022
The Air War Over Ukraine – March 2022
Debating a No Fly Zone: The Risk of Escalation with Moscow – March 2022
Examining Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine – March 2022
The Risk of War: Russia’s Options for War in Ukraine – February 2022
The Risk of War in Ukraine: Moscow’s Military Posture – February 2022
Tensions Over Ukraine: Russia’s Rationale for War – February 2022
Russian Perceptions of Military AI and Automation – February 2022
Russia’s Anti-Satellite Weapon: Understanding Russia’s ASAT Test – November 2021
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Navalny? – September 2021
Russia’s Coercive Diplomacy: Looking Back at the Ukraine Crisis – August 2021
Russian-Turkish Relations and Their Implications for the West – May 2021
Learning From Our Adversaries: Russian Aerial Operations in Syria – April 2021

Protracted Conflicts: Moldova and Georgia

War As a Neighbor: Moldova and the Challenges of Facing Russian Aggression in Ukraine – April 2023
Strategic Connectivity in the Black Sea: A Focus on Georgia – December 2021
Taking Stock of U.S. Military Assistance to Georgia – December 2021
Georgia’s Democracy is in Trouble, It’s Time for Closer Engagement – November 2021
Russia’ Permanent War Against Georgia – March 2021
Georgia’s Doomed Deep-Sea Port Ambitions: Geopolitics of the Canceled Anaklia Project – October 2020
Anatomy of a Fraud: The Moldovan Parliamentary Elections – March 2019
Geopolitical Games Expected Ahead of Moldova’s 2018 Elections – October 2017
The Future of US Strategic Interests in the South Caucasus: Challenges and Opportunities for the Biden Administration – October 2021
Tug of War in the Black Sea: Defending NATO’s Eastern Flank – July 2021
The Turkish Veto: Why Erdogan Is Blocking Finland and Sweden’s Path to NATO – March 2023
Article 5 for the Next Decade of NATO – December 2022
The Art of the Possible: Minimizing Risks as a New European Order Takes Shape – November 2022
The Baltics Predicted the Suspension of the Ukraine Grain Deal — and Contributed to its Resumption – November 2022
Good and Bad Neighbors: Perceptions in Latvian Society – September 2022
Europe’s Wait for Turkmen Natural Gas Continues – September 2022
From the Migrant Crisis to Aggression in Ukraine: Belarus is Still on the Baltic Agenda – July 2022
Two Less Obvious Lessons for Baltic Defense from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine – June 2022
The Baltic Road to Energy Independence from Russia Is Nearing Completion – May 2022
America Needs a Comprehensive Compellence Strategy Against Russia – April 2022
Baltic Sea Mining as an Extension of the Russian Gray Zone – April 2022
The Significance of the Turkish Straits to the Russian Navy – March 2022
Fear, Solidarity, and Calls for Further Action in the Baltics as Russia Invades Ukraine – March 2022
Latvia’s First Response to Russia’s War in Ukraine – March 2022
Turkey’s Careful and Risky Fence-Sitting between Ukraine and Russia – February 2022
At the Double: Poland’s Military Expansion – January 2022
Turkey’s Response to the Russia-Ukraine Crisis – January 2022
Afghanistan was a Turbulent NATO Proving Ground for the Baltic States – December 2021
Crowded Pond: NATO and Russian Maritime Power in the Baltic Sea – December 2021
Baltic Perspectives on U.S. and Transatlantic Nuclear Negotiations with Russia – October 2021
Namejs vs. Zapad: Military Exercises on Both Sides of the Frontline – September 2021
Reconceptualizing Lithuania’s Importance for U.S Foreign Policy – July 2021
Russian-Turkish Relations and Their Implications for the West – April 2021
Nord Stream 2: Germany’s Faustian Bargain with Gazprom and Why it Matters for the Baltics – December 2020
Cooperation, Competition, and Compartmentalization: Russian-Turkish Relations and Their Implications for the West – May 2021
America’s Approach to the Three Seas Initiative – May 2021
The Baltic States as NATO Heavyweights – March 2023
The Future of European Energy – February 2023
What’s Happening With Russian Speakers in Latvia? – January 2023
We Can France if We Want To: What Does Paris Want for Ukraine and Europe? – November 2022
Giorgia on My Mind: Italy’s Rightward Turn and Its Implications – October 2022
Stuck in the Magyar: Why is Hungary the “Bad Boy” of Europe? – October 2022
Bloc Party: The EU and the War in Ukraine – September 2022
The View from Ukraine: An interview with Dr. Volodymyr Dubovyk – August 2022
What Does Erdogan, Erdo-want? – July 2022
Baltic Power Hour – July 2022
No More Niinistö Nice Guy: Has Finland’s Security Calculus Changed? – June 2022
Swedening the Deal: Stockholm Turns to NATO – June 2022
The Energy Trilemma: An interview with Dr. Andrei Belyi – May 2022
The Sejm Difference? Poland and the New, Old Europe – May 2022
Bundes-where? Germany’s Politics and Security in Changing Times – May 2022
Ukrainian Refugees in Latvia: An interview with Agnese Lāce – April 2022
Who Speaks For Eastern Europe? – February 2022
Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkēvičs on Latvia’s Foreign Policy Challenges – November 2021
Reframing the Baltic states: An Interview with Dr. Andres Kasekamp – October 2021

FPRI Experts to Follow

Rob Lee – @RALee85 Eurasia Senior Fellow, PhD Student at King’s College, London
Bob Hamilton – @BobHam88 Black Sea Fellow, Research Professor at the U.S. Army War College
Maia Otarashvili – @MaiaVanRijn Deputy Director of Research
Aaron Stein – @aaronstein1
Chris Miller – @crmiller1 Director of Eurasia Program, Assistant Professor at The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Nikolas Gvosdev @FPRI_Orbis Editor, Orbis: FPRI’s Journal of World Affairs, Captain Jerome E. Levy Chair in Economic Geography and National Security at the U.S. Naval War College
Clint Watts – @SelectedWisdom Distinguished Research Fellow , National Security Contributor for NBC News and MSNBC
Indra Ekmanis – @indraekmanis Baltic Sea Fellow and Editor of the Baltic Bulletin
Una Bergmane @UnaBergmane Baltic Sea Fellow, Researcher at the University of Helsinki
Mitchell Orenstein @m_orenstein Eurasia Senior Fellow, Professor of East European and Russian Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Stephanie Petrella @sdpetrella Eurasia Fellow
Sara Ashbaugh @sara_ashbaugh Editor in Chief, BMB Russia
Eilish Hart @EilishHart Eurasia F ellow, Eurasia Program
Clara Marchaud @ClaraMarchaud Editor of BMB Ukraine

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Russia’s war in Ukraine, explained

Putin’s invasion in February began Europe’s first major war in decades.

by Jen Kirby and Jonathan Guyer

A woman flees with her family across a destroyed bridge in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 2, as Russian forces encircled the capital region.

Russia is bombarding major cities in Ukraine, more than a week into a war where Moscow has faced setbacks on the battlefield — yet seems undeterred from its campaign to take Ukraine.

Get in-depth coverage about Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Why Ukraine?

Learn the history behind the conflict and what Russian President Vladimir Putin has said about his war aims .

The stakes of Putin’s war

Russia’s invasion has the potential to set up a clash of nuclear world powers . It’s destabilizing the region and terrorizing Ukrainian citizens . It could also impact inflation , gas prices , and the global economy.

How other countries are responding

The US and its European allies have responded to Putin’s aggression with unprecedented sanctions , but have no plans to send troops to Ukraine , for good reason .

How to help

Where to donate if you want to assist refugees and people in Ukraine.

On March 4, Russia seized Zaporizhzhia , one of Europe’s largest nuclear power plants. Russian shelling of the southeastern Ukraine facility set off a fire , which Ukrainian officials warned could set off a nuclear disaster. It took hours, but the fire was extinguished, and international monitors said that they do not detect elevated radiation levels and that the fire did not damage “essential” equipment. US officials have said Russia now appears to be in control of the plant.

But the incident was a reminder of how dangerous this war in Ukraine is becoming, and how uncertain and confusing things still are on the ground. Russian troops were advancing toward Kyiv, and thousands and thousands are fleeing in advance of a possible siege on the city.

The Russian military has made advances in the south, and are gaining in the area of Kherson, a port city on the Black Sea whose control is reportedly contested , and Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov. Russian bombardment of these cities has resulted in humanitarian issues , with bridges and roads damaged by the fighting and dwindling access to food, clean water, medicine, and electricity in certain areas. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, experienced heavy Russian fire this week, and strikes have heavily damaged residential areas .

Ukrainian and Russian officials met in early March, and tentatively agreed on the need to humanitarian corridors — basically, safe zones for civilians to flee and supplies to pass through — but did not reach agreements on a larger ceasefire. As of March 6, multiple attempts to evacuate Ukrainian civilians have been halted because of Russian shelling.

Putin’s attempt to redraw the map of Europe risks becoming the most devastating conflict on the continent since World War II. Already, it is causing an astounding humanitarian crisis: Hundreds, perhaps thousands , of civilians have died, and more than 1.5 million people have fled the violence so far, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, making it the fastest-growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.

The battle for Ukraine began in the early morning hours, local time, on February 24, when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched what he called a “special military operation” into the country of about 40 million. He claimed the Russian military seeks “demilitarization and denazification” but not occupation; attacks shortly followed from multiple fronts and targeted toward multiple cities.

Ukraine’s resistance has complicated Russia’s efforts to seize the country. Russian forces have not made the progress they likely thought they would at the start of the campaign. The Russian military’s early strategy has perplexed some experts and observers . But the more protracted this war becomes, the more catastrophic it will be.

The United States and its allies in Europe and the United Kingdom imposed the toughest financial sanctions ever on Russia after the first incursion, and have only built on these penalties since. On February 26, the United States and European countries agreed to block some Russian banks from SWIFT, a global messaging system, which will essentially prevent those institutions from doing any global transactions, a punishment that allies had previously hesitated to pursue . Already, Russia’s economy is reeling from the impact of these penalties .

This sustained international pressure, and Ukraine’s resistance, may still not be enough to force Russia to end its military campaign. That leaves Ukraine — and the world — in a perilous and unpredictable moment.

Ukraine is under siege

After months of Putin building up tens of thousands of troops near the Ukrainian border and a series of failed diplomatic talks, Russia is now waging a full-out war on Ukraine.

Tensions escalated quickly when, on February 21, Putin delivered an hour-long combative speech that essentially denied Ukrainian statehood . He recognized the independence of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine where Moscow has backed a separatist rebellion since 2014 and sent so-called peacekeeping forces into the region. As experts said , that was likely just the beginning, setting the stage for a much larger conflict.

Days later, that larger conflict materialized. On February 24, Putin announced he was launching an assault “to defend people who for eight years are suffering persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime,” a reference to a false claim about the government in Ukraine. He demanded Ukraine lay down its weapons or be “ responsible for bloodshed .”

Soon after Putin’s speech,reports emerged of explosions around cities, including Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and the capital Kyiv . The Ukrainian foreign minister called it “a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.” By the afternoon in Ukraine, Russian troops and tanks had entered the country on three fronts : from Belarus in the north, from the east of Ukraine, and from the south.

Black smoke rises from a military airport in Chuguyev near Kharkiv, Ukraine, on February 24.

The Russian military has targeted critical infrastructure, like airports, with airstrikes and has launched more than 400 missiles , as of March 1. As a senior US defense official said on February 26, “There’s no doubt in our mind that civilian infrastructure and civilian areas are being hit as a result of these barrages.”

The main battlefronts are in Kyiv’s outskirts; in southern Ukraine, including the major city of Mariupol; and in eastern Ukraine around Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city.

“They had maximal war aims,” Michael Kofman, research director in the Russia studies program at CNA, said in an interview posted on Twitter on February 25. “They had a military operation that’s now in progress, first to try to achieve regime change, encircle the capital, and try to overthrow the Ukrainian government, and then a much larger set of pincer movements to encircle and envelope Ukrainian forces. Try to do this quickly and force surrender of isolated pockets.”

But the Russian army has not been able to completely roll over Ukrainian forces, and some analysts have suggested Moscow may have been surprised at Ukraine’s resistance. Pentagon officials said that, as of March 4, Russia has committed about 92 percent of its combat power so far. Ukraine’s airspace remains contested.

Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at RAND Corporation, told a panel of reporters on February 28 that Russia’s military performance has been odd. “In other words, some of the things that I would have expected — like the air force taking a major role — have not happened.”

“Seems to me there was a lot of war optimism and a sense that the [Ukrainian] government would fall with just a little push,” Charap continued. “And that didn’t happen. I wouldn’t read too much into that about the ultimate course of the war, though. This is still a situation where the deck unfortunately is stacked against the Ukrainians, despite their bravery.”

Putin himself has called on the Ukrainian army to “take power into their own hands and overthrow” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a sign that Putin remains focused on regime change. “According to the available intelligence, the enemy marked me as a target No. 1 and my family as the target No. 2,” said Zelenskyy, speaking on the night of February 24.

Efforts to stop the fighting have so far failed. On February 28, high-level officials from Russia and Ukraine met at the Ukraine-Belarus border,and again on March 3. Russia has continued to insist that a ceasefire requires “demilitarization” and neutrality for Ukraine, but Ukraine has only continued to push for more military aid and ascension into Western bodies like the EU, even signing an EU membership application amid the fighting .

Both Ukraine and Russia have suggested they will hold another round of talks in coming days. Across conflicts, there is usually a severe escalation in fighting before ceasefires, as everyone attempts to maximize their leverage. “I think that they want to inflict maximum damage to pressure the Ukrainian government to seek some sort of ceasefire that is effectively a surrender,” said Margarita Konaev, associate director of analysis and research fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, center, displays the country’s application for membership in the European Union in Kyiv, Ukraine, on February 28.

The toll of this young conflict is growing. The UN has said that, as of March 6, more than 350 civilians have been confirmed killed and hundreds more have been wounded; Ukraine’s emergency services puts the civilian death toll at 2,000 people as of March 2 . Ukrainian officials have said about 11,000 Russian troops have been killed in the fighting, as of March 6, but American and European estimates of Russian casualties have been substantially lower . The Russian government has reported nearly 500 soldier deaths . Experts said all these statistics should be treated with a great deal of caution because of the fog of war and the incentives both Russia and Ukraine have to push a particular narrative.

Why is Putin attacking Ukraine? He told us.

Ukrainian officials have also accused Russia of war crimes after reports of a shelling of an orphanage and kindergarten outside of Kyiv . Across Ukraine, thousands of civilians of all ages are enlisting to fight . Ukrainian officials called on residents to “make Molotov cocktails” to defend against the invasion. More than 1.5 million Ukrainians have fled to neighboring countries like Poland since the conflict began, according to a United Nations estimate .

Children being treated at a pediatric hospital in Kyiv have been moved to the basement of the hospital, which is being used as a bomb shelter, on February 28.

The roots of the current crisis grew from the breakup of the Soviet Union

Russia’s invasion contravenes security agreements the Soviet Union made upon its breakup in the early ’90s. At the time, Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, had the third-largest atomic arsenal in the world. The US and Russia worked with Ukraine to denuclearize the country, and in a series of diplomatic agreements , Kyiv gave its hundreds of nuclear warheads back to Russia in exchange for security assurances that protected it from a potential Russian attack.

But the very premise of a post-Soviet Europe is helping to fuel today’s conflict. Putin has been fixated on reclaiming some semblance of empire, lost with the fall of the Soviet Union. Ukraine is central to this vision. Putin has said Ukrainians and Russians “ were one people — a single whole ,” or at least would be if not for the meddling from outside forces (as in, the West) that has created a “wall” between the two.

“It’s not about Russia. It’s about Putin”: An expert explains Putin’s endgame in Ukraine

Last year, Russia presented the US with a list of demands , some of which were nonstarters for the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Putin demanded that NATO stop its eastward expansion and deny membership to Ukraine, and also made other demands for “security guarantees” around NATO.

The prospect of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO has antagonized Putin at least since President George W. Bush expressed support for the idea in 2008. “That was a real mistake,” Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 was ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton, told Vox in January. “It drove the Russians nuts. It created expectations in Ukraine and Georgia, which then were never met. And so that just made that whole issue of enlargement a complicated one.”

Ukraine is the fourth-largest recipient of military funding from the US, and the intelligence cooperation between the two countries has deepened in response to threats from Russia. But Ukraine isn’t joining NATO in the near future, and President Joe Biden has said as much. Still, Moscow’s demand was largely seen as a nonstarter by the West, as NATO’s open-door policy says sovereign countries can choose their own security alliances.

Though Putin has continued to tout the threat of NATO, his speech on February 21 showed that his obsession with Ukraine goes far beyond that. He does not see the government in Ukraine as legitimate.

“Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space,” he said, per the Kremlin’s official translation . “Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians.”

The two countries do have historical and cultural ties, but as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained , Putin’s “basic claim — that there is no historical Ukrainian nation worthy of present-day sovereignty — is demonstrably false .”

As experts noted, it is difficult to square Putin’s speech — plus a 2021 essay he penned and other statements he’s made — with any realistic diplomatic outcome to avert conflict. It was, essentially, a confession that this wasn’t really about NATO, said Dan Baer, the acting director of the Europe program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “It was about that he doesn’t think Ukraine has a right to exist as a free country,” he said before Putin’s escalation on the night of February 23.

Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Russia, on February 27.

This is the culmination of eight years of tensions

This isn’t the first time Russia has attacked Ukraine. In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, invaded eastern Ukraine, and backed Russian separatists in the eastern Donbas region. Thatconflict has killed more than 14,000 people to date .

Russia’s assault grew out of mass protests in Ukraine that toppled the country’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, which began over his abandonment of a trade agreement with the European Union. US diplomats visited the demonstrations, in symbolic gestures that further agitated Putin.

President Barack Obama, hesitant to escalate tensions with Russia any further, was slow to mobilize a diplomatic response in Europe and did not immediately provide Ukrainians with offensive weapons.

“A lot of us were really appalled that not more was done for the violation of that [post-Soviet] agreement,” said Ian Kelly, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to Georgia from 2015 to 2018. “It just basically showed that if you have nuclear weapons” — as Russia does — “you’re inoculated against strong measures by the international community.”

Since then, corruption has persisted in the Ukrainian government, and the country ranks in the bottom third of the watchdog group Transparency International ’s index.

Ukraine’s far-right presence has grown and become somewhat normalized, and there are government-aligned fascist militias in the country. But Moscow has drawn out those issues to advance false claims about genocide and other attacks on civilians as a way to legitimize the separatist movement in eastern Ukraine and to create a pretext for invasion. In his prerecorded speech shared on the eve of the bombardment of Ukraine, Putin said he sought the “ denazification ” of Ukraine.

To be clear: The Ukrainian government is not a Nazi regime and has not been co-opted by the far right. Zelenskyy is Jewish; he speaks proudly of how his Jewish grandfather fought against Hitler’s army .

Ukrainian soldiers prepare to repel an attack in Ukraine’s Luhansk region on February 24.

Yet, days earlier, Putin used these sorts of claims as part of his explanation for recognizing as independent the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic, the two territories in eastern Ukraine where he has backed separatists since 2014. “Announcing the decisions taken today, I am confident in the support of the citizens of Russia. Of all the patriotic forces of the country,” Putin said before moving troops into the regions for “peacekeeping” purposes.

At the time, most experts Vox spoke to said that looked like the beginning, not the end, of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine.

“In Russia, [it] provides the political-legal basis for the formal introduction of Russian forces, which they’ve already decided to do,” Kofman, of CNA, told Vox on February 21 . “Secondarily, it provides the legal local basis for Russian use of force in defense of these independent republics’ Russian citizens there. It’s basically political theater.”

It set “the stage for the next steps,” he added. Those next steps are now clear.

How the rest of the world is responding

The United States and its allies around the world have condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and have since announced increasingly tough sanctions, intended to completely isolate Russia from the international community and inflict real economic costs.

Biden announced on the afternoon of February 24 that the United States would impose sanctions on Russian financial institutions, including cutting off Russia’s largest banks from the US financial system, and on Russian elites in Putin’s inner circle. America will also implement export controls on certain technologies . The United Kingdom and Europe added their own sanctions, imposing the “ massive ” penalties the West had been warning Putin about.

People demonstrate in support of Ukraine outside the residence of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in London on February 25.

The US and its allies have only amped up the pressure since then. On February 25, the EU and US imposed sanctions on Putin himself . On February 26, the US and European countries announced an agreement to cut some (but not all) Russian banks off from SWIFT, the global messaging system that enables most international transactions, which will make it very difficult for Russia to make transactions beyond its borders. (Japan also signed on to SWIFT actions on February 27.) The US and its allies have said they will target Russia’s central bank , specifically its foreign reserves that Moscow needs to help support its currency. The US has continued to add penalties, including joining other countries in closing US airspace to Russian aircraft , and sanctioning more than a dozen oligarchs.

The United States has said it will not involve troops in any Ukrainian conflict, though more US military aid to Ukraine is on its way and the US has shored up its presence on NATO’s eastern flank. On February 24, the Pentagon said it would send 7,000 additional troops to Germany , and Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on February 26 that he was authorizing “up to $350 million” in additional military aid to Ukraine, including “further lethal defensive assistance to help Ukraine address the armored, airborne, and other threats it is now facing.”

Such aid, according to a February 26 tweet by State Department spokesperson Ned Price, will be provided “immediately” and include “anti-tank and air defense capabilities.”Other European and NATO countries are also stepping up their assistance, including Germany , which reversed a long-standing policy of not sending lethal aid to conflict zones.

How to punish Russia for Ukraine

Russia knows that the US and its partners do not want to commit themselves militarily, and, as Putin launched his invasion, he offered an ominous warning as he touted Russia’s nuclear arsenal : “There should be no doubt that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country.” On February 27, Putin escalated that threat by putting the country’s nuclear deterrent forces on high alert .

American soldiers at the Polish-Ukrainian border near Arlamow, Poland, on February 24.

NATO has vowed to protect its members from any Russian aggression. On February 25, NATO announced that it was activating part of its NATO Response Force — a 40,000-troop unit modernized after the 2014 Crimea invasion — to protect allies on NATO’s eastern flank. “We are now deploying the NATO Response Force for the first time in a collective defense context. We speak about thousands of troops. We speak about air and maritime capabilities,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said .

Yet these are largely defensive measures, which means most of the punishment against Russia will come in the form of economic sanctions. Still, the West is starting to shift from an original hesitancy to impose the most severe costs on Russia over fears of what it might mean for Europe, the US, and the rest of the global economy — and what Russia might do to retaliate.

They’re not all the way there, however. For example, even the SWIFT action is expected to leave some carve-outs so Russia can still export gas to Europe . The tougher the sanctions on Russia, the harder it will hit the US and especially European economies, so leaders are still trying to soften the impact. But the fallout from these punishments — along with other measures, like the EU and United Statesbarring Russia from their airspace — is being felt in Russia, as the ruble crashes and analysts warn of a deep recession .

Prepare for higher gas prices thanks to Russia — and more inflation

Maxar satellite imagery shows a large Russian military convoy moving toward Antonov Airport in Hostomel, Ukraine, near Kyiv, on February 28.

A way out of this war is difficult to contemplate as bombs are falling on Ukraine, but the US and its allies are going to have to do careful diplomacy to isolate and put pressure on Russia in the long term — and create incentives for Moscow to stop its assault on Ukraine . The US and its allies are also likely going to have to decide how much they want, or can, support Ukraine as it battles Russia.

“The real question, I think, is going to come down to what extent the West can and will try to support and supply a long-term insurgency against Russia,” said Paul D’Anieri, an expert on Eastern European and post-Soviet politics at the University of California Riverside. “And what level of success does Russia have in fighting back against? Unfortunately, it seems like the best strategy for peace right now is when enough Russians die, that the Russians decide it’s not worth it anymore.”

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A short history of Russia and Ukraine

Seven maps that illustrate vladimir putin’s distortion of history.

I N JULY 2021 Vladimir Putin published an essay with arguments he would later use to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It raced through 1,000 years to argue that Russians and Ukrainians are one people , cruelly divided by “external forces” with an “anti-Russian” agenda. Mr Putin’s war is supposed to fix that. There is truth in his claim that Ukraine and Russia are close kin, as the following maps demonstrate. What is nonsense is the assertion that their separation into two countries is the result of some external plot, imposed on the Ukrainians against their wishes.

For Mr Putin the origin of Russian-Ukrainian identity is Kyivan Rus, a confederation of princedoms that lasted from the late 9th to the mid-13th century (see map 1). Its centre was Kyiv, now Ukraine’s capital. Its rulers were the Rus, Scandinavian Vikings who gradually established dominance over the region and merged with local Slavic tribes. (“Rus” is the origin of the word “Russia”.) When it comes to political and cultural tradition, Kyivan Rus is indeed the cradle of Russia and Ukraine, as well as the country now called Belarus. It was a refined European civilisation with roots in the Byzantine empire and its Orthodox Christian religion.

In the mid-11th century, however, Kyivan Rus began to fragment into semi-autonomous principalities (see map 2). These included Galicia-Volhynia, which covered parts of modern Ukraine and Belarus, Novgorod in north-western modern-day Russia, and Vladimir-Suzdal, in western Russia. In 1240 the Mongol empire besieged Kyiv, finally destroying what remained of Kyivan Rus as a single entity.

When the Mongol empire and its successors began to decline in the 14th century, rival polities rose to fill the vacuum. In the east of the region power eventually accumulated in Moscow, leading to the creation of the Grand Principality of Muscovy. To the west, what had become the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania joined forces in 1569 to create the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

In 1648 the Cossacks, settlers on the steppe who amalgamated into disciplined military units, led an uprising against the commonwealth. This led to the formation of their own state, the Hetmanate (see map 3). Many Ukrainians look back to the Hetmanate as the origin of their identity as an independent state. Indeed, the original Cossack lands were often called “Ukraine”, a Slavic word meaning “borderland”. Early Cossack warriors practised a limited form of democracy, a contrast to Muscovy’s autocratic regime. That the Hetmanate came about as an act of resistance to larger neighbouring powers is a history that resonates with Ukrainians today. In the 19th century, the folk memory of the Cossacks’ state helped inspire the birth of a recognisable form of Ukraine’s cultural nationalism.

But the Cossack state had a hard time. In 1654, threatened by the Poles as well as the Ottomans to the south, Cossack leaders pledged allegiance to the tsar of Muscovy. A few decades later intellectuals in Kyiv wrote what is believed to be one of the oldest texts outlining the basis of a “Slavo-Rossian” nation. They hoped to convince the tsar to defend them, not only because of their shared history and Orthodox religion , but also in the name of ethno-national unity.

By the end of the 17th century the Hetmanate’s territory had split into two: Muscovy took control of the east bank of the Dnieper river, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth seized the west. In 1708 Ivan Mazepa, a Cossack leader, led a failed uprising against Tsar Peter the Great. (Russia regards Mazepa as a traitor; in Ukraine he is a hero.) Peter went on to become Russia’s first emperor in 1721.

In the late 18th century the Russian empire broke up the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with help from Austria and Prussia. The Russians also seized territory in what is now southern Ukraine from the Ottomans. This included Crimea, annexed to Russia by Catherine the Great in 1783. She oversaw the final dismantling of the Cossack Hetmanate.

On the eve of the first world war the Russian empire stretched from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic (see map 4).

In 1917, weakened by the war, Russia experienced two revolutions. The first overthrew the Romanov dynasty. The second was the seizure of power by Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks. Officials in Kyiv founded the Ukrainian People’s Republic ( UPR ), a state in union with Russia. In January 1918 the UPR declared independence. Eventually Lenin took the UPR by force. But the strength of Ukrainian national identity compelled him to create a socialist Ukrainian republic, and to allow the use of the Ukrainian language. In 1922 Ukraine became one of the four founding members of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ( USSR )—or Soviet Union.

Ukraine’s territory expanded during the Soviet period. Under the Soviet Union’s non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, signed in 1939, the two countries carved up eastern Europe. In the ensuing fighting, what had been parts of Poland that were settled by Ukrainians were added to Soviet Ukraine. In 1954 the Soviet Union transferred the administration of Crimea from Soviet Russia to Ukraine.

But Ukraine also experienced great suffering. In the 1930s Josef Stalin’s policy of forced collectivisation of agriculture led to a famine, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor , which killed millions of people. In the mid-20th century Ukraine found itself part of what Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale, later called the “bloodlands” : territory in which Hitler and Stalin, though enemies, enabled each other’s crimes against locals. Co-operation between some Ukrainian nationalists and the Nazis during the war is adduced by Mr Putin as evidence for his claim that the Ukraine of today is run by fascists. In 1986, in the dying days of the Soviet Union, the world’s worst-ever nuclear accident took place at Chernobyl in Ukraine. The damage, and the ensuing cover-up, heightened Ukrainians’ anger towards the Kremlin.

In the 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev , the last Soviet leader, set out to reform the Soviet Union through openness and reform— glasnost and perestroika . But eastern Europeans, subject to Soviet control through the framework of the Warsaw Pact, took the opportunity to demand their freedom. In 1991 the Soviet Union itself collapsed, bringing independence to its 15 constituent republics (see map 6). Mr Putin has called this the biggest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.

Ukraine suddenly became home to the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. In 1994 it agreed to denuclearise in exchange for security assurances from America, Britain and the Russian Federation. (Ukraine used this agreement, known as the Budapest memorandum, to ask America and Britain for aid on the eve of Russia’s invasion in 2022.)

In 2004-05 the “Orange revolution” highlighted Ukraine’s democratic ambitions. Thousands protested against a rigged presidential election that gave victory to a pro-Russian candidate. Ukraine’s democratic resolve was even more visible during the “Maidan revolution” in 2013-14. This was a reaction to the refusal by Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s president, who was chummy with Russia, to sign an association agreement (an extensive free-trade deal) with the European Union. Thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets; Mr Yanukovych fled to Russia. Ukraine’s new government signed the agreement, infuriating Mr Putin.

His response to the Maidan marked Russia’s first military incursions into independent Ukraine. In 2014 the Kremlin illegally annexed Crimea and sent troops into the Donbas, a predominantly Russian-speaking region in eastern Ukraine (see map 7). Russia’s separatist proxies—led by the Russian intelligence officers— declared “people’s republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk. By December 2021, just before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the conflict had killed more than 14,000 people. The war continues. ■

Correction (January 30th) The borders in maps 3 and 4 have been updated since this story was published. The chronology of the founding of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1917 has also been clarified.

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A personal reflection on a nation's dream of independence and the nightmare Vladimir Putin has visited upon it.

Chrystia freeland.

May 12, 2015

O n March 24 last year, I was in my Toronto kitchen preparing school lunches for my kids when I learned from my Twitter feed that I had been put on the Kremlin's list of Westerners who were banned from Russia. This was part of Russia's retaliation for the sanctions the United States and its allies had slapped on Vladimir Putin's associates after his military intervention in Ukraine.

For the rest of my grandparents' lives, they saw themselves as political exiles with a responsibility to keep alive the idea of an independent Ukraine.

Four days earlier, nine people from the U.S. had been similarly blacklisted, including John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Harry Reid, then the majority leader of the Senate, and three other senators: John McCain, a long-time critic of Putin, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, and Dan Coats of Indiana, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany. “While I'm disappointed that I won't be able to go on vacation with my family in Siberia this summer,” Coats wisecracked, “I am honored to be on this list.”

I, however, was genuinely sad to be barred from Russia. I think of myself as a Russophile. I speak the language and studied the nation's literature and history in college. I loved living in Moscow in the mid-nineties as bureau chief for the Financial Times and have made a point of returning regularly over the subsequent fifteen years.

Speaking in #Toronto today, we must continue to support the Maidan & a democratic #Ukraine . pic.twitter.com/c6r2K63GDO — Chrystia Freeland (@cafreeland) February 23, 2014

I'm also a proud member of the Ukrainian-Canadian community. My maternal grandparents fled western Ukraine after Hitler and Stalin signed their non-aggression pact in 1939. They never dared to go back, but they stayed in close touch with their brothers and sisters and their families, who remained behind. For the rest of my grandparents' lives, they saw themselves as political exiles with a responsibility to keep alive the idea of an independent Ukraine, which had last existed, briefly, during and after the chaos of the 1917 Russian Revolution. That dream persisted into the next generation, and in some cases the generation after that.

My late mother moved back to her parents' homeland in the 1990s when Ukraine and Russia, along with the thirteen other former Soviet republics, became independent states. Drawing on her experience as a lawyer in Canada, she served as executive officer of the Ukrainian Legal Foundation, an NGO she helped to found.

My mother was born in a refugee camp in Germany before the family immigrated to western Canada. They were able to get visas thanks to my grandfather's older sister, who had immigrated between the wars. Her generation, and an earlier wave of Ukrainian settlers, had been actively recruited by successive Canadian governments keen to populate the vast prairies of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.

Today, Canada's Ukrainian community, which is 1.25 million-strong, is significantly larger as a percentage of total population than the one in the United States, which is why it is also a far more significant political force. And that in turn probably accounts for the fact that while there were no Ukrainian-Americans on the Kremlin's blacklist, four of the thirteen Canadians singled out were of Ukrainian extraction: in addition to myself, my fellow Member of Parliament James Bezan, Senator Raynell Andreychuk, and Paul Grod, who has no national elective role, but is head of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.

Until March of last year, none of this prevented my getting a Russian visa. I was, on several occasions, invited to moderate panels at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, the Kremlin's version of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Then, in 2013, Medvedev agreed to let me interview him in an off-the-record briefing for media leaders at the real Davos annual meeting.

That turned out to be the last year when Russia, despite its leadership's increasingly despotic and xenophobic tendencies, was still, along with the major Western democracies and Japan, a member in good standing of the G-8. Russia in those days was also part of the elite global group Goldman Sachs had dubbed the BRICs — the acronym stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China — the emerging market powerhouses that were expected to drive the world economy forward. Putin was counting on the $50 billion extravaganza of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics to further solidify Russia's position at the high table of the international community.

President Viktor Yanukovych's flight from Ukraine in the face of the Maidan uprising, which took place on the eve of the closing day of those Winter Games, astonished and enraged Putin. In his pique, as Putin proudly recalled in a March 2015 Russian government television film, he responded by ordering the takeover of Crimea after an all-night meeting. That occurred at dawn on the morning of February 23, 2014, the finale of the Sochi Olympics. The war of aggression, occupation, and annexation that followed turned out to be the grim beginning of a new era, and what might be the start of a new cold war, or worse.

Putin's Big Lie

Chapter 1: putin's big lie.

T he crisis that burst into the news a year-and-a-half ago has often been explained as Putin's exploitation of divisions between the mainly Russian-speaking majority of Ukrainians in the eastern and southern regions of the country, and the mainly Ukrainian-speaking majority in the west and center. Russian is roughly as different from Ukrainian as Spanish is from Italian.

Russian is roughly as different from Ukrainian as Spanish is from Italian.

While the linguistic factor is real, it is often oversimplified in several respects: Russian-speakers are by no means all pro-Putin or secessionist; Russian- and Ukrainian-speakers are geographically commingled; and virtually everyone in Ukraine has at least a passive understanding of both languages. To make matters more complicated, Russian is the first language of many ethnic Ukrainians, who are 78 percent of the population (but even that category is blurry, because many people in Ukraine have both Ukrainian and Russian roots). President Petro Poroshenko is an example — he always understood Ukrainian, but learned to speak it only in 1996, after being elected to Parliament; and Russian remains the domestic language of the Poroshenko family. The same is true in the home of Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Ukraine's prime minister. The best literary account of the Maidan uprising to date was written in Russian: Ukraine Diaries , by Andrey Kurkov, the Russian-born, ethnic Russian novelist, who lives in Kyiv .

Being a Russian-speaker in Ukraine does not automatically imply a yearning for subordination to the Kremlin any more than speaking English in Ireland or Scotland means support for a political union with England.

In this last respect, my own family is, once again, quite typical. My maternal grandmother, born into a family of Orthodox clerics in central Ukraine, grew up speaking Russian and Ukrainian. Ukrainian was the main language of the family refuge she eventually found in Canada, but she and my grandfather spoke Ukrainian and Russian as well as Polish interchangeably and with equal fluency. When they told stories, it was natural for them to quote each character in his or her original language. I do the same thing today with Ukrainian and English, my mother having raised me to speak both languages, as I in turn have done with my three children.

In short, being a Russian-speaker in Ukraine does not automatically imply a yearning for subordination to the Kremlin any more than speaking English in Ireland or Scotland means support for a political union with England. As Kurkov writes in his Diaries : “I am a Russian myself, after all, an ethnically Russian citizen of Ukraine. But I am not 'a Russian,' because I have nothing in common with Russia and its politics. I do not have Russian citizenship and I do not want it.”

That said, it's true that people on both sides of the political divide have tried to declare their allegiances through the vehicle of language. Immediately after the overthrow and self-exile of Yanukovych, radical nationalists in Parliament passed a law making Ukrainian the sole national language — a self-destructive political gesture and a gratuitous insult to a large body of the population.

However, the contentious language bill was never signed into law by the acting president. Many civic-minded citizens also resisted such polarizing moves. As though to make amends for Parliament's action, within 72 hours the people of Lviv, the capital of the Ukrainian-speaking west, held a Russian-speaking day, in which the whole city made a symbolic point of shifting to the country's other language.

Russians see Ukraine as the cradle of their civilization. Even the name came from there: the vast empire of the czars evolved from Kyivan Rus , a loose federation of Slavic tribes in the Middle Ages.

Less than two weeks after the language measure was enacted it was rescinded, though not before Putin had the chance to make considerable hay out of it.

The blurring of linguistic and ethnic identities reflects the geographic and historic ties between Ukraine and Russia. But that affinity has also bred, among many in Russia, a deep-seated antipathy to the very idea of a truly independent and sovereign Ukrainian state.

The ties that bind are also contemporary and personal. Two Soviet leaders — Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev — not only spent their early years in Ukraine but spoke Russian with a distinct Ukrainian accent. This historic connectedness is one reason why their post-Soviet successor, Vladimir Putin, has been able to build such wide popular support in Russia for championing — and, as he is now trying to do, recreating — “Novorossiya” (New Russia) in Ukraine.

Many Russians have themselves been duped into viewing Washington, London, and Berlin as puppet-masters attempting to destroy Russia.

In selling his revanchist policy to the Russian public, Putin has depicted Ukrainians who cherish their independence and want to join Europe and embrace the Western democratic values it represents as, at best, pawns and dupes of NATO — or, at worst, neo-Nazis. As a result, many Russians have themselves been duped into viewing Washington, London, and Berlin as puppet-masters attempting to destroy Russia.

Click here to learn more about the linguistic kinship

The linguistic kinship between Russian and Ukrainian has been an advantage to some, Freeland explains, but the familiarity has also caused problems.

For individual Ukrainians, though less often for the country as whole, this linguistic kinship has sometimes been an advantage. Nikolai Gogol, known to Ukrainians as Mykola Hohol, was the son of prosperous Ukrainian gentleman farmer. His first works were in Ukrainian, and he often wrote about Ukraine. But he entered the international literary canon as a Russian writer, a feat he is unlikely to have accomplished had Dead Souls been written in his native language. Many ethnic Ukrainians were likewise successful in the Soviet nomenklatura, where these so-called “younger brothers” of the ruling Russians had a trusted and privileged place, comparable to the role of Scots in the British Empire.

But familiarity can also breed contempt. Russia's perceived kinship with Ukrainians often slipped into an attempt to eradicate them. These have ranged from Tsar Alexander II's 1876 Ems Ukaz , which banned the use of Ukrainian in print, on the stage or in public lectures and the 1863 Valuev ukaz which asserted that “the Ukrainian language has never existed, does not exist, and cannot exist,” to Stalin's genocidal famine in the 1930s.

This subterfuge is, arguably, Putin's single most dramatic resort to the Soviet tactic of the Big Lie. Through his virtual monopoly of the Russian media, Putin has airbrushed away the truth of what happened a quarter of a century ago: the dissolution of the USSR was the result not of Western manipulation but of the failings of the Soviet state, combined with the initiatives of Soviet reformist leaders who had widespread backing from their citizens. Moreover, far from conspiring to tear the USSR apart, Western leaders in the late 1980s and early nineties used their influence to try to keep it together.

It all started with Mikhail Gorbachev, who, when he came to power in 1985, was determined to revitalize a sclerotic economy and political system with perestroika (literally, rebuilding), glasnost (openness), and a degree of democratization.

These policies, Gorbachev believed, would save the USSR. Instead, they triggered a chain reaction that led to its collapse. By softening the mailed-fist style of governing that traditionally accrued to his job, Gorbachev empowered other reformers — notably his protégé-turned-rival Boris Yeltsin — who wanted not to rebuild the USSR but to dismantle it.

Their actions radiated from Moscow to the capitals of the other Soviet republics — most dramatically Kyiv (then known to most of the world by its Russian name, Kiev). Ukrainian democratic reformers and dissidents seized the chance to advance their own agenda — political liberalization and Ukrainian statehood — so that their country could be free forever from the dictates of the Kremlin.

However, they were also pragmatists. Recognizing that after centuries of rule from Moscow, Ukraine's national consciousness was weak while its Communist Party was strong, they cut a tacit deal with the Ukrainian political leadership: in exchange for the Communists' support for independence, the democratic opposition would postpone its demands for political and economic reform.

By 1991, the centrifugal forces in the Soviet Union were coming to a head. Putin, in his rewrite of history, would have the world believe that the United States was cheering and covertly supporting secessionism. On the contrary, President George H.W. Bush was concerned that the breakup of the Soviet Union would be dangerously destabilizing. He had put his chips on Gorbachev and reform Communism and was skeptical about Yeltsin. In July of that year, Bush traveled first to Moscow to shore up Gorbachev, then to Ukraine, where, on August 1, he delivered a speech to the Ukrainian Parliament exhorting his audience to give Gorbachev a chance at keeping a reforming Soviet Union together: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”

I was living in Kyiv at the time, working as a stringer for the FT , The Economist , and The Washington Post . Listening to Bush in the parliamentary press gallery, I felt he had misread the growing consensus in Ukraine. That became even clearer immediately afterward when I interviewed Ukrainian members of Parliament (MPs), all of whom expressed outrage and scorn at Bush for, as they saw it, taking Gorbachev's side. The address, which New York Times columnist William Safire memorably dubbed the “Chicken Kiev speech,” backfired in the United States as well, antagonizing Americans of Ukrainian descent and other East European diasporas, which may have hurt Bush's chances of reelection, costing him support in several key states.

But Bush was no apologist for Communism. His speech was heavily influenced by Condoleezza Rice, not a notable soft touch, and it echoed the United Kingdom's Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, who, a year earlier, had said she could no more imagine opening a British embassy in Kyiv than in San Francisco.

The magnitude of the West's miscalculation, and Gorbachev's, became clear less than a month later. On August 19, a feckless attempt by Russian hardliners to overthrow Gorbachev triggered a stampede to the exits by the non-Russian republics, especially in the Baltic States and Ukraine. On August 24, in Kyiv , the MPs Bush had lectured three weeks earlier voted for independence.

The world would almost certainly never have heard of Putin had it not been for the dissolution of the USSR, which Putin has called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

Three months after that, I sat in my Kyiv studio apartment — on a cobblestone street where the Russian-language writer Mikhail Bulgakov once lived — listening to Gorbachev's televised plea to the Ukrainian people not to secede. He invoked his maternal grandmother who (like mine) was Ukrainian; he rhapsodized about his happy childhood in the Kuban in southern Russia, where the local dialect is closer to Ukrainian than to Russian. He quoted — in passable Ukrainian — a verse from Taras Shevchenko, a serf freed in the 19th century who became Ukraine's national poet. Gorbachev was fighting back tears as he spoke.

What does "My Ukraine" mean to you?

Share a thought or photo using #MyUkraine.

That was November 30, 1991. The next day, 92 percent of Ukrainians who participated in a national referendum voted for independence. A majority in every region of the country including Crimea (where 56 percent voted to separate) supported breaking away.

Two weeks later, Ukraine's President Leonid Kravchuk met Yeltsin, who by then was the elected president of the Russian Federation. The two of them, along with the president of Belarus, signed an accord that formally dissolved the Soviet Union. Gorbachev, who'd set in motion a process that he could not control, had lost his job and his country. Down came the red stars on the spires, up went the Russian tricolor in place of the hammer-and-sickle. Yeltsin took his place in the Kremlin office and residence that Putin occupies today.

Therein lies a stunning double irony. First, Yeltsin — who plucked Putin from obscurity and hand-picked him as his successor — would not have been able to engineer Russia's own emergence as an independent state had it not been for Ukraine's eagerness to break free as well. Second, the world would almost certainly never have heard of Putin had it not been for the dissolution of the USSR, which Putin has called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

Little Reform, Big Corruption

Chapter 2: little reform, big corruption.

T hen came the hard part. Having broken up the Soviet Union, Moscow and Kyiv both faced three immediate, vast, and novel challenges: how to establish genuine statehood and independence for their brand new countries; create efficacious democracies with checks and balances and rule of law; and make the transition from the Communist command economy to capitalism. Accomplishing all three tasks at once was essential, but it proved impossible. As a result, like Tolstoy's unhappy families, Russia and Ukraine each failed in its own way.

Ukraine's path to failure started with the 1991 compromise between democratic reformers and the Ukrainian Communist establishment.

Post-Soviet Russia's wrong turn came in the form of the Faustian bargain its first group of leaders — the Yeltsin team of economists known as the young reformers — was willing to strike in order to achieve their overriding priority: wrenching Russia from central planning to a market economy. They accomplished a lot, laying the foundations for Russia's economic rebound in the new millennium. But along the way they struck deals, most stunningly the vast handover of state assets to the oligarchs in exchange for their political support, which eventually transformed Russia into a kleptocracy and discredited the very idea of democracy with the Russian people.

Ukraine's path to failure started with the 1991 compromise between democratic reformers and the Ukrainian Communist establishment. That tactical alliance proved to be both brilliant and doomed. Its value was immediate — Ukraine became, as long as Russia acquiesced, a sovereign state. The cost was revealed only gradually, but it was staggeringly high.

Like Russia's Yeltsin, a former candidate-member of the Politburo, Ukraine's new leadership was made up overwhelmingly of relics of the Soviet-era leadership: Leonid Kravchuk, Ukraine's first president, had been the ideology secretary of the Communist Party in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic; his successor, Leonid Kuchma, had been the director of a mega-factory in Dnipropetrovsk that built the SS-18 missiles, the ten-warhead behemoth of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces. Once the superpower they had thrived in disappeared, these men, and most of those around them, adopted Ukrainian patriotism, soon proving themselves to be enthusiastic, determined, and wily advocates of Ukrainian independence. Their conversion was intensely opportunistic — it allowed them to preserve, and even enhance, their political power and offered the added perk of huge personal wealth. But because many of the leaders of post-Soviet Ukraine had a genuine emotional connection to their country, they also took pride in building Ukrainian sovereignty, which put them at odds with some of their former colleagues in Russia, including, they would eventually discover, Vladimir Putin.

Russia's economic performance in the two decades following the collapse of communism was mixed at best; Ukraine's was absolutely dire.

Unfortunately, their commitment to statehood was not matched by any coherent vision of economic reform, and they followed the usual post-Soviet project of enriching themselves and their comrades. The result, in addition to massive corruption, was gross mismanagement of the economy. Russia's economic performance in the two decades following the collapse of communism was mixed at best; Ukraine's was absolutely dire.

But when it came to democracy, the tables were reversed. Even though the pact between Ukrainian reformers and the Communist Party left the nomenklatura, as the Soviet leadership class was known, essentially intact, it turned out to be remarkably — and mercifully — inept at authoritarian governance. The Ukrainian Communist Party and the KGB, with their formal ties to Moscow severed, were unprepared to act effectively on their own. Instead of closing ranks to rule the country, the power elites broke into competing clans associated with the major cities and regions. The result was a newborn country that was accidentally pluralistic, allowing democracy to spring up through the cracks in the regime's control. Proof of that came in 1994 when Kravchuk lost his reelection campaign. The very fact that he could be voted out of office was an early but important milestone for a fledgling democracy. It is one that Russia, with its more deeply rooted absolutist political system, has yet to reach.

That said, what followed was not exactly encouraging. Kravchuk's successor, Leonid Kuchma, began to turn back the clock, harassing the opposition and the media. After serving the constitutionally maximum two five-year terms, Kuchma was able to rig the 2004 election in favor of his dauphin, Viktor Yanukovych, who was prime minister.

But Kuchma and Yanukovych overestimated their power to manipulate the electorate — and they underestimated civil society. In what became known as the Orange Revolution, Ukrainians camped out in the Maidan — the central square in Kyiv — and demanded a new election. They got it.

Then came a truly tragic irony. Yanukovych's opponent and polar opposite was Viktor Yushchenko, a highly respected economist and former head of the central bank. He was the champion of Ukrainian democracy. Largely for that reason, he was hated and feared by many in Russia, notably in Putin's inner circle. Yushchenko was poisoned on the eve of the ballot. The attempt on his life left him seriously ill and permanently scarred, yet he triumphed in the election. However, Yushchenko then did such a poor job in office that Yanukovych, who had failed to become president by cheating in 2004, ended up being elected fair and square in 2010.

Over the next four years of Yanukovych's rule, the Ukrainian state became more corrupt and abusive of political rights than it had been even in the last years of Kuchma's presidency. Nonetheless, the legacy of the 1991 compromise between the democrats and the apparatchiks lived on through the success of at least two of its main goals: peace and survival. When, two years ago, Ukraine celebrated its twenty-second anniversary as an independent state, the longest period in modern history, it had — for all its troubles — at least avoided violent separatism within its own borders, not to mention a war with Russia.

Then, in November of that year, came the first tremors of the cataclysm.

Maidan and the Return of History

Chapter 3: maidan and the return of history.

A ccording to Putin's propaganda, the original fault line was within Ukraine, in the form of ethnic tension, and only later did the conflict take on a geopolitical dimension and disrupt relations with Russia.

A more objective and accurate version is that the unremitting and escalating crisis of the last year-and-a-half erupted in two stages: first, when Yanukovych reneged on a promised trade deal with Europe, part of a general turning away from the West, which set off a massive demonstration of people power; and then when, with Moscow's support, he unleashed bloody force on the demonstrators.

But that drama has its own origin in 1991. Back then, the leaders and many of the people of Ukraine and Russia shared the dream of joining the political West, a choice that was about much more than geopolitics — it meant choosing the rule of law, democracy, and individual rights over authoritarian kleptocracy. Now Russia, at least as represented by the most powerful Kremlin leader since Stalin, has turned its back on that dream, while Ukraine's leader, with the backing of most of his people, is determined to keep it alive.

Sitting on my uncle Bohdan's couch in central Kyiv , ten days after Viktor Yanukovych's flight from Ukraine, I began to grasp what was at stake. Bohdan is my mother's brother, an agronomist who was born in and grew up in Canada, but moved to Kyiv during the 1990s , around the same time my mother did. He married a bilingual Ukrainian and, after two decades living there, is comfortable in both Ukrainian and Russian.

The citizens of the capital had suffered the bloodiest conflict on their streets since World War II.

When I arrived at Bohdan's high-ceilinged, post-war apartment on March 4, 2014, he and his wife, Tanya, like so many Kyivites, were glued to their television and its coverage of the political tumult that followed Yanukovych's ouster. The previous three-and-a-half months had been an emotional whipsaw. In the past two weeks alone, the citizens of the capital had suffered the bloodiest conflict on their streets since World War II. They had also watched their reviled president, Yanukovych, flee to Russia, a provisional government take charge, Russian troops assert control over part of their country, and Putin insist on his right to take further military action. Ukrainians were simultaneously celebrating their eviction of Yanukovych, mourning the victims of the slaughter on the Maidan, horrified by the invasion of Crimea, and fearful of the possibility of a long, grinding war fanned and often directly waged by their giant neighbor to the north.

During my evenings on my uncle's couch, I watched a number of extraordinarily dramatic events playing out on the TV screen, including many profiles in heroism. Some dramatized the complexity of the ethnic and linguistic issue that Putin was exploiting to his own cynical advantage. In those first days of March, for example, Maksym Emelyanenko, captain of the corvette Ternopil in the Ukrainian navy, was ordered by the commander of the Russian Black Sea Fleet to hand over control of his vessel. Captain Emelyanenko answered: “Russians do not surrender!” The surprised Russian vice-admiral asked the Ukrainian seaman what he meant. Captain Emelyanenko replied that, although he was ethnically Russian (his Ukrainian last name notwithstanding), he had given his oath of loyalty to the Ukrainian state and he would not betray it.

It quickly became apparent that peaceful tactics would not succeed against the near-term objectives of Putin.

My uncle and aunt, along with many Ukrainians, hoped that passive resistance would prevail as it had in the Maidan demonstrators' stand-off with Yanukovych. But, as the covert occupation of Crimea, ordered by Putin and spearheaded by “little green men” — as the Russian soldiers without insignia who took over the peninsula were called — inched toward outright annexation, it quickly became apparent that peaceful tactics would not succeed against the near-term objectives of Putin. That said, I could sense, even in those early days, that Putin's use of overwhelming Russian force to crush Ukrainian resistance was backfiring against his ultimate goal, which was to bring Ukraine back under Russian sway.

The day after I arrived in Kyiv , I met Yegor Sobolev, a 37-year-old activist, over cappuccinos at a cafe on the Khreshchatyk , Kyiv 's central boulevard. An ethnic Russian who was born and raised in Russia, Sobolev was one of a group of young, politically engaged Ukrainians who were the backbone of the Maidan movement starting back in November 2013. He was a confidant of Mustafa Nayyem, a Muslim refugee from Afghanistan who was celebrated for launching the protests through a Facebook call to action. Sobolev and Nayyem are both former journalists who had tried to uncover the skullduggery and looting of the Yanukovych regime, and then had been motivated to political action by their revulsion at Yanukovych's brutality. (Both men would be elected to Parliament several months later, as advocates of democratic and economic reform.)

Learn more about Putin

Mr. putin: operative in the kremlin.

The great irony of Vladimir Putin's intervention in Ukraine, as Chrystia Freeland notes in this essay, is that the world may never have heard of him if not for Ukraine's separation from the USSR in 1991. In the new and expanded book, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin , Brookings scholars Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill detail the origins of Putin's rise, his leadership styles, what drives him, and how far he is willing to go. Foreign Affairs has called Mr. Putin the “most useful” biography of Vladimir Putin.

Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine, and the New Cold War by Marvin Kalb

Russia and the New World Disorder by Bobo Lo

“For many years, a big social problem was the passivity of people in the building of the nation,” Sobolev told me. “Yanukovych forced us, not just during the Maidan but before, to get angry and finally to fight, even with weapons. People have learned that the country is them.”

I heard similar sentiments wherever I went in Kyiv that week. The capital was, almost literally, grievously wounded. The air was thick with smoke from bonfires, reeking with the stench of burning tires. The once-elegant Khreshchatyk was a grimy tent city, the avenue itself denuded of its cobblestones because protesters had pulled them up to throw at the armored special forces who were firing tear gas and live bullets at them.

A steady stream of Kyivites, many of them stylish matrons in long fur coats and high-heeled leather boots, made their way to Institytska, the steep street leading up from the Maidan. Their mission was to lay bouquets on the two-story-high mountain of flowers in tribute to the victims of police and snipers, known as the Heavenly Hundred (it sounds less mawkish in Ukrainian).

The city was experiencing the kind of we're-all-in-this-together feeling familiar to anyone who lived through the London Blitz, or 9/11, or other times of national crisis and tragedy.

But Kyiv also felt invigorated and united. The city was experiencing the kind of we're-all-in-this-together feeling familiar to anyone who lived through the London Blitz, or 9/11, or other times of national crisis and tragedy.

“Yanukovych freed Ukraine, and Putin is uniting it,” Sobolev told me. “Ukraine is functioning not through its government but through the self-organization of its people and their sense of human decency.”

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I found myself harking back to 1991, when Ukrainian democrats I interviewed felt they had to choose between democracy and sovereignty. Now, in the wake of the Maidan and in the midst of the Russian land grab, Ukrainians had come to see that both are critical and that they are mutually reinforcing.

By early March of last year, as it became glaringly obvious that Ukraine was fighting not just for its political soul but for national survival, support for the agenda of the pro-Maidan provisional government and the sense of solidarity under pressure started to flow south and east — into the very regions that both Putin and simplistic international media coverage had characterized as pro-Russian.

A comprehensive poll done in April by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, one of the country's most respected polling firms, found, for instance, that in those regions of Ukraine 76.8 percent of respondents opposed the seizure of government buildings by separatist protesters; only 11.7 percent supported it. Nearly 70 percent were opposed to the unification of their region of Ukraine with Russia; only 15.4 percent were in favor. An overwhelming 87.7 percent said that Ukraine should make its own decisions about internal affairs, such as constitutional structure and official language, without any involvement from outside powers, specifically Russia. (Interestingly, 71.5 percent said the rights of Russian language speakers were not under any threat in Ukraine.) It is worth underscoring that these strong views are the opinions of the lands Putin has claimed as “ Novorossiya ,” the largely Russian-speaking southern and eastern regions of Ukraine.

“People in Odesa , Mykolaev , Donetsk , and Dnipropetrovsk [all cities with large Russian-speaking populations] are coming out to defend their country,” Sobolev said. “They have never liked the western Ukrainian, Galician point of view. But they are showing themselves to be equally patriotic. They are defending their country from foreign aggression. Fantastical things are happening.”

Learn about Ukraine's best-known poet, Serhiy Zhadan

Western Ukraine, known as Galicia , had long seen itself as the most nationally conscious region, the one that would lead a broader effort to knit the nation together and build a sovereign state.

Culturally, historically, linguistically, and even religiously southern and eastern Ukraine were quite different, and did not always appreciate the Galician assumption that the western Ukrainian version of Ukraine was the best and truest one. One of the paradoxical consequences of the Russian invasion was that southern and eastern Ukraine were proudly asserting their versions of Ukrainian identity as equally authentic and powerful.

Four days after I arrived in Kyiv , Serhiy Zhadan, described by The New Yorker as Ukraine's “best-known poet” and “most famous counter-culture writer” was beaten by pro-Russian agitators at a Maidan demonstration. But that protest didn't take place in Kyiv 's Maidan. It happened 500 kilometers east in Kharkiv , the capital of eastern Ukraine where Zhadan, who was born in the Donbass , now lives and works. His writing — think Trainspotting set against a grim post-Soviet backdrop — is very popular in Russia, but he writes in Ukrainian, partly, he says, as a political act. When his attackers asked him to kneel and kiss the Russian flag, Zhadan recalled on his Facebook page — “I told them to go fuck themselves.” (Zhadan's English-language translator happens to be another uncle of mine.)

Before I left Kyiv in March, I took a final walk along the Khreshchatyk . Two hand-written signs, taped to the walls of buildings, stood out. “Russian people, we love you,” one said, in Russian. “Putin, Ukraine will be your grave,” another, written in Ukrainian, warned.

Click here to learn about Ukraine's best-known poet, Serhiy Zhadan

Freeland describes how Zhadan represents a paradoxical consequence of the Russian invasion: an assertion of Ukrainian identity in the east and south.

Blue and Yellow vs. “Little Green Men”

Chapter 4: blue and yellow vs. “the little green men”.

I saw the transformation Sobolev had told me about first-hand ten weeks later, when I returned to Ukraine for the presidential election. I spent a day in Dnipropetrovsk , a city just 150 miles from the Russian border, whose citizens are largely Russian-speaking and whose industry was vital to the Soviet Union (to wit: those SS-18 missiles Kuchma built for a living). Leonid Brezhnev was born and educated there, and it remained his lifelong political powerbase.

Gr8 mtng MP Petro Poroshenko today, overlooking #Maidan ; Rus-speaker from south, says Rus invasion has united country pic.twitter.com/gihcnuoZ89 — Chrystia Freeland (@cafreeland) March 5, 2014

But on election day, Dnipropetrovsk was wreathed in symbols of Ukrainian statehood. Apartment buildings were draped in blue and yellow, the colors of the national flag; every second car sported the same colors; many election officials wore shirts worked with traditional Ukrainian embroidery. Dnipropetrovsk had resisted the little green men — the governor had offered a $10,000 bounty for any captured Russian soldier — and was scornful of the “Soviet” mentality of neighboring Donetsk, which was suffering from a so-called hybrid war (waged by Russian-backed locals armed with Russian equipment and artillery and supported by undercover Russian officers, advisors, and soldiers who were, according to the Russian government, “volunteering while on holiday”).

This political shift provoked another twist of Ukraine's linguistic kaleidoscope. Now that civil society's common enemy was Yanukovych and the Kremlin political values he represented, speaking Ukrainian in public came to symbolize the fight for democracy, notably including in the east. For his part, Sobolev told me he had overcome his “psychological barrier” to speaking Ukrainian by reading For Whom the Bell Tolls in Ukrainian translation out loud to himself.

The Threat and Promise of Ukrainian Democracy

Chapter 5: the threat and promise of ukrainian democracy.

It is an entirely good thing that Ukraine's new leaders are defining their national identity as inherently democratic and freedom-loving. But there have been times when Russia might have laid claim to such an identity, too. To take just one example: on August 19, 1991, when Boris Yeltsin climbed on top of a tank in Moscow in front of the White House to defy a hardline coup and assert that “the democratic process in the country is acquiring an increasingly broad sweep and an irreversible character, the peoples of Russia are becoming masters of their destiny.”

Putin today is master of Crimea, but Russia is more isolated, less respected, and surrounded by more suspicious neighbors than was the proud host of the Sochi Olympics just a year ago.

A quarter century later, no one would make that assertion in Moscow. But it is the sort of thing said every day in Kyiv . And that is why Putin is determined to subdue Ukraine. He doesn't need Ukraine for economic gain — indeed, his aggression has come at a great, and mounting, economic cost. He doesn't need Ukraine for strategic reasons — Putin today is master of Crimea, but Russia is more isolated, less respected, and surrounded by more suspicious neighbors than was the proud host of the Sochi Olympics just a year ago. He doesn't even need the immediate popularity bump leaders always get at the beginning of a foreign war, especially one promised to be short and victorious. What he does need is to show that a democratic, rule-of-law Ukraine can't work.

As Mikhail Kasyanov, who served as Putin's prime minister and once shared a sauna with his boss before joining the political opposition, told me in November: “We are similar people. As soon as Russians understand that Ukrainians can be free, why shouldn't we be, too? That is why Mr. Putin hates what is happening so much, and doesn't want Ukraine to escape his grip.”

Putin “submitted to paranoia” and decided it was essential to crush the new Ukraine.

Leonid Bershidsky, a distinguished Russian journalist who was so appalled by what happened in his country in 2014 that he left, thinks that for Putin, February 22, 2014 was the tipping point. That was the day the police melted away from Mezhyhirya , Yanukovych's grotesquely palatial estate outside Kyiv , and the public flooded in. They discovered a lavish complex including grand, manicured parks, a zoo, and a restaurant shaped like a pirate ship. Inside the main residence, a solid gold loaf of rye bread — a tribute to Yanukovych from a petitioner — was found. That absurd sculpture quickly became the symbol of Yanukovych's criminal excess. (You can follow it on Twitter at the Russian-language parody account @zolotoybaton .) That was the moment, Bershidsky believes, when Putin “submitted to paranoia” and decided it was essential to crush the new Ukraine. After all, he and his cronies have palaces, too.

Author Biography

Chrystia Freeland is a journalist, author, and politician. She was a stringer in Ukraine, deputy editor of The Globe and Mail , and has held positions at the Financial Times ranging from Moscow bureau chief to U.S. managing editor. As an activist Ukrainian-Canadian, she has written several articles criticizing Russia's interventionism and supporting Ukrainian independence. Freeland is author of Sale of the Century a book about Russia's transition from communism to capitalism, and the award-winning book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else . Since 2013, Freeland has been a member of Canada's Parliament, representing Toronto Centre in the House of Commons.

Bershidsky is right. There were many bloodier and more dramatic episodes over the past year. But the opening of the gates of Mezhyhirya gets to the essence of what is at stake. The uprising in Ukraine and the fight between Ukraine and Russia is about many things — Ukraine's consolidation as a nation, a wounded Russia's rising nationalism, the uncertainty of a world in which the Cold War is over — but we haven't quite figured out what will replace it. At its heart, however, the conflicts within Ukraine, and the fight Putin has picked with Ukraine, are about post-Soviet kleptocracy, and where and whether there is a popular will to resist it.

Last September, I drove out to Mezhyhirya . It had become a much-visited public park. The grassy shoulders of the surrounding country roads were crowded with parked cars. A few couples were having their wedding pictures taken beside the ornate fountains. Two entrepreneurs were renting bicycles at the entrance to make it easier to tour the vast grounds. Others were doing a brisk business selling toilet paper and doormats with Yanukovych's image on them. Even more popular were the ones depicting Putin.

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Like other products of the Institution, The Brookings Essay is intended to contribute to discussion and stimulate debate on important issues. The views are solely those of the author.

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Russia's War on Ukraine : News, Context & Analysis

A beginner's guide to the russian invasion of ukraine.

This guide is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather to introduce sources to help researchers and students deepen their understanding of events unfolding in Ukraine. It includes selected links to news sources, to books in held in Stanford's Library, to helpful overviews outlining historical and political factors leading to this moment, and to articles and reports by experts in the field.

News Sources (Reliable and Freely Accessible)

Kyiv Independent The Kyiv Independent is Ukraine’s English-language media outlet, created by journalists who were fired from the Kyiv Post for defending editorial independence. The Kyiv Independent provides fair and reliable news on a variety of topics, from Russia’s war against Ukraine and disinformation campaigns to the ongoing pandemic and medical procurement, from human rights in occupied Donbas and Crimea to reforms in Kyiv.
Meduza Independent, international outlet for verified and objective news and feature stories from hundreds of sources in Russia and across the former Soviet Union.
BBC News BBC global news website, special coverage of Ukraine.
NPR Daily Recaps & News Coverage Special Series: Ukraine Invasion Explained, including links to NPR's State of Ukraine podcast updates.

Ukrains'ka Pravda (Ukrainian Truth) is an independent online publication ( with a YouTube site that has over 300,000 subscribers) that covers socio-political and economic events in Ukraine. Regular authors include political scientists, economists, writers, cultural figures, well-known journalists. Its stance is pro-Ukrainian, and it has been covering all aspects of the war in detail.

Ukrains'ka Pravda

Library Resources

The Gates of Europe: The History of Ukraine

As Ukraine is embroiled in an ongoing struggle with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence, celebrated historian Serhii Plokhy explains that today’s crisis is a case of history repeating itself: the Ukrainian conflict is only the latest in a long history of turmoil over Ukraine’s sovereignty. Situated between Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, Ukraine has been shaped by empires that exploited the nation as a strategic gateway between East and West—from the Romans and Ottomans to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. In The Gates of Europe , Plokhy examines Ukraine’s search for its identity through the lives of major Ukrainian historical figures, from its heroes to its conquerors.

The House with the Stained Glass Window

Recommended by historian Marci Shore:

It’s about four generations of women who share an apartment in a house in Lviv. The story extends from the Soviet Terror of the 1930s to the Ukrainian revolution of 2014. This is a Bildungsroman, in which the coming-of-age of the narrator, the youngest of the women, draws us into an archaeology of Lviv; the once-Habsburg, then-Polish, now post-Soviet Ukrainian city reveals itself as a layered composition. It’s a beautiful novel. https://fivebooks.com/best-books/ukraine-marci-shore/

The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation

Andrew Wilson brings his classic work up to the present, through the Orange Revolution and its aftermath, including the 2006 election, the ensuing crisis of 2007, the Ukrainian response to the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, the economic crisis in Ukraine, and the 2009 gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine. It looks forward to the key election in 2010, which will revisit many of the issues that were thought settled in 2004.

Greetings from Novorossiya: Eyewitness to the War in Ukraine

Paweł Pieniążek is a very young Polish journalist. He was beaten by Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych’s riot police in the early days of the Maidan, in December 2014. Nonetheless, he stayed in Ukraine, and after Yanukovych’s defeat and flight to Russia, followed his story to the Donbas. This is some of the best reportage from a little-understood war. Pieniazek’s stories reveal the tragedy of hybrid war in the age of post-truth: people are being killed in fact for reasons that are fiction. https://fivebooks.com/best-books/ukraine-marci-shore/

Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine

Inspired and informed by the author's own experiences in Ukraine, this is a history of a politically and culturally rich collection of borderlands. The word "Ukraine" means "borderland" and, for most of its history, the lands that make up Ukraine have been a collection of other countries' borders. Split between Russia and Poland in the 18th century, between Austria and Russia in the 19th century and between Russia, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia between World War I and II, before being swallowed whole by the Soviet Union in 1945, Ukrainians have never, until 1991, known anything approaching a state of their own. Until the depradations of Stalin and Naziism, Ukraine was ethnically diverse: Russians, Poles and Jews lived in the cities; Crimea belonged to Muslim tartars, Greeks and Armenians; Boyks, Lemks and Hutsuls farmed the Ukrainian Carpathians. Their ghosts linger on in literature (Gogol, Bulgakov), language and in an architecture quite distincitve from that of Russia. Combining history, her own adventures in Ukraine and personal interviews, Anna Reid charts the tragic past of this land and the troubles inflicted upon it, and considers how a country builds itself up from scratch and creates a sense of national identity.

Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev

Kurkov writes of a traumatised country – his Ukraine Diaries harbours neither illusions about the tremendous struggles facing Ukraine, nor disillusions about the need for dissent and the Maidan. Russia has invaded Ukraine, and the ‘civil’ in civil war – a word Kurkov feels very important to Putin – has faded away. Kurkov concludes that Ukraine has learnt a cynical lesson from Europe – money matters more than convictions. He believes that this lesson will haunt Europe for years to come.

Ukraine's Maidan, Russia's War : A Chronicle and Analysis of the Revolution of Dignity

In early 2014, sparked by an assault by their government on peaceful students, Ukrainians rose up against a deeply corrupt, Moscow-backed regime. Initially demonstrating under the banner of EU integration, the Maidan protesters proclaimed their right to a dignified existence; they learned to organize, to act collectively, to become a civil society. Most prominently, they established a new Ukrainian identity: territorial, inclusive, and present-focused with powerful mobilizing symbols. Driven by an urban “bourgeoisie” that rejected the hierarchies of industrial society in favor of a post-modern heterarchy, a previously passive post-Soviet country experienced a profound social revolution that generated new senses: “Dignity” and “fairness” became rallying cries for millions. Europe as the symbolic target of political aspiration gradually faded, but the impact (including on Europe) of Ukraine’s revolution remained. When Russia invaded—illegally annexing Crimea and then feeding continuous military conflict in the Donbas—, Ukrainians responded with a massive volunteer effort and touching patriotism.

In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

Making his way from the Polish border in the west, through the capital city and the heart of the 2014 revolution, to the eastern frontline near the Russian border, seasoned war reporter Tim Judah brings a rare glimpse of the reality behind the headlines. Along the way he talks to the people living through the conflict - mothers, soldiers, businessmen, poets, politicians - whose memories of a contested past shape their attitudes, allegiances and hopes for the future. Together, their stories paint a vivid picture of a nation trapped between powerful forces, both political and historical.

Jews and Ukrainians in Russian Literary Borderlands

Recommended by historian Marci Shore:

“Ukraine” means borderlands. In the territory that is now present-day Ukraine, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Yiddish and German languages, literatures, humors, cultures, joys and despairs intermingled for hundreds of years. In this study spanning the century from 1829 to 1929, Glaser leads us into encounters among the most variegated characters. The book takes us through the First World War, the fall of the tsarist empire, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Civil War that followed. In these years, Kyiv alone was occupied by five different armies; the confusion was breathtaking—the literature as well.

The author is a scholar of comparative literature who is herself not Ukrainian, but who came to learn Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish and to grasp Ukraine extremely well. The book allows us to wander among and within wonderful tales and wonderful literature. The setting of the marketplace is in some ways the center of this book, the marketplace as a site that illuminates the simultaneous drama and everydayness of encounters with others. https://fivebooks.com/best-books/ukraine-marci-shore/

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold History of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand.

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

In 1932-33, nearly four million Ukrainians died of starvation, having been deliberately deprived of food. It is one of the most devastating episodes in the history of the twentieth century. With unprecedented authority and detail, Red Famine investigates how this happened, who was responsible, and what the consequences were. It is the fullest account yet published of these terrible events.The book draws on a mass of archival material and first-hand testimony only available since the end of the Soviet Union, as well as the work of Ukrainian scholars all over the world. It includes accounts of the famine by those who survived it, describing what human beings can do when driven mad by hunger. It shows how the Soviet state ruthlessly used propaganda to turn neighbours against each other in order to expunge supposedly 'anti-revolutionary' elements. It also records the actions of extraordinary individuals who did all they could to relieve the suffering.The famine was rapidly followed by an attack on Ukraine's cultural and political leadership - and then by a denial that it had ever happened at all. Census reports were falsified and memory suppressed. Some western journalists shamelessly swallowed the Soviet line; others bravely rejected it, and were undermined and harassed. The Soviet authorities were determined not only that Ukraine should abandon its national aspirations, but that the country's true history should be buried along with its millions of victims. Red Famine, a triumph of scholarship and human sympathy, is a milestone in the recovery of those memories and that history. At a moment of crisis between Russia and Ukraine, it also shows how far the present is shaped by the past.

Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia is Zhadan’s most recent book to appear in English. It’s a novel composed of different stories, mostly prose with some poetry as well. The stories are set in Kharkiv, a city in eastern Ukraine where Zhadan, who is himself from the Donbas, now lives. It was unclear in spring of 2014 whether there was going to be a separatist rebellion in Kharkiv, whether it was also going to become part of the territory ensconced in war. https://fivebooks.com/best-books/ukraine-marci-shore/

Everything Flows

Everything Flows takes us through the Stalinist experience in a very condensed but pointed way. It takes us through the story of the famine in Ukraine, and there’s no way to understand Ukraine without understanding the horror of that famine. https://fivebooks.com/best-books/ukraine-marci-shore/

Historical Context

Context in 4 Podcasts:

Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Yale Historian Timothy Snyder to understand the background that led up to this point in history. ( Today Explained )

Harvard historian, Serhii Plokhii talks with NPR's Throughline about the origins and development of Ukrainian identity: how it formed, its relationship to Russia, and how it helps us understand what's happening now. ( Throughline )

Ryan Grim talks with Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko about his country’s history, from the Dark Ages up the current war. ( Deconstructed )

Journalist Anne Applebaum has been covering the war in Ukraine for The Atlantic . She talks with Terry Gross about why Putin takes Ukrainian democracy as a personal and political threat — and how Stalin created a famine to destroy the Ukrainian national movement in the 1930s. ( Fresh Air )

Pullitzer Center Resources and Articles This twitter thread from the Pulitzer Center draws together links to resources and articles that are helpful in setting the historical context for Russian belligerence and conflict in the region.
Ukraine Articles from Nationalities Papers A syllabus for understanding the crisis in Ukraine, based on articles published in Nationalities Papers. Available free through the end of March 2022, and continuously accessible via Stanford Libraries.
Russia, Ukraine, and the West (CPCS Virtual Issue) To provide some context and analysis of Russia’s part in this crisis, this virtual issue of Communist and Post-Communist Studies presents a range of articles published during the last decade that highlight the drivers of Russia’s foreign policy towards Ukraine and the West.

Research & Analysis

NATO Library Guide: The Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Special Focus The Russian Invasion of Ukraine - Special Focus is a collection of articles by leading experts with their latest analysis on the Russia-Ukraine crisis. Feature articles, opinion pieces, and links to pertinent resources have been collected here by the NATO Library staff here for easy access.
Federal Documents Sources on the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict A select list of documents, websites, books and other resources that provide information, background and perspective on the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The list below is meant simply as a starting point for research. While the emphasis is on publications and sources produced by the US government, other types of resources are also included. Part of the Cold War and Internal Security Collection at J.Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University.
Sources on the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict (Part Two): The Russian Military and Eastern Europe A select list of sources on the Russian armed forces and the military situation in eastern Europe since 2014. The focus is on material produced by the US federal government, though useful non-government and international resources are also provided. Part of the Cold War and Internal Security Collection at J.Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University.
News, Context & Analysis

Curator for Slavic and East European Collections

Last Updated: Mar 14, 2022 2:21 PM
URL: https://guides.library.stanford.edu/russian-war-on-ukraine

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The Talks That Could Have Ended the War in Ukraine

A hidden history of diplomacy that came up short—but holds lessons for future negotiations, by samuel charap and sergey radchenko.

In the early hours of February 24, 2022, the Russian air force struck targets across Ukraine. At the same time, Moscow’s infantry and armor poured into the country from the north, east, and south. In the days that followed, the Russians attempted to encircle Kyiv.

These were the first days and weeks of an invasion that could well have resulted in Ukraine ’s defeat and subjugation by Russia. In retrospect, it seems almost miraculous that it did not.

What happened on the battlefield is relatively well understood. What is less understood is the simultaneous intense diplomacy involving Moscow, Kyiv, and a host of other actors, which could have resulted in a settlement just weeks after the war began.

By the end of March 2022, a series of in-person meetings in Belarus and Turkey and virtual engagements over video conference had produced the so-called Istanbul Communiqué, which described a framework for a settlement. Ukrainian and Russian negotiators then began working on the text of a treaty, making substantial progress toward an agreement. But in May, the talks broke off. The war raged on and has since cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides.

What happened? How close were the parties to ending the war? And why did they never finalize a deal?

To shed light on this often overlooked but critical episode in the war, we have examined draft agreements exchanged between the two sides, some details of which have not been reported previously. We have also conducted interviews with several participants in the talks as well as with officials serving at the time in key Western governments, to whom we have granted anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters. And we have reviewed numerous contemporaneous and more recent interviews with and statements by Ukrainian and Russian officials who were serving at the time of the talks. Most of these are available on YouTube but are not in English and thus not widely known in the West. Finally, we scrutinized the timeline of events from the start of the invasion through the end of May, when talks broke down. When we put all these pieces together, what we found is surprising—and could have significant implications for future diplomatic efforts to end the war.

In the midst of Moscow’s unprecedented aggression, the Russians and the Ukrainians almost finalized an agreement.

Some observers and officials (including, most prominently, Russian President Vladimir Putin ) have claimed that there was a deal on the table that would have ended the war but that the Ukrainians walked away from it because of a combination of pressure from their Western patrons and Kyiv’s own hubristic assumptions about Russian military weakness. Others have dismissed the significance of the talks entirely, claiming that the parties were merely going through the motions and buying time for battlefield realignments or that the draft agreements were unserious.

Although those interpretations contain kernels of truth, they obscure more than they illuminate. There was no single smoking gun; this story defies simple explanations. Further, such monocausal accounts elide completely a fact that, in retrospect, seems extraordinary: in the midst of Moscow’s unprecedented aggression, the Russians and the Ukrainians almost finalized an agreement that would have ended the war and provided Ukraine with multilateral security guarantees, paving the way to its permanent neutrality and, down the road, its membership in the EU.

A final agreement proved elusive, however, for a number of reasons. Kyiv’s Western partners were reluctant to be drawn into a negotiation with Russia, particularly one that would have created new commitments for them to ensure Ukraine’s security. The public mood in Ukraine hardened with the discovery of Russian atrocities at Irpin and Bucha. And with the failure of Russia’s encirclement of Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky became more confident that, with sufficient Western support, he could win the war on the battlefield. Finally, although the parties’ attempt to resolve long-standing disputes over the security architecture offered the prospect of a lasting resolution to the war and enduring regional stability, they aimed too high, too soon. They tried to deliver an overarching settlement even as a basic cease-fire proved out of reach.

Today, when the prospects for negotiations appear dim and relations between the parties are nearly nonexistent, the history of the spring 2022 talks might seem like a distraction with little insight directly applicable to present circumstances. But Putin and Zelensky surprised everyone with their mutual willingness to consider far-reaching concessions to end the war. They might well surprise everyone again in the future.

ASSURANCE OR GUARANTEE?

What did the Russians want to accomplish by invading Ukraine? On February 24, 2022, Putin gave a speech in which he justified the invasion by mentioning the vague goal of “denazification” of the country. The most reasonable interpretation of “denazification” was that Putin sought to topple the government in Kyiv, possibly killing or capturing Zelensky in the process.

Yet days after the invasion began, Moscow began probing to find grounds for a compromise. A war Putin expected to be a cakewalk was already proving anything but, and this early openness to talking suggests he appears to have already abandoned the idea of outright regime change. Zelensky, as he had before the war, voiced an immediate interest in a personal meeting with Putin. Though he refused to talk directly with Zelensky, Putin did appoint a negotiating team. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko played the part of mediator.

The talks began on February 28 at one of Lukashenko’s spacious countryside residences near the village of Liaskavichy, about 30 miles from the Belarusian-Ukrainian border. The Ukrainian delegation was headed by Davyd Arakhamia, the parliamentary leader of Zelensky’s political party, and included Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, and other senior officials. The Russian delegation was led by Vladimir Medinsky, a senior adviser to the Russian president who had earlier served as culture minister. It also included deputy ministers of defense and foreign affairs, among others.

At the first meeting, the Russians presented a set of harsh conditions, effectively demanding Ukraine’s capitulation. This was a nonstarter. But as Moscow’s position on the battlefield continued to deteriorate, its positions at the negotiating table became less demanding. So on March 3 and March 7, the parties held a second and third round of talks, this time in Kamyanyuki, Belarus, just across the border from Poland. The Ukrainian delegation presented demands of their own: an immediate cease-fire and the establishment of humanitarian corridors that would allow civilians to safely leave the war zone. It was during the third round of talks that the Russians and the Ukrainians appear to have examined drafts for the first time. According to Medinsky, these were Russian drafts, which Medinsky’s delegation brought from Moscow and which probably reflected Moscow’s insistence on Ukraine’s neutral status.

At this point, in-person meetings broke up for nearly three weeks, although the delegations continued to meet via Zoom. In those exchanges, the Ukrainians began to focus on the issue that would become central to their vision of the endgame for the war: security guarantees that would oblige other states to come to Ukraine’s defense if Russia attacked again in the future. It is not entirely clear when Kyiv first raised this issue in conversations with the Russians or Western countries. But on March 10, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, then in Antalya, Turkey, for a meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, spoke of a “systematic, sustainable solution” for Ukraine, adding that the Ukrainians were “ready to discuss” guarantees it hoped to receive from NATO member states and Russia.

What Kuleba seemed to have in mind was a multilateral security guarantee, an arrangement whereby competing powers commit to the security of a third state, usually on the condition that it will remain unaligned with any of the guarantors. Such agreements had mostly fallen out of favor after the Cold War . Whereas alliances such as NATO intend to maintain collective defense against a common enemy, multilateral security guarantees are designed to prevent conflict among the guarantors over the alignment of the guaranteed state, and by extension to ensure that state’s security.

Ukraine had a bitter experience with a less ironclad version of this sort of agreement: a multilateral security assurance, as opposed to a guarantee. In 1994, it signed on to the so-called Budapest Memorandum, joining the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a nonnuclear weapons state and agreeing to give up what was then the world’s third-largest arsenal. In return, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States promised that they would not attack Ukraine. Yet contrary to a widespread misconception, in the event of aggression against Ukraine, the agreement required the signatories only to call a UN Security Council meeting, not to come to the country’s defense.

Russia’s full-scale invasion—and the cold reality that Ukraine was fighting an existential war on its own—drove Kyiv to find a way to both end the aggression and ensure it never happened again. On March 14, just as the two delegations were meeting via Zoom, Zelensky posted a message on his Telegram channel calling for “normal, effective security guarantees” that would not be “like the Budapest ones.” In an interview with Ukrainian journalists two days later, his adviser Podolyak explained that what Kyiv sought were “absolute security guarantees” that would require that “the signatories . . . do not stand aside in the event of an attack on Ukraine, as is the case now. Instead, they [would] take an active part in defending Ukraine in a conflict.”

Ukraine’s demand not to be left to fend for itself again is completely understandable. Kyiv wanted (and still wants) to have a more reliable mechanism than Russia’s goodwill for its future security. But getting a guarantee would be difficult. Naftali Bennett was the Israeli prime minister at the time the talks were happening and was actively mediating between the two sides. In an interview with journalist Hanoch Daum posted online in February 2023, he recalled that he attempted to dissuade Zelensky from getting stuck on the question of security guarantees. “There is this joke about a guy trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to a passerby,” Bennett explained. “I said: ‘America will give you guarantees? It will commit that in several years if Russia violates something, it will send soldiers? After leaving Afghanistan and all that?’ I said: ‘Volodymyr, it won’t happen.’”

To put a finer point on it: if the United States and its allies were unwilling to provide Ukraine such guarantees (for example, in the form of NATO membership) before the war, why would they do so after Russia had so vividly demonstrated its willingness to attack Ukraine? The Ukrainian negotiators developed an answer to this question, but in the end, it didn’t persuade their risk-averse Western colleagues. Kyiv’s position was that, as the emerging guarantees concept implied, Russia would be a guarantor, too, which would mean Moscow essentially agreed that the other guarantors would be obliged to intervene if it attacked again. In other words, if Moscow accepted that any future aggression against Ukraine would mean a war between Russia and the United States, it would be no more inclined to attack Ukraine again than it would be to attack a NATO ally.

A BREAKTHROUGH

Throughout March, heavy fighting continued on all fronts. The Russians attempted to take Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Sumy but failed spectacularly, although all three cities sustained heavy damage. By mid-March, the Russian army’s thrust toward Kyiv had stalled, and it was taking heavy casualties. The two delegations kept up talks over videoconference but returned to meeting in person on March 29, this time in Istanbul, Turkey.

There, they appeared to have achieved a breakthrough. After the meeting, the sides announced they had agreed to a joint communiqué. The terms were broadly described during the two sides’ press statements in Istanbul. But we have obtained a copy of the full text of the draft communiqué, titled “Key Provisions of the Treaty on Ukraine’s Security Guarantees.” According to participants we interviewed, the Ukrainians had largely drafted the communiqué and the Russians provisionally accepted the idea of using it as the framework for a treaty.

The treaty envisioned in the communiqué would proclaim Ukraine as a permanently neutral, nonnuclear state. Ukraine would renounce any intention to join military alliances or allow foreign military bases or troops on its soil. The communiqué listed as possible guarantors the permanent members of the UN Security Council (including Russia) along with Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, Poland, and Turkey.

The communiqué also said that if Ukraine came under attack and requested assistance, all guarantor states would be obliged, following consultations with Ukraine and among themselves, to provide assistance to Ukraine to restore its security. Remarkably, these obligations were spelled out with much greater precision than NATO’s Article 5: imposing a no-fly zone, supplying weapons, or directly intervening with the guarantor state’s own military force.

The Istanbul Communiqué called for the two sides to seek to peacefully resolve their dispute over Crimea during the next 15 years.

Although Ukraine would be permanently neutral under the proposed framework, Kyiv’s path to EU membership would be left open, and the guarantor states (including Russia) would explicitly “confirm their intention to facilitate Ukraine’s membership in the European Union.” This was nothing short of extraordinary: in 2013, Putin had put intense pressure on Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to back out of a mere association agreement with the EU. Now, Russia was agreeing to “facilitate” Ukraine’s full accession to the EU.

Although Ukraine’s interest in obtaining these security guarantees is clear, it is not obvious why Russia would agree to any of this. Just weeks earlier, Putin had attempted to seize Ukraine’s capital, oust its government, and impose a puppet regime. It seems far-fetched that he suddenly decided to accept that Ukraine—which was now more hostile to Russia than ever, thanks to Putin’s own actions—would become a member of the EU and have its independence and security guaranteed by the United States (among others). And yet the communiqué suggests that was precisely what Putin was willing to accept.

We can only conjecture as to why. Putin’s blitzkrieg had failed; that was clear by early March. Perhaps he was now willing to cut his losses if he got his longest-standing demand: that Ukraine renounce its NATO aspirations and never host NATO forces on its territory. If he could not control the entire country, at least he could ensure his most basic security interests, stem the hemorrhaging of Russia’s economy, and restore the country’s international reputation.

The communiqué also includes another provision that is stunning, in retrospect: it calls for the two sides to seek to peacefully resolve their dispute over Crimea during the next ten to 15 years. Since Russia annexed the peninsula in 2014, Moscow has never agreed to discuss its status, claiming that it was a region of Russia no different than any other. By offering to negotiate over its status, the Kremlin had tacitly admitted that was not the case.

FIGHTING AND TALKING

In remarks he made on March 29, immediately after the conclusion of the talks, Medinsky, the head of the Russian delegation, sounded decidedly upbeat, explaining that the discussions of the treaty on Ukraine’s neutrality were entering the practical phase and that—allowing for all the complexities presented by the treaty’s having many potential guarantors—it was possible that Putin and Zelensky would sign it at a summit in the foreseeable future.

The next day, he told reporters, “Yesterday, the Ukrainian side, for the first time fixed in a written form its readiness to carry out a series of most important conditions for the building of future normal and good-neighborly relations with Russia.” He continued, “They handed to us the principles of a potential future settlement, fixed in writing.”

Meanwhile, Russia had abandoned its efforts to take Kyiv and was pulling back its forces from the entire northern front. Alexander Fomin, Russia’s deputy minister of defense, had announced the decision in Istanbul on March 29, calling it an effort “to build mutual trust.” In fact, the withdrawal was a forced retreat. The Russians had overestimated their capabilities and underestimated the Ukrainian resistance and were now spinning their failure as a gracious diplomatic measure to facilitate peace talks.

Even after reports from Bucha made headlines in April 2022, the two sides continued to work around the clock on a treaty.

The withdrawal had far-reaching consequences. It stiffened Zelensky’s resolve, removing an immediate threat to his government, and demonstrated that Putin’s vaunted military machine could be pushed back, if not defeated, on the battlefield. It also enabled large-scale Western military assistance to Ukraine by freeing up the lines of communication leading to Kyiv. Finally, the retreat set the stage for the gruesome discovery of atrocities that Russian forces had committed in the Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, where they had raped, mutilated, and murdered civilians.

Reports from Bucha began to make headlines in early April. On April 4, Zelensky visited the town. The next day, he spoke to the UN Security Council via video and accused Russia of perpetrating war crimes in Bucha, comparing Russian forces to the Islamic State terrorist group (also known as ISIS). Zelensky called for the UN Security Council to expel Russia, a permanent member.

Remarkably, however, the two sides continued to work around the clock on a treaty that Putin and Zelensky were supposed to sign during a summit to be held in the not-too-distant future.

The sides were actively exchanging drafts with each other and, it appears, beginning to share them with other parties. (In his February 2023 interview, Bennett reported seeing 17 or 18 working drafts of the agreement; Lukashenko also reported seeing at least one.) We have closely scrutinized two of these drafts, one that is dated April 12 and another dated April 15, which participants in the talks told us was the last one exchanged between the parties. They are broadly similar but contain important differences—and both show that the communiqué had not resolved some key issues.

First, whereas the communiqué and the April 12 draft made clear that guarantor states would decide independently whether to come to Kyiv’s aid in the event of an attack on Ukraine, in the April 15 draft, the Russians attempted to subvert this crucial article by insisting that such action would occur only “on the basis of a decision agreed to by all guarantor states”—giving the likely invader, Russia, a veto. According to a notation on the text, the Ukrainians rejected that amendment, insisting on the original formula, under which all the guarantors had an individual obligation to act and would not have to reach consensus before doing so.

Second, the drafts contain several articles that were added to the treaty at Russia’s insistence but were not part of the communiqué and related to matters that Ukraine refused to discuss. These require Ukraine to ban “fascism, Nazism, neo-Nazism, and aggressive nationalism”—and, to that end, to repeal six Ukrainian laws (fully or in part) that dealt, broadly, with contentious aspects of Soviet-era history, in particular the role of Ukrainian nationalists during World War II.

It is easy to see why Ukraine would resist letting Russia determine its policies on historical memory, particularly in the context of a treaty on security guarantees. And the Russians knew these provisions would make it more difficult for the Ukrainians to accept the rest of the treaty. They might, therefore, be seen as poison pills.

It is also possible, however, that the provisions were intended to allow Putin to save face. For example, by forcing Ukraine to repeal statutes that condemned the Soviet past and cast the Ukrainian nationalists who fought the Red Army during World War II as freedom fighters, the Kremlin could argue that it had achieved its stated goal of “denazification,” even though the original meaning of that phrase may well have been the replacement of Zelensky’s government.

In the end, it remains unclear whether these provisions would have been a deal-breaker. The lead Ukrainian negotiator, Arakhamia, later downplayed their importance. As he put it in a November 2023 interview on a Ukrainian television news program, Russia had “hoped until the last moment that they [could] squeeze us to sign such an agreement, that we [would] adopt neutrality. This was the biggest thing for them. They were ready to finish the war if we, like Finland [during the Cold War], adopted neutrality and undertook not to join NATO.”

The talks had deliberately skirted the question of borders and territory.

The size and the structure of the Ukrainian military was also the subject of intense negotiation. As of April 15, the two sides remained quite far apart on the matter. The Ukrainians wanted a peacetime army of 250,000 people; the Russians insisted on a maximum of 85,000, considerably smaller than the standing army Ukraine had before the invasion in 2022. The Ukrainians wanted 800 tanks; the Russians would allow only 342. The difference between the range of missiles was even starker: 280 kilometers, or about 174 miles, (the Ukrainian position), and a mere 40 kilometers, or about 25 miles, (the Russian position).

The talks had deliberately skirted the question of borders and territory. Evidently, the idea was for Putin and Zelensky to decide on those issues at the planned summit. It is easy to imagine that Putin would have insisted on holding all the territory that his forces had already occupied. The question is whether Zelensky could have been convinced to agree to this land grab.

Despite these substantial disagreements, the April 15 draft suggests that the treaty would be signed within two weeks. Granted, that date might have shifted, but it shows that the two teams planned to move fast. “We were very close in mid-April 2022 to finalizing the war with a peace settlement,” one of the Ukrainian negotiators, Oleksandr Chalyi, recounted at a public appearance in December 2023. “[A] week after Putin started his aggression, he concluded he had made a huge mistake and tried to do everything possible to conclude an agreement with Ukraine.”

WHAT HAPPENED?

So why did the talks break off? Putin has claimed that Western powers intervened and spiked the deal because they were more interested in weakening Russia than in ending the war. He alleged that Boris Johnson, who was then the British prime minister, had delivered the message to the Ukrainians, on behalf of “the Anglo-Saxon world,” that they must “fight Russia until victory is achieved and Russia suffers a strategic defeat.”

The Western response to these negotiations, while a far cry from Putin’s caricature, was certainly lukewarm. Washington and its allies were deeply skeptical about the prospects for the diplomatic track emerging from Istanbul; after all, the communiqué sidestepped the question of territory and borders, and the parties remained far apart on other crucial issues. It did not seem to them like a negotiation that was going to succeed.

Moreover, a former U.S. official who worked on Ukraine policy at the time told us that the Ukrainians did not consult with Washington until after the communiqué had been issued, even though the treaty it described would have created new legal commitments for the United States—including an obligation to go to war with Russia if it invaded Ukraine again. That stipulation alone would have made the treaty a nonstarter for Washington. So instead of embracing the Istanbul communiqué and the subsequent diplomatic process, the West ramped up military aid to Kyiv and increased the pressure on Russia, including through an ever-tightening sanctions regime.

The United Kingdom took the lead. Already on March 30, Johnson seemed disinclined toward diplomacy, stating that instead “we should continue to intensify sanctions with a rolling program until every single one of [Putin’s] troops is out of Ukraine.” On April 9, Johnson turned up in Kyiv —the first foreign leader to visit after the Russian withdrawal from the capital. He reportedly told Zelensky that he thought that “any deal with Putin was going to be pretty sordid.” Any deal, he recalled saying, “would be some victory for him: if you give him anything, he’ll just keep it, bank it, and then prepare for his next assault.” In the 2023 interview, Arakhamia ruffled some feathers by seeming to hold Johnson responsible for the outcome. “When we returned from Istanbul,” he said, “Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we won’t sign anything at all with [the Russians]—and let’s just keep fighting.”

Since then, Putin has repeatedly used Arakhamia’s remarks to blame the West for the collapse of the talks and demonstrate Ukraine’s subordination to its supporters. Notwithstanding Putin’s manipulative spin, Arakhamia was pointing to a real problem: the communiqué described a multilateral framework that would require Western willingness to engage diplomatically with Russia and consider a genuine security guarantee for Ukraine. Neither was a priority for the United States and its allies at the time.

Putin and Zelensky were willing to consider extraordinary compromises to end the war.

In their public remarks, the Americans were never quite so dismissive of diplomacy as Johnson had been. But they did not appear to consider it central to their response to Russia’s invasion. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited Kyiv two weeks after Johnson, mostly to coordinate greater military support. As Blinken put it at a press conference afterward, “The strategy that we’ve put in place—massive support for Ukraine, massive pressure against Russia, solidarity with more than 30 countries engaged in these efforts—is having real results.”

Still, the claim that the West forced Ukraine to back out of the talks with Russia is baseless. It suggests that Kyiv had no say in the matter. True, the West’s offers of support must have strengthened Zelensky’s resolve, and the lack of Western enthusiasm does seem to have dampened his interest in diplomacy. Ultimately, however, in his discussions with Western leaders, Zelensky did not prioritize the pursuit of diplomacy with Russia to end the war. Neither the United States nor its allies perceived a strong demand from him for them to engage on the diplomatic track. At the time, given the outpouring of public sympathy in the West, such a push could well have affected Western policy.

Zelensky was also unquestionably outraged by the Russian atrocities at Bucha and Irpin, and he probably understood that what he began to refer to as Russia’s “genocide” in Ukraine would make diplomacy with Moscow even more politically fraught. Still, the behind-the-scenes work on the draft treaty continued and even intensified in the days and weeks after the discovery of Russia’s war crimes, suggesting that the atrocities at Bucha and Irpin were a secondary factor in Kyiv’s decision-making.

The Ukrainians’ newfound confidence that they could win the war also clearly played a role. The Russian retreat from Kyiv and other major cities in the northeast and the prospect of more weapons from the West (with roads into Kyiv now under Ukrainian control) changed the military balance. Optimism about possible gains on the battlefield often reduces a belligerent’s interest in making compromises at the negotiating table.

Indeed, by late April, Ukraine had hardened its position, demanding a Russian withdrawal from the Donbas as a precondition to any treaty. As Oleksii Danilov, the chair of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, put it on May 2: “A treaty with Russia is impossible—only capitulation can be accepted.”

And then there is the Russian side of the story, which is difficult to assess. Was the whole negotiation a well-orchestrated charade, or was Moscow seriously interested in a settlement? Did Putin get cold feet when he understood that the West would not sign on to the accords or that the Ukrainian position had hardened?

Even if Russia and Ukraine had overcome their disagreements, the framework they negotiated in Istanbul would have required buy-in from the United States and its allies. And those Western powers would have needed to take a political risk by engaging in negotiations with Russia and Ukraine and to put their credibility on the line by guaranteeing Ukraine’s security. At the time, and in the intervening two years, the willingness either to undertake high-stakes diplomacy or to truly commit to come to Ukraine’s defense in the future has been notably absent in Washington and European capitals.

A final reason the talks failed is that the negotiators put the cart of a postwar security order before the horse of ending the war. The two sides skipped over essential matters of conflict management and mitigation (the creation of humanitarian corridors, a cease-fire, troop withdrawals) and instead tried to craft something like a long-term peace treaty that would resolve security disputes that had been the source of geopolitical tensions for decades. It was an admirably ambitious effort—but it proved too ambitious.

To be fair, Russia, Ukraine, and the West had tried it the other way around—and also failed miserably. The Minsk agreements signed in 2014 and 2015 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas covered minutiae such as the date and time of the cessation of hostilities and which weapons system should be withdrawn by what distance. Both sides’ core security concerns were addressed indirectly, if at all.

This history suggests that future talks should move forward on parallel tracks, with the practicalities of ending the war being addressed on one track while broader issues are covered in another.

KEEP IT IN MIND

On April 11, 2024, Lukashenko, the early middleman of the Russian-Ukrainian peace talks, called for a return to the draft treaty from spring 2022. “It’s a reasonable position,” he said in a conversation with Putin in the Kremlin. “It was an acceptable position for Ukraine, too. They agreed to this position.”

Putin chimed in. “They agreed, of course,” he said.

In reality, however, the Russians and the Ukrainians never arrived at a final compromise text. But they went further in that direction than has been previously understood, reaching an overarching framework for a possible agreement.

After the past two years of carnage, all this may be so much water under the bridge. But it is a reminder that Putin and Zelensky were willing to consider extraordinary compromises to end the war. So if and when Kyiv and Moscow return to the negotiating table, they’ll find it littered with ideas that could yet prove useful in building a durable peace.

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SAMUEL CHARAP is Distinguished Chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy and a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation.
SERGEY RADCHENKO is Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Europe.
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Russia keeps up pressure on the front line as Ukraine gets a boost from Western military aid

Ukrainian soldiers, of 43rd artillery brigade, fire by 2s7 self-propelled howitzer towards Russian positions at the frontline in Donetsk region, Ukraine, Monday, June 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

In this photo released by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Tuesday, June 25, 2024, Russian soldiers fire the 152-mm howitzer “Msta-B” in an undisclosed location in Ukraine. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)

In this photo taken from video released by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Tuesday, June 25, 2024, Russian soldiers fire the 152-mm howitzer “Msta-B” in an undisclosed location in Ukraine. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)

In this photo released by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Tuesday, June 25, 2024, Russian soldiers pose for photo in a shelter at their position in an undisclosed location in Ukraine. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)

In this photo released by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Tuesday, June 25, 2024, a Russian soldier poses for photo with his dog in a shelter at a position in an undisclosed location in Ukraine. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)

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DONETSK REGION, Ukraine (AP) — Relentless Russian attacks on Ukrainian positions defending the strategically important eastern town of Chasiv Yar are disrupting troop rotations and the delivery of some supplies, soldiers in the area say.

Russian troops are seeking to press their advantage in troop numbers and weaponry before Ukrainian forces are bulked up by promised new Western military aid that is already trickling to the front line, analysts say.

The Kremlin’s military has been hitting civilian targets just as hard, using powerful glide bombs that obliterate buildings and leave huge craters. Its monthslong campaign to cripple Ukraine’s electricity supply aims to sap public morale and deny energy to Ukraine’s burgeoning arms industry .

Attacks on such civilian targets brought arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court on Tuesday for former Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and military chief of staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov for alleged war crimes. Judges said there is evidence they “intentionally caused great suffering or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health” of Ukrainian civilians.

For Ukrainian soldiers defending the eastern Donetsk region, the Russian ground assaults and aerial barrages allow little respite after more than two years of war.

“We work, you could say, without rest,” said a platoon commander who, in line with his brigade’s rules, identified himself only by his first name, Oleksandr.

“So no two days are alike. You always need to be ready to work day and night,” he told The Associated Press on Monday.

His platoon is part of Ukraine’s 43rd Artillery Brigade. It dashes to positions and without delay fires a Soviet-era Pion self-propelled howitzer at Russian positions before it can be targeted itself.

Holding Chasiv Yar is crucial. The town, highly sought-after due to its strategic location and elevated position but now largely in ruins, lies to the west of neighboring Bakhmut, which was captured by Russia last year after a 10-month battle.

Ukraine is racing to stabilize parts of the about 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line after badly needed military assistance was approved by the United States in April. A six-month delay in U.S. aid threw Ukraine’s military onto the defensive.

Members of the artillery brigade in Chasiv Yar reported that supplies of American ammunition have started to arrive.

The U.S. is expected to announce this week an additional $150 million in critically needed munitions to Ukraine, and Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said Tuesday that the first shipment of ammunition under a Czech initiative has been delivered to Ukraine.

Separately, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke by phone with Russian Minister of Defense Andrei Belousov.

Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said Austin emphasized the importance of maintaining lines of communication amid the war. The last time Austin, who initiated the call, spoke to his Russian counterpart was with then-minister Shoigu on March 15, 2023. There was no immediate report of the call by Russian officials.

The Czechs are looking to acquire from countries outside the European Union at least 800,000 artillery shells that Ukraine badly needs. The war has drained stockpiles in Europe, the U.S. and Russia.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said it will take time for the effects of the new Western weaponry to be felt on the front line.

Meanwhile, it said, “Russian forces are attempting to make tactically and operationally significant gains” before it arrives.

Elsewhere, the Kremlin’s forces kept up their barrages of civilian infrastructure with three aerial strikes in the northeastern Kharkiv region Tuesday, local officials said, though nobody was injured.

Russia has pounded Kharkiv in recent months, apparently to draw some Ukrainian forces away from the defense of Donetsk while trying to create a buffer zone to prevent cross-border Ukrainian attacks.

Russian launched 42 glide bombs against the Kharkiv region in the previous 24 hours, authorities said Tuesday.

In other developments, the Russian Defense Ministry and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that each side had released 90 war prisoners to the other in an exchange mediated by the United Arab Emirates. The Emirati Foreign Ministry said it was the fifth swap mediated by the country this year alone.

The deal “is the outcome of the UAE leveraging its distinct ties and partnership with both sides, including as a reliable mediator among both parties,” the UAE said in a statement.

Zelenskyy said the swap included troops across the country’s military and its border guard, including those who fought at the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and other regions.

Also Tuesday, Moscow responded to the EU’s decision to suspend the broadcasting activities of Russia’s Voice of Europe, RIA Novosti, Izvestia and Rossiyskaya Gazeta by banning the broadcasts of 81 European media outlets.

“The Russian side has repeatedly warned that politically motivated repressions against Russian journalists and unfounded bans of the Russian media in the EU won’t go unanswered,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in the statement.

Associated Press writer Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

On February 24, 2022, the world watched in horror as Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, inciting the largest war in Europe since World War II. In the months prior, Western intelligence had warned that the attack was imminent, amidst a concerning build-up of military force on Ukraine’s borders. The intelligence was correct: Putin initiated a so-called “special military operation” under the pretense of securing Ukraine’s eastern territories and “liberating” Ukraine from allegedly “Nazi” leadership (the Jewish identity of Ukraine’s president notwithstanding).

Once the invasion started, Western analysts predicted Kyiv would fall in three days. This intelligence could not have been more wrong. Kyiv not only lasted those three days, but it also eventually gained an upper hand, liberating territories Russia had conquered and handing Russia humiliating defeats on the battlefield. Ukraine has endured unthinkable atrocities: mass civilian deaths, infrastructure destruction, torture, kidnapping of children, and relentless shelling of residential areas. But Ukraine persists.

With support from European and US allies, Ukrainians mobilized, self-organized, and responded with bravery and agility that evoked an almost unified global response to rally to their cause and admire their tenacity. Despite the David-vs-Goliath dynamic of this war, Ukraine had gained significant experience since fighting broke out in its eastern territories following the Euromaidan Revolution in 2014 . In that year, Russian-backed separatists fought for control over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the Donbas, the area of Ukraine that Russia later claimed was its priority when its attack on Kyiv failed. Also in 2014, Russia illegally annexed Crimea, the historical homeland of indigenous populations that became part of Ukraine in 1954. Ukraine was unprepared to resist, and international condemnation did little to affect Russia’s actions.

In the eight years between 2014 and 2022, Ukraine sustained heavy losses in the fight over eastern Ukraine: there were over 14,000 conflict-related casualties and the fighting displaced 1.5 million people . Russia encountered a very different Ukraine in 2022, one that had developed its military capabilities and fine-tuned its extensive and powerful civil society networks after nearly a decade of conflict. Thus, Ukraine, although still dwarfed in comparison with Russia’s GDP ( $536 billion vs. $4.08 trillion ), population ( 43 million vs. 142 million ), and military might ( 500,000 vs. 1,330,900 personnel ; 312 vs. 4,182 aircraft ; 1,890 vs. 12,566 tanks ; 0 vs. 5,977 nuclear warheads ), was ready to fight for its freedom and its homeland. Russia managed to control up to 22% of Ukraine’s territory at the peak of its invasion in March 2022 and still holds 17% (up from the 7% controlled by Russia and Russian-backed separatists before the full-scale invasion ), but Kyiv still stands and Ukraine as a whole has never been more unified.

The Numbers

Source: OCHA & Humanitarian Partners

Civilians Killed

Source: Oct 20, 2023 | OHCHR

Ukrainian Refugees in Europe

Source: Jul 24, 2023 | UNHCR

Internally Displaced People

Source: May 25, 2023 | IOM

As It Happened

During the prelude to Russia’s full-scale invasion, HURI collated information answering key questions and tracing developments. A daily digest from the first few days of war documents reporting on the invasion as it unfolded.

Frequently Asked Questions

Russians and Ukrainians are not the same people. The territories that make up modern-day Russia and Ukraine have been contested throughout history, so in the past, parts of Ukraine were part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Other parts of Ukraine were once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Poland, among others. During the Russian imperial and Soviet periods, policies from Moscow pushed the Russian language and culture in Ukraine, resulting in a largely bilingual country in which nearly everyone in Ukraine speaks both Ukrainian and Russian. Ukraine was tightly connected to the Russian cultural, economic, and political spheres when it was part of the Soviet Union, but the Ukrainian language, cultural, and political structures always existed in spite of Soviet efforts to repress them. When Ukraine became independent in 1991, everyone living on the territory of what is now Ukraine became a citizen of the new country (this is why Ukraine is known as a civic nation instead of an ethnic one). This included a large number of people who came from Russian ethnic backgrounds, especially living in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, as well as Russian speakers living across the country.

See also: Timothy Snyder’s overview of Ukraine’s history.

Relevant Sources:

Plokhy, Serhii. “ Russia and Ukraine: Did They Reunite in 1654 ,” in The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2021). (Open access online)

Plokhy, Serhii. “ The Russian Question ,” in The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2021). (Open access online)

Ševčenko, Ihor. Ukraine between East and West: Essays on Cultural History to the Early Eighteenth Century (2nd, revised ed.) (Toronto: CIUS Press, 2009).

“ Ukraine w/ Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon (#221).” Interview on The Road to Now with host Benjamin Sawyer. (Historian Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon joins Ben to talk about the key historical events that have shaped Ukraine and its place in the world today.) January 31, 2022.

Portnov, Andrii. “ Nothing New in the East? What the West Overlooked – Or Ignored ,” TRAFO Blog for Transregional Research. July 26, 2022. Note: The German-language version of this text was published in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte , 28–29/2022, 11 July 2022, pp. 16–20, and was republished by TRAFO Blog . Translation into English was done by Natasha Klimenko.

Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for the protection of its territorial sovereignty in the Budapest Memorandum.

But in 2014, Russian troops occupied the peninsula of Crimea, held an illegal referendum, and claimed the territory for the Russian Federation. The muted international response to this clear violation of sovereignty helped motivate separatist groups in Donetsk and Luhansk regions—with Russian support—to declare secession from Ukraine, presumably with the hopes that a similar annexation and referendum would take place. Instead, this prompted a war that continues to this day—separatist paramilitaries are backed by Russian troops, equipment, and funding, fighting against an increasingly well-armed and experienced Ukrainian army.

Ukrainian leaders (and many Ukrainian citizens) see membership in NATO as a way to protect their country’s sovereignty, continue building its democracy, and avoid another violation like the annexation of Crimea. With an aggressive, authoritarian neighbor to Ukraine’s east, and with these recurring threats of a new invasion, Ukraine does not have the choice of neutrality. Leaders have made clear that they do not want Ukraine to be subjected to Russian interference and dominance in any sphere, so they hope that entering into NATO’s protective sphere–either now or in the future–can counterbalance Russian threats.

“ Ukraine got a signed commitment in 1994 to ensure its security – but can the US and allies stop Putin’s aggression now? ” Lee Feinstein and Mariana Budjeryn. The Conversation , January 21, 2022.

“ Ukraine Gave Up a Giant Nuclear Arsenal 30 Years Ago. Today There Are Regrets. ” William J. Broad. The New York Times , February 5, 2022. Includes quotes from Mariana Budjeryn (Harvard) and Steven Pifer (former Ambassador, now Stanford)

What is the role of regionalism in Ukrainian politics? Can the conflict be boiled down to antagonism between an eastern part of the country that is pro-Russia and a western part that is pro-West?

Ukraine is often viewed as a dualistic country, divided down the middle by the Dnipro river. The western part of the country is often associated with the Ukrainian language and culture, and because of this, it is often considered the heart of its nationalist movement. The eastern part of Ukraine has historically been more Russian-speaking, and its industry-based economy has been entwined with Russia. While these features are not untrue, in reality, regionalism is not definitive in predicting people’s attitudes toward Russia, Europe, and Ukraine’s future. It’s important to remember that every oblast (region) in Ukraine voted for independence in 1991, including Crimea.

Much of the current perception about eastern regions of Ukraine, including the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk that are occupied by separatists and Russian forces, is that they are pro-Russia and wish to be united with modern-day Russia. In the early post-independence period, these regions were the sites of the consolidation of power by oligarchs profiting from the privatization of Soviet industries–people like future president Viktor Yanukovych–who did see Ukraine’s future as integrated with Russia. However, the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests changed the role of people like Yanukovych. Protesters in Kyiv demanded the president’s resignation and, in February 2014, rose up against him and his Party of Regions, ultimately removing them from power. Importantly, pro-Euromaidan protests took place across Ukraine, including all over the eastern regions of the country and in Crimea.

Ukraine’s Zelenskyy charting ‘comprehensive plan’ to end war with Russia

Ukrainian president says as the war rages and casualties mount, a plan to end the 28-month conflict is ‘the diplomatic route we are working on’.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he’s drawing up a “comprehensive plan” for how Kyiv believes the war with Russia should end.

“It is very important for us to show a plan to end the war that will be supported by the majority of the world,” the Ukrainian president said at a news conference in Kyiv alongside Slovenian President Natasa Pirc Musar on Friday.

Keep reading

Russia suffers setbacks as ukraine braces for tough month on battlefield, why did the ukraine peace summit fail, top european court finds russia guilty of rights violations in crimea, russia-ukraine war: list of key events, day 854.

“This is the diplomatic route we are working on.”

There are no current negotiations between Ukraine and Russia and, based on public statements by Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the two sides appear as far apart as ever when it comes to the terms of a potential peace settlement.

Ukraine has repeatedly said Russia must pull its troops out of its internationally recognised territory – including the peninsula of Crimea that Moscow annexed in 2014 – before peace talks can start.

Meanwhile, Putin, who launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, is demanding Ukraine effectively capitulate by evacuating even more territory across its east and south that Russia now occupies.

Zelenskyy hosted a major international summit in Switzerland earlier this month — and Russia was not invited — to rally support for Ukraine’s position.

‘We don’t have too much time’

More than 90 countries sent leaders and senior officials to the two-day summit and a vast majority agreed to a final communique that stressed the need for Ukraine’s “territorial integrity” to be respected in any settlement.

But some key countries that attended, such as India, did not agree and others, such as Russia’s ally China, boycotted the summit in protest at Moscow not being invited.

Russia’s troops are slowly advancing on the battlefield , claiming to have seized another small front-line village on Friday.

Moscow currently occupies about 25 percent of Ukraine and in 2022 claimed to have annexed four more regions, none of which they fully control.

On Thursday, at an EU Council Summit in Brussels, Zelenskyy said he would put forward a “detailed plan” in a matter of months to end the war.

“We don’t have too much time,” he said, pointing to the high casualty rate among soldiers and civilians.

INTERACTIVE-WHO CONTROLS WHAT IN UKRAINE-1719391953

Anger at the US

Russia warned the United States on Friday its reconnaissance drone flights over the Black Sea risked leading to a “direct” military clash, issuing the threat days after angrily blaming Washington for a missile attack on Crimea.

Ukraine’s attack on the Russian-annexed port of Sevastopol on Sunday drew fury from Moscow, which accused Kyiv of using US-supplied ATACMS missiles equipped with cluster munitions.

Four people, including two children, were killed as missile fragments fell over the city, in what the Kremlin’s foreign ministry called a “bloody crime”.

On Friday, Russia’s Defence Ministry said it “observed an increased frequency of US strategic unmanned aerial vehicle flights over the waters of the Black Sea” that surrounds Crimea.

Drones are “carrying out reconnaissance” and providing information for Western-supplied Ukrainian weapons that Kyiv plans to use to strike Russian targets, it said.

Such flights “increase the risk of a direct confrontation” between NATO and Russia, and the army has been instructed to prepare an “operational response”, the defence ministry added.

The United States routinely carries out drone flights over the Black Sea, operations that it says are conducted in neutral airspace and in accordance with international law.

Ukraine’s defence ministry said on Friday the military destroyed the Russian space communication centre in Moscow-occupied Crimea in an attack this week.

In a statement on Telegram, the ministry described the target as a valuable military component in satellite communication and navigation system for Russian troops. There was no immediate response from Moscow.

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Ukraine needs to stop fighting the war Russia wants

Ukraine is trapped in a strategy that favors Russia, a Ukrainian security expert argues.

Without a grand strategy for victory, the most that Ukraine can do is try to hold on.

"The lack of a strategy for victory will turn this war into a war of attrition," Oleksandr Danylyuk told BI.

Ukraine is caught in a strategic trap. It barely has the strength to keep Russia from making major advances, yet it is not strong enough to eject Russian forces from the territory it held prior to the 2022 invasion. The result is a war of attrition that Ukraine can't win.

The solution? Build up Ukrainian military power and compel Russia to agree to peace, argues a Ukrainian security expert. But that can't happen unless Ukraine devises a grand strategy that extends beyond mere survival that's characterized much of the war in 2024 as Russia exploited the long delay of US arms support.

"The lack of a strategy for victory will turn this war into a war of attrition for Ukraine, which completely coincides with Russian interests," Oleksandr Danylyuk told Business Insider.

Danylyuk dismisses the notion that even with Western aid, Ukraine can match Russia in the sheer numbers of military power like tanks, artillery and troops. "Trying to win a war with Russia at the expense of only a symmetrical mass increase is a flawed strategy, given that Russia has a larger number of [military-age] human reserves (about 30 million people in Russia, compared to about 8 million people in Ukraine), significant stockpiles of weapons and military equipment inherited from the USSR or built by 2022, as well as a developed defense-industrial complex and a powerful mining industry that satisfies its needs for a significant amount of strategic materials," he wrote in an essay for the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.

That leaves improving the quality of Ukraine's military. But this involves more than better weapons and tactics. Danylyuk argues that political mobilization is just as important, a view that seems reminiscent of the 19th Century German military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz, who envisioned a nation's war effort as a trinity comprised of the people, government and military.

"The political effectiveness of a military organization consists of its ability to receive financial support, the provision of weapons and military equipment, and the replenishment of human forces in the volume and quality necessary to eliminate existing threats," Danylyuk wrote. However, "the political effectiveness of the [Armed Forces of Ukraine] remains insufficient, as Ukraine's defense needs are currently only partially met."

Danylyuk blames Western restrictions on the types of weapons being supplied, and how they can be used. The US and Europe have long imposed restraints on using long-range weapons, such as ATACMS long-range guided rockets , to hit targets deep inside Russia. Only recently has the Biden administration begun to relax that policy . Easy victories with Western weapons have failed to materialize as the war has dug in. It's also clear that even with robust EU and US support, Ukraine is still at a disadvantage against the Russian war machine in a years-long fight.

Danylyuk also worries that political divergences between Ukraine and its allies are undermining Ukrainian military effectiveness. Ukraine's current government wants to liberate all occupied territory, which is "undeniably fair and rational, but it ignores the fact that the liberation of territory does not necessarily mean the end of the war," he wrote. On the other hand, US and European desires for a negotiated settlement "will be viewed by Russia as a tactical respite which can be used to restore and build capabilities and plan a new phase of aggression."

In other words, Russia could exploit a peace deal to rebuild its battered forces before launching another invasion of Ukrainian lands.

The result is that the Ukrainian military isn't sure what kind of war to prepare for. "The AFU are in an extremely difficult situation, as the political leaderships of both Ukraine and its partner countries see these goals in different ways, which negatively affects the ability of the AFU to develop and implement a military strategy aimed at achieving them," wrote Danylyuk.

Without a grand strategy for victory, the most that Ukraine can do is hold its own, Danylyuk told Business Insider. "The planning of individual operations, the assessment and provision of the needs of the AFU, the development of training programs and preparation, and the introduction of new tactical techniques can at best support Ukraine's ability to conduct the war, but not to win it."

There are too many competing visions of Ukrainian victory, he argues. These include retaking all lost Ukrainian territory, threatening Russia's hold on Crimea to force it into negotiations, punishing Russian industry and exports to try to force Russians to reconsider the war's costs, or exacting such a heavy toll that Russian leaders are compelled to withdraw similar to the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan.

Danylyuk does fault Ukraine for some military mistakes, such as failure to adequately prepare and train for the failed counteroffensive against well-entrenched Russian forces in summer 2023. But he considers tactical improvements to be at the bottom of Ukraine's to-do list.

The West can boost Ukrainian military power by focusing on weapons that have already proven devastating against Russian vulnerabilities, according to Danylyuk. This includes cheap naval drones that have sunk numerous Russian warships and driven Russia's Black Sea Fleet from the Ukrainian coast, as well as giving Ukraine more Western aircraft and air-to-air missiles to contest Russian airpower.

Interestingly, Danylyuk blames the West for failing to adapt its equipment to the lessons of the Ukraine war. "This concerns, first of all, their ability to quickly improve military equipment not only because Ukraine needs it, but also because the security of the partners themselves depends on its improvement. The current pace of this improvement is completely unsatisfactory, and the approaches to identifying and eliminating the shortcomings of such systems require a complete revision."

Danylyuk's analysis does leave some questions unanswered. For example, as the Germans discovered on the Eastern Front in World War II, quality doesn't always triumph over quantity. And as Ukraine's failed 2023 counteroffensive demonstrated, achieving decisive battlefield success is no easy matter . With Russian society mobilized for total war, and with Moscow able to procure resources from allies such as China, North Korea and Iran, Russia's ability to wage a long war is considerable.

Also, choosing a grand strategy is easier said than done. For example, the Ukrainian government vows to liberate all occupied territory, including the Crimean peninsula and eastern Ukraine which Russia has annexed. Some critics say this is unrealistic, and Ukraine will have to accept some loss of territory.

Whatever strategy Kyiv chooses, Danylyuk argues, it can't be the status quo.

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn .

Read the original article on Business Insider

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News Analysis

Russia Sends Waves of Troops to the Front in a Brutal Style of Fighting

More than 1,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine were killed or wounded on average each day in May, according to NATO and Western military officials.

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The rusted out top of a Russian tank with a tree, a green field and cloudy sky in the background.

By Julian E. Barnes , Eric Schmitt and Marc Santora

Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Marc Santora from Kyiv, Ukraine.

May was a particularly deadly month for the Russian army in Ukraine, with an average of more than 1,000 of its soldiers injured or killed each day, according to U.S., British and other Western intelligence agencies.

But despite its losses, Russia is recruiting 25,000 to 30,000 new soldiers a month — roughly as many as are exiting the battlefield, U.S. officials said. That has allowed its army to keep sending wave after wave of troops at Ukrainian defenses, hoping to overwhelm them and break through the trench lines.

It is a style of warfare that Russian soldiers have likened to being put into a meat grinder, with commanding officers seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are sending infantry soldiers to die.

At times, this approach has proved effective, bringing the Russian army victories in Avdiivka and Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. But Ukrainian and Western officials say the tactics were less successful this spring, as Russia tried to take land near the city of Kharkiv.

American officials said that Russia achieved a critical objective of President Vladimir V. Putin, creating a buffer zone along the border to make it more difficult for the Ukrainians to strike into the country.

But the drive did not threaten Kharkiv and was ultimately stopped by Ukrainian defenses, according to Western officials.

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Israel-Hamas War

Ben Stiller: Why I Can’t Stay Silent About the Suffering in Israel and Gaza

Protesters gather during an anti-government rally calling for early elections, outside the Knesset in Jerusalem, on June 18, 2024.

W hat a time we are all living through. Like so many people, I have been watching the awful events happening in the Middle East over the last year and trying to determine how to react. I have been seeing the brazen antisemitic incidents in my own city and feeling a mix of anger, fear, and astonishment that we are at this place in our country. Saying nothing at this point feels like I am betraying my own conscience. But what do you say? How does one express the complicated and very real feelings in this scary world of social media, where it seems any sentiment opens you to online vitriol from one side or another? The issues we are dealing with are so nuanced and complicated that short statements cannot in any way express fully what I want to say from my heart. As a public advocate for refugees, I’ve been struggling to reconcile my silence with that work. Please bear with me as I explain. And to be clear, what I say here is my personal view, not that of any organization–it’s just how I feel.

I was given the opportunity in 2016 to work with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, a global organization dedicated to saving lives, protecting rights, and building a better future for people forced to flee their homes because of conflict and persecution. The agency was created to help the millions who fled the Second World War and leads international action to protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities, and stateless people, ensuring that everyone has the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge from violence, persecution, or war at home.

With UNHCR I have visited refugees and those impacted by war and violence in Lebanon, Guatemala, Jordan, Poland, and Ukraine. I visited Lebanon just before the eighth anniversary of the Syrian conflict and met refugee families struggling to survive, among the millions living on the razor’s edge. I went to Kyiv after the full-scale Russian invasion and talked to people whose lives have been upended by this senseless war. I’ve advocated for refugees at the UN and in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, imploring the U.S. government not to look away from this global humanitarian crisis. I say this not to toot my own horn, but to explain that for me, if I am to speak out about these issues in these places, I can’t ignore the crisis that is front and center in the world right now.

I am Jewish. I’m also half Irish. My father’s mother came to the United States as a refugee from Poland. His father’s grandfather came from Ukraine, where over 100,000 Jewish people lost their lives in the ethnic pogroms that preceded the great horror of the Holocaust by just two decades. My mother’s grandparents came from Ireland seeking a better life. They arrived in New York with a surplus of hope and not much else.

My dad served in the U.S. Army at the end of World War II. He met my mom and they got married–he was Jewish, she was Catholic. At the time that was an issue. They dealt with judgment from both sides of their families and the outside world. They turned that tension into humor and based their stand-up comedy act on their ethnic differences, which brought them together – and brought them success.

My mom converted to Judaism when they married. Ours was not a religious household, but we learned the traditions of inclusion and tolerance. After my Bar Mitzvah, I didn’t really go back to synagogue too often. But I always felt connected to my heritage, both Irish and Jewish, and valued the bonds I saw formed by both sides of my family. Eventually they came together through my parents’ love for each other. It was a palpable and beautiful thing I experienced as a child. As a kid growing up surrounded by that love, in New York City in the ‘70s, I never really experienced antisemitism. Where we find ourselves now is a place I never thought I would be.

Like so many Jews I grieve for those who suffered in the barbaric Hamas attack on October 7 and for those who have suffered as a result of those atrocities . My heart aches for the families who lost loved ones to this heinous act of terrorism and for those anxiously waiting these long months for the return of the hostages still in captivity. It’s a nightmare. I also grieve for the innocent people in Gaza who have lost their lives in this conflict and those suffering through that awful reality now.

I detest war, but what Hamas did was unconscionable and reprehensible. The hostages have to be freed. Terrorism must be named and fought by all people of conscience on the planet. There is no excuse for it under any circumstances.

I stand with the Israeli people and their right to live in peace and safety. At the same time, I don’t agree with all of the Israeli government’s choices on how they are conducting the war. I want the violence to end, and the innocent Palestinian people affected by the humanitarian crisis that has resulted to receive the lifesaving aid they need. And I know that many in Israel share this sentiment.

I believe, as many people in Israel and around the world do, in the need for a two-state solution, one that ensures that the Israeli people can live in peace and safety alongside a homeland for the Palestinian people that provides them the same benefits.

I also see a troubling conflation in criticism of the actions of the Israeli government with denunciations of all Israelis and Jewish people. And as a result, we are seeing an undeniable rise in global antisemitism. I am seeing it myself, on the streets of the city I grew up in. It isn’t right and must be denounced.

Antisemitism must be condemned whenever it happens and wherever it exists. As should Islamophobia and bigotry of all kinds. There is a frightening amnesia for history in the air. We must remind ourselves that we can only manifest a more hopeful, just, and peaceful future by learning from the past.

Obviously I am no politician or diplomat. I have no solutions for these world conflicts and claim to offer none. I think I, like so many people, am struggling with how to process this all. But as an advocate for displaced people, I do believe this war must end. As I write this, there are about 120 million people all over the world who have been displaced by conflicts. In the Middle East, in Ukraine, Sudan, and many other countries. They all deserve to live in safety and peace. The human suffering must end. We must demand this of our leaders. Peace is the only path.

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Easy 10 lines English essay on Russia & Ukraine war
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English Essay
Essay on Russia-Ukraine War #russiaukrainewar #essay #shorts

COMMENTS

Russia
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Russia - Ukraine Conflict [UPSC Notes]

Russia – Ukraine Conflict Background

Reasons for Russian Aggression

Russia – Ukraine Latest Developments

Russia – Ukraine Crisis: Implications on India

UPSC Questions related to Russia – Ukraine Conflict

Why did Ukraine not join NATO?

Is Crimea a part of Russia?

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Ukraine: Conflict at the Crossroads of Europe and Russia

Introduction

Why is Ukraine a geopolitical flash point?

What are Russia’s broad interests in Ukraine?

What triggered Russia’s moves in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014?

Why did Russia launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022?

What are Russia’s objectives in Ukraine?

What have been U.S. priorities in Ukraine?

Ukraine’s Struggle for Independence in Russia’s Shadow

What are U.S. and EU policy in Ukraine?

What do Ukrainians want?

More From Our Experts

Top Stories on CFR

Russia, One Year After the Invasion of Ukraine

More on the War in Ukraine

Understanding Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Introduction

Russian Aggression in Ukraine & Russian Defense

Protracted Conflicts: Moldova and Georgia

FPRI Experts to Follow

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A personal reflection on a nation's dream of independence and the nightmare Vladimir Putin has visited upon it.

Putin's Big Lie

Click here to learn more about the linguistic kinship

What does "My Ukraine" mean to you?

Little Reform, Big Corruption

Maidan and the Return of History

Learn more about Putin

What does "My Ukraine" mean to you? Share a thought or photo using #MyUkraine.

Learn about Ukraine's best-known poet, Serhiy Zhadan

Click here to learn about Ukraine's best-known poet, Serhiy Zhadan

Blue and Yellow vs. “Little Green Men”

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Russia's War on Ukraine : News, Context & Analysis

News Sources (Reliable and Freely Accessible)

Library Resources