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Russia's war in ukraine: identity, history, and conflict.

By Jeffrey Mankoff CSIS

Protesters demonstrate against Russian invasion of Ukraine

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine constitutes the biggest threat to peace and security in Europe since the end of the Cold War. On February 21, 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin gave a bizarre and at times unhinged speech laying out a long list of grievances as justification for the “special military operation” announced the following day. While these grievances included the long-simmering dispute over the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the shape of the post–Cold War security architecture in Europe, the speech centered on a much more fundamental issue: the legitimacy of Ukrainian identity and statehood themselves. It reflected a worldview Putin had long expressed, emphasizing the deep-seated unity among the Eastern Slavs—Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, who all trace their origins to the medieval Kyivan Rus commonwealth—and suggesting that the modern states of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus should share a political destiny both today and in the future. The corollary to that view is the claim that distinct Ukrainian and Belarusian identities are the product of foreign manipulation and that, today, the West is following in the footsteps of Russia’s imperial rivals in using Ukraine (and Belarus) as part of an “ anti-Russia project .”

Throughout Putin’s time in office, Moscow has pursued a policy toward Ukraine and Belarus predicated on the assumption that their respective national identities are artificial—and therefore fragile. Putin’s arguments about foreign enemies promoting Ukrainian (and, in a more diffuse way, Belarusian) identity as part of a geopolitical struggle against Russia echo the way many of his predecessors refused to accept the agency of ordinary people seeking autonomy from tsarist or Soviet domination. The historically minded Putin often invokes the ideas of thinkers emphasizing the organic unity of the Russian Empire and its people—especially its Slavic, Orthodox core—in a form of what the historian Timothy Snyder calls the “politics of eternity,” the belief in an unchanging historical essence.

The salience that Putin and other Russian elites assign to the idea of Russian-Ukrainian-Belarusian unity helps explain the origins of the current conflict, notably why Moscow was willing to risk a large-scale war on its borders when neither Ukraine nor NATO posed any military threat. It also suggests that Moscow’s ambitions extend beyond preventing Ukrainian NATO membership and encompass a more thorough aspiration to dominate Ukraine politically, militarily, and economically.

Read the rest of the report at CSIS -

Jeffrey Mankoff is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, Center for Strategic Research at National Defense University.

The views expressed are the authors own and do not reflect those of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Russia, One Year After the Invasion of Ukraine

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. ♦

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)
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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ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY

Voice for the army - support for the soldier, the russo-ukrainian war: a strategic assessment two years into the conflict.

painted model soldiers standing on a map of eastern Europe

by LTC Amos C. Fox, USA Land Warfare Paper 158, February 2024

In Brief Examining the strategic balance in the Russo-Ukrainian War leads to the conclusion that Russia has the upper hand. In 2024, Ukraine has limited prospects for overturning Russian territorial annexations and troop reinforcements of stolen territory. Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russian offensive action decreases as U.S. financial and materiel support decreases. Ukraine needs a significant increase in land forces to evict the occupying Russian land forces.

Introduction

The Russo-Ukrainian War is passing into its third year. In the period leading up to this point in the conflict, the defense and security studies community has been awash with arguments stating that the war is a stalemate. Perhaps the most compelling argument comes from General Valery Zaluzhny, former commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, who stated as much in an interview with the Economist in November 2023. 1 Meanwhile, there are others, including noted analyst Jack Watling, who emphatically state the opposite. 2

Nonetheless, two years in, it is useful to objectively examine the conflict’s strategic balance. Some basic questions guide the examination, such as: is Ukraine winning, or is Russia winning? What does Ukraine need to defeat Russia, and conversely, what does Russia need to win in Ukraine? Moreover, aside from identifying who is winning or losing the conflict, it is important to identify salient trends that are germane not just within the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War, but that are applicable throughout the defense and security studies communities.

This article addresses these questions through the use of the ends-ways-means-risk heuristic. In doing so, it examines Russia and Ukraine’s current strategic dispositions, and not what they were in February 2022, nor what we might want them to be. Viewing the conflict through the lens of preference and aspiration causes any analyst to misread the strategic situation. The goal of this article, however, is to take a sobering look at the realities of the conflict, offer an assessment of the situation, and posit where the conflict is likely to go in 2024.

The overall conclusion is that Russia is winning the conflict. Russia is winning because it possesses its minimally acceptable outcome: the possession of the Donbas, of the land bridge to Crimea, and of Crimea itself. This victory condition, however, is dependent upon Ukraine’s inability to generate a force sufficient to a) defeat Russia’s forces in each of those discrete pieces of territory; b) retake control of that territory; and c) hold that territory against subsequent Russian counterattacks. No amount of precision strike, long-range fires or drone attacks can compensate for the lack of land forces Ukraine needs to defeat Russia’s army and then take and hold all that terrain. Thus, without an influx of resources for the Ukrainian armed forces—to include a significant increase in land forces—Russia will likely prevail in the conflict. If U.S. support to Ukraine remains frozen, as it is at the time of this writing, then Russian victory in 2024 is a real possibility.

Laying the Groundwork: Situational Implications

Moreover, several other important implications emerge for the defense and security studies community. First, land wars fought for control of territory possess inherently different military end states than irregular wars, counterinsurgencies and civil wars. Therefore, militaries must have the right army for the conflict in which they are engaged. A counterinsurgency army or constabulary force, for instance, will not win a war for territory against an industrialized army built to fight and win wars of attrition. This is something policymakers, senior military leaders and force designers must appreciate and carefully consider as they look to build the armies of the future.

Second, land wars fought for control of territory require military strategies properly aligned to those ends. Therefore, militaries must have the right strategy for the conflict, or phase of the conflict, in which they are engaged. A strategy built on the centrality of precision strike but lacking sufficient land forces to exploit the success of precision strike, for instance, will not win a war for territory—especially against an industrialized army built to fight and win wars of attrition. Policymakers and senior military leaders must periodically refresh and reframe their political ends and military strategies according to their means; otherwise, they risk a wasteful strategy that fritters away limited resources in the pursuit of unrealistic goals.

Third, despite statements to the contrary, physical mass—in this case, more manpower—is more important than precision strike and long-range fires where the physical possession of territory is a critical component of political and military victory for both states. Physical mass allows an army to hold and defend territory. The more physical mass an army possesses, the more resilient it is to attacks of any type and the more difficult and costly it is to defeat—whether that be in munitions expended, number of attacks conducted or lives lost.

Fourth, a prepared, layered and protected defense, like that of Russia’s along the contact line with Ukraine’s armed forces, is challenging to overcome. This challenge grows exponentially if the attacker lacks sufficiently resilient and resourced land forces that are capable of a three-fold mission: (1) defeating the occupying army; (2) moving into the liberated territory; and (3) controlling that land. Armies that are designed to deliver a punch but lack the depth of force structure to continue advancing into vacated or liberated territory after a successful attack, and subsequently are unable to stave off counterattacks, are of little use beyond defensive duty. This finding is at odds with conventional wisdom regarding future force structure that posits that future forces should be small and light and should fight dispersed.

Fifth, Carl von Clausewitz warns that, “So long as I have not overthrown my opponent, I am bound to fear he may overthrow me. Thus, I am not in control: he dictates to me as much as I dictate to him.” 3 The Russo-Ukrainian War has reiterated Clausewitz’s caution: as neither army is able to outright defeat the other, Russia and Ukraine are locked in a long war of attrition, which is fueling the stalemate to which Zaluzhny refers and Watling rejects. The writing between the lines thus suggests that, when confronted with war, a state must unleash a military force that is capable of both defeating its adversary’s army and simultaneously accomplishing its supplemental conditions of end state, to include taking and holding large swaths of physical terrain. Without defeating an adversary’s army—regardless of its composition—one must then always contend with the possibility that tactical military gains are fleeting. Moreover, by first defeating an adversary’s army, one might turn what would otherwise be a long war of attrition into a short war of attrition.

Russian Strategic Assessment

Russia’s strategic ends can be summarized as:

fracture the Ukrainian state—politically, territorially and culturally;
maintain sufficient territorial acquisitions to support a range of acceptable political-military outcomes;
maintain strategic materiel overmatch;
exhaust Ukraine’s ability to continue fighting—both materially and as regards Ukrainian support from the international community;
normalize the conflict’s abnormalities; and
undercut and erode Ukraine’s ability to conduct offensive operations to reclaim annexed territory.

When viewing all of these ends collectively, it is clear that denationalization of the Ukrainian state is Russia’s strategic end in this conflict. Raphael Lemkin defines denationalization as a state’s deliberate and systematic process of eroding or destroying another state’s national character and national patterns (i.e., culture, self-identity, language, customs, etc.). 4 Russia’s policy and military objectives have evolved ever so slightly since February 2022, but Ukraine’s denationalization remains at the heart of the Kremlin’s strategic ends. The Kremlin’s objectives in 2022 included unseating President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, ending Ukrainian self-rule and replacing it with a Russian partisan political leadership, and annexing a significant portion of Ukraine’s territory. To that end, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke at the time of “denazifying” and “demilitarizing” Ukraine, while also forcing Kyiv to remain politically and militarily neutral within the international community’s network of political and military alliances. 5 Putin reaffirmed these policy aims during a December 2023 press conference in Moscow. 6 Nonetheless, Russia’s military activities—which have not made advances toward Kyiv since Moscow’s initial assault on the capital failed in April 2022—do not indicate any renewed effort to remove Zelenskyy or Ukraine’s government from power. There is, though, a real possibility of this occurring in 2024, especially if U.S. support to Ukraine remains frozen for the foreseeable future.

It does appear, however, that the Kremlin is attempting to elongate the conflict in time and cost such that Moscow outlasts both Kyiv’s financial and military support from the international community and Ukraine’s material means to continue attempting offensive military activities to reclaim its territory. In doing so, the Kremlin likely intends to accelerate Ukraine to strategic exhaustion and subsequently force Kyiv to broker a peace deal.

As noted recently, Russia’s territorial ambitions of Ukraine likely operate along a spectrum of acceptable outcomes. 7 Presumably, as noted above, Russia’s minimally acceptable outcome—or the minimal territorial holdings that the Kremlin is satisfied to end the war possessing—include retention of the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea (see Figure 1). For clarity’s sake, the land bridge to Crimea includes the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts—the two oblasts that provide a unified ground link between the Donbas and Crimea. The land bridge is important because it provides Russia a ground-based connection from Russian territory between the occupied Donbas and occupied Crimea, thus simplifying the governance, defense and retention of Crimea.

2024 will be a pivotal year for Ukraine. If the United States elects a Ukraine-friendly president, then Kyiv can likely expect continued financial and military support from the United States in 2025. On the other hand, if it does not elect a Ukraine-friendly president, then Kyiv can anticipate a range of decreasing financial and military support in the defense of their state against Russian denationalization efforts.

At the same time, the appearance of Chinese, North Korean and Iranian weapons and munitions on the Ukrainian battlefield indicate that Russia is facing its own challenges keeping up with the conflict’s attritional character. 8 Though the degree to which external support is helping keep its war-machine going in Ukraine is challenging to discern through open-source information, we do know that external support allows the Russian military to overcome some of its defense industry’s production and distribution shortfalls. In turn, Chinese, North Korean and Iranian support allows the Kremlin to continue elongating the conflict in time, space and resources with the goal of exhausting Ukraine’s military and Kyiv’s capacity to sustain its resistance to Russia.

Russia has already weathered much of the risk associated with invading Ukraine. Economic sanctions hit hard early on, but Russian industry and its economy have absorbed those early hardships and found ways to offset many of those challenges—including through Chinese, North Korean and Iranian support. 9 Further, the West’s gradual escalation of weapon support to Ukraine allowed Russia to develop an equally gradual learning curve to those weapons, and, in most cases, nullify any “game-changing” effects that they might have generated if introduced early in the conflict and with sufficient density to create front-wide effects. 10 Instead, the slow drip of Western support allowed Russian forces to observe, learn and adapt to those weapon systems and develop effective ways to counter Western technology and firepower. 11 The Russian military’s learning process has allowed it to recover from its embarrassing performance early in the conflict and draw into question the U.S. and other Western states’ strategy of third-party support to Ukraine. 12

The primary risks that the Russo-Ukrainian War poses to Russia today are: (1) The United States and/or NATO might intervene with their land forces on behalf of Ukraine; and (2) political upheaval might occur as a result of domestic unrest. The risk of U.S. and NATO intervention with land forces is low, and will likely remain that way, because of the fear of Russian escalation with tactical or strategic nuclear weapons. 13 Although the likelihood of Russian nuclear strikes in Ukraine is also low, Russian political leaders regularly unsheathe nuclear threats to oppose and deter unwanted activities. 14 Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council, recently threated Ukraine with a nuclear response if Ukraine attacked Russian missile launch sites within Russia with Western-supplied, long-range missiles. 15 This follows Russia’s repositioning of some of its nuclear arsenal to Belarus in the summer of 2023. 16 Nonetheless, short of the commitment of U.S. or NATO land forces, or the potential loss of the Crimean peninsula, Russia’s likelihood to actually use nuclear weapons remains low.

To the second risk—that of domestic unrest creating political instability—Putin and his coterie of supporters continue to use old Russian methods to offset this problem. Arrests, assassinations, disappearances and suppression are the primary methods employed against this challenge and to deter domestic opposition to his policies vis-à-vis Ukraine. 17 The assassination of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, in August 2023, is perhaps the most high-profile example of this technique. 18 Further, the periodic disappearances and imprisonments of Alexei Navalny is another example of the Putin regime attempting to keep political opposition quiet. 19 Longtime Kremlin henchman, Igor Girkin, who was extremely critical of Putin and of the Kremlin’s handling of the war in Ukraine during 2023, was sentenced to four years in prison in January 2024. 20 Moreover, the suppression of journalists within Russia is spiking as Putin seeks to silence opposition and punish dissent in the wake of the strong economic and domestic upheavals caused by his war. 21

In addition, former U.S. Army Europe commander, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, USA, Ret., states that Russia mobilizes citizens from its peripheral and more rural areas for its war in Ukraine. 22 Many of these individuals are ethnic minorities and therefore of lesser importance in Putin’s (and many Russians’) social hierarchy. 23 According to Hodges, by pulling heavily from the areas outside of Russia’s major population centers, to include Moscow and St. Petersburg, Putin is able to offset a significant potential domestic unrest by thrusting the weight of combat losses into the state’s far-flung reaches, to be borne by those with less social status. 24 Doing so buys Putin more time to continue the conflict and attempt to bankrupt both Ukrainian and Western resolve.

Means are the military equipment and other materiel that a military force requires to create feasible ways. Moreover, means operate as the strategic glue that binds a military force’s ends with their ways. As mentioned in the Ends section, Russian industry appears to be challenged by the Russian armed forces’ demand for military equipment and armaments. The Russian armed forces’ ways—or approach to operating on the battlefield against Ukraine—is resource-intensive. Early Russian combat losses—the result of stalwart Ukrainian fighting coupled with inept Russian tactics—generated massive logistics challenges for Russia. Further, Russia has continued to fight according to long-standing Russian military practice: lead with fires, and move forward incrementally as the fires allow. The incremental advances, however, have also come at extreme costs in men and materiel. Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, for instance, refer to Russian fighting at the battles of Mariupol and Bakhmut as relying on “meatgrinder tactics” in which human-wave attacks are used to advance Russian military interests. 25 As of 20 February 2024, Russia has lost 404,950 troops, 6,503 tanks, 338 aircraft and 25 ships, among many other combat losses; the losses that they have afflicted on Ukrainian forces remains largely unknown. 26

As noted by Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s chief intelligence officer, Russia’s use of proxy forces is the primary way in which they have sought to offset land force requirements and to relieve some of the stress on their own army. 27 The contractual proxy, the Wagner Group, and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Armies (DPA and LPA, respectively)—both cultural proxies—were the primary proxies used between the renewed hostilities of February 2022 through the summer of 2023. The Wagner Group’s attempted coup in June 2023 naturally cooled the Kremlin’s reliance on it. At the same time, Russia’s military operations have become less offensive and more defensive, seeking to retain land already annexed, as opposed to confiscating more Ukrainian territory. Consequently, Moscow’s demand for more land forces and disposable infantry has somewhat diminished.

Nonetheless, fighting a defensive war along the contact line across the Donbas and the land bridge to Crimea has increased Russia’s need for drones and strike capability. As noted previously, Russia has maintained good diplomatic relationships with China, North Korea and Iran; this has allowed the Russian armed forces access to important weaponry from those states for use on the battlefield in Ukraine. Thus, despite the potential for economic sanctions to cripple Russia’s ability to wage war, the Kremlin has diversified its bases of economic and military power to ensure that it has the means it requires to continue the conflict with Ukraine. Moreover, this has allowed Russia to overcome many of the advantages that Ukraine obtained through the introduction of U.S. and other Western-supplied military aide and so to return theater-level stasis to the battlefield. Put another way, Russia’s ability to diversify its means has allowed it to generate a stalemate—which works in Moscow’s favor—and to keep the conflict going, with the goal of outlasting the international community’s military support and exhausting Ukraine’s ability to continue fighting.

Considering Russia’s diverse bases of power, it is likely that battlefield stasis—or stalemate—will continue through 2024. In fact, this is probably Russia’s preferred course of action. It is likely that Russia is seeking to elongate the conflict through the upcoming U.S. presidential election, in hopes that the United States will elect a president who is not as friendly toward Kyiv and the Ukrainian fight for sovereignty—namely, one that will eliminate U.S. support to Ukraine’s war effort altogether.

Ways are the specific methods an actor seeks to obtain their ends, with deference to their means. Ways consist of many supporting lines of operation or lines of effort. Moreover, many complimentary campaigns and operations can exist simultaneously within a strategy’s ways. Further, from a taxonomical position, the dominant approach or line of operation (or effort) within a strategy’s ways often becomes shorthand for a combatant’s general strategy. To that end, Russia’s strategy can be considered a strategy of exhaustion.

Russia’s strategy of exhaustion can be broken into five lines of effort:

incrementally increase territorial gains to support negotiations later down the line;
fortify territorial gains to prevent Ukrainian efforts to retake that land;
destroy Ukraine’s offensive capability to prevent future attempts to retake annexed territory;
temporally elongate the conflict to outlast U.S. and Western military support; and
temporally and spatially elongate the conflict to exceed Ukraine’s manpower reserves.

Early in the conflict, Russia’s strategy focused on the conquest of Ukrainian territory. The scale is up for debate, but Russian military operations indicated that they intended to take Kyiv, the oblasts that paralleled both sides of the Dnieper River, and all the oblasts east of the Dnieper to the Ukraine-Russia international boundary. This operation floundered, but Russia was able to extend their holdings in the Donbas, retain Crimea and obtain the land bridge to Crimea—which had been a goal of their 2014–2015 campaign, one that they came up short on at that time. 28

As noted in the Means section above, Russia attempted limited territorial gains through 2023. 29 The attainment of any further Ukrainian territory is likely only for negotiation purposes. With that, if and when Russia and Ukraine reach the point in which they must negotiate an end to the conflict, Russia can offer to “give back” some of Ukraine’s territory as a bargaining chip so that it can hold onto what it truly desires: retention of the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea. This is a trend that will likely continue through 2024; we can expect to see Russia attempting to extend their territorial holdings along the contact line, arguably for the purpose of improving their bargaining position if and when negotiations between the two states come to fruition.

Further, Russia seeks to cause Ukraine’s war effort to culminate by depleting Ukrainian materiel and manpower—both on hand and reserves. Putin states that Russia currently has 617,000 soldiers participating in the conflict. The number of combat forces within Ukraine is unknown. 30 Nonetheless, significant battles, such as Mariupol, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and others, while tough on Russia, are of serious concern for Ukraine. Russia’s population advantage in relation to Ukraine means, quite simply, that the Kremlin has a much deeper well from which to generate an army than does Kyiv. Therefore, Russia continues to leverage its population advantages over Ukraine in bloody battles of attrition to exhaust Ukraine’s ability to field forces. The Kremlin’s attempt to cause the Ukrainian armed forces to culminate shows signs of success. In December 2023, for instance, Zelenskyy stated that his military commanders were asking for an additional 500,000 troops. 31 Zelenskyy called this number “very serious” because of the impact it would have on Ukrainian civil society. 32 Budanov more recently echoed Zelenskyy, stating that Ukraine’s position was precarious without further mobilizations of manpower. 33

Russia’s strategy of exhaustion, therefore, appears to be working. Russian mass has generally frozen the conflict along the lines of Russia’s minimally acceptable outcome noted previously, i.e., the retention of the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea. This reality flies in the face of General Chris Cavoli, commander of U.S. Army European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who emphatically stated: “Precision can beat Mass. The Ukrainians have showed that this past autumn. But it takes time for it to work, and that time is usually bought with space. And so, to use this method, we need space to trade for time. Not all of us have that. We have to compensate for this in our thinking [and] our planning.” 34

While U.S. and Western-provided precision strike might have helped Ukraine in some early instances within the conflict, Russian mass, coupled with Russian’s intention on retaining territory, is disproving Cavoli’s hypothesis. Further, the sacrifice of territory for time that Cavoli refers to actually plays to the favor of Russian rather than Ukrainian political-military objectives. The land that Ukrainian forces have involuntarily ceded to Russian land forces is not likely to be retaken by precision strike. Ukraine will require a significant amount of land forces, supported by joint fires and precision strike, to dislodge Russian land forces, to control the retaken territory, and to hold it against subsequent Russian counterattacks.

Russian Strategic Assessment: Summary

If winning in war is defined by one state’s attainment of their political-military objectives at the cost of their adversary’s political-military objectives, then Russia appears to possess the upper-hand through two years of conflict (see Table 1). Russia’s strategy of exhaustion and territorial annexation appears to be working, albeit at high costs to the Russian economy and the Russian people. Russia has had to diversify its bases of power to maintain the war stocks required to execute its strategy of exhaustion, and it has had to exact a heavy toll on the Russian people to conduct the bite-and-hold tactics needed to make its territorial gains. Considering that Russia is largely on the defensive now, holding its position along the time of contact, the toll on the Russian people will likely decrease in the coming year. Moreover, considering its heavily fortified defensive position, it will likely maintain the upper hand on the battlefield through 2024.

Ukrainian Strategic Assessment

Ukraine’s focus remains to liberate its territory from Russian occupation and restore its 1991 borders with Russia, which includes restoring its sovereignty over the Donbas and Crimea. 35 Beyond that, Ukraine continues to work to strengthen its bonds with the West. From security assistance partnerships to working on joining the European Union (EU), Zelenskyy and his government continue to press the diplomatic channels to maintain and gain political, military and economic support from the international community. 36

Kyiv’s efforts to join the EU and continue to maintain support from the international community are arguably much more realistic than its objective to remove Russian military forces—to include Russian proxies—from Ukraine’s territory. The classic board game Risk provides an excellent analogy for what Ukraine must do. In Risk, to claim or reclaim a piece of territory on the map, a player must attack and defeat the army occupying a territory. If (and when) the attacker defeats the defender, the attacker must then do two things—not just one. The attacker must not only move armies into the conquered territory, but he must also leave at least one army in the territory from which he initiated his attack. In effect, any successful attack diffuses combat power, and this is on top of any losses suffered during the attack. And yet, the attacker must identify the appropriate balance of armies between the newly acquired territory and the territory from which he attacked. An imbalance in either territory creates an enticing target for counterattack by the vanquished occupier.

Ukraine finds itself in just such a position; however, instead of just attacking to retake one small portion of its territory, Ukraine must work to reclaim nearly 20 percent of its territory. 37 Compounding this problem is the size of Russia’s occupation force. As noted previously, Putin indicated that Russia has 670,000 soldiers committed to the conflict—this is more than a 200 percent increase from Moscow’s initial 190,000-strong invasion force. 38 It is challenging to verify Putin’s numbers, or to identify how those numbers are split between combat and support troops, and troops operating in Ukraine vice support troops committed to the conflict but operating in Russia. Nonetheless, for the sake of argument, let’s assume all 670,000 Russian troops are in Ukraine. Using the traditional attacker-to-defender heuristic, which states that a successful attack requires three units of measure to every one defensive unit of measure (3:1), and using individual troops as the unit of measure, we find that a successful Ukrainian attack would require more than two million troops to execute the sequence outlined above.

Are two million troops really what’s required to evict Russian land forces from Ukraine and hold it against a likely counterattack? Some analysts—both old and current—suggest that the 3:1 ratio is flawed, not relevant, or both. 39 Or does modern technology obviate the need for some of those land forces, as Cavoli suggested?

The fact of the matter remains: Long-range precision strike, drones of all types and excellent targeting information have done what complimentary arms and intelligence have always done—they have supported the advance or defensive posture of competing land forces, but they have not supplanted it. Moreover, technology must be viewed in the context of both the operations that it is supporting, but also the adversarial operations that it seeks to overcome. If it is correct that Russian strategy is primarily concerned with retaining its territorial acquisitions at this point, and thus Russian military forces are focused on conducting defensive operations, and that Ukrainian land forces do not have the numbers to conduct the attack-defeat-occupy-defend sequence in conjunction with those other components of combined arms operations, then the precision strike, drones and targeting information might be the window dressing for a futile strategic position. Seen in this light, Kyiv’s strategy is out of balance; that is, Kyiv’s ends exceed the limits of its means. The effect of this situation has contributed to the conflict being characterized as a war of attrition.

The greatest risk to Ukraine’s strategy for winning the war against Russia is the loss of U.S. political, financial and military support. The loss of support from other European partners closely follows in order of importance. A great deal has been written about this in other publications, and as a result, this section will examine other strategic risks.

One of Kyiv’s biggest strategic risks is exhausting or diffusing its military force so much so that Russian land forces might attack and confiscate additional Ukrainian land through increasingly vulnerable positions. For instance, Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the summer of 2023 could have very well created so-called soft spots in Ukraine’s lines through which a localized counterattack might create an operational breakthrough. That did not happen, but this situation is something that strategic military planners must consider if Zelenskyy and his government truly intend to liberate all of Ukraine’s territory from Russia.

In addition, the reclamation of Crimea is something that is potentially a game-changing situation. Putin has stated the Crimea is Russia’s red line, indicating that a nuclear retort could likely coincide with any legitimate Ukrainian attempt to retake the peninsula. 40 Therefore, Putin’s red line is something policymakers and strategists in Kyiv would have to consider before enacting any attempt to seize and hold Crimea. Might Putin’s red line be a bluff? Perhaps. But the threat of nuclear strike, coupled with Putin’s move of nuclear weapons into Belarus and his repositioning of nuclear strike weapons close to Ukraine earlier in the conflict, demonstrate some credibility to the threat.

As noted extensively in the section on Ukraine’s strategic ends, manpower is the biggest resource inhibiting Ukraine from attaining its political-military objectives. 41 As Zaluzhnyi notes in a recent essay, Ukraine’s recruiting and retention problems, coupled with a fixed population, no coalition to share the manpower load and two years of killed in action and other casualties, have put Ukraine in this position. 42 It is not a position that they are likely to overcome, even if Kyiv initiates a conscription system. Considering the 3:1 math outlined above, Kyiv theoretically needs to generate a trained army of more than two million troops if it hopes to remove Russian land forces from Ukraine. Moreover, if technology enthusiasts are correct and precision strike weapons, drones and advanced intelligence could shift the 3:1 ratio to perhaps 2:1 or even 1.5:1 in open combat, that advantage would shift back toward the defenders in urban areas. This is because of considerations of International Humanitarian Law and the challenges of targeting in more respective operating environments—a useful segue to discuss combat in urban areas.

The math gets even more challenging when this context is applied. Trevor Dupuy writes that, “The 3:1 force ratio requirement for the attacker cannot be of useful value without some knowledge of the behavioral and other combat variable factors involved.” 43 As such, factors such as the operating environment, the type of opponent and the method in which they have historically fought must also be applied to the situation. Theory and military doctrine both suggest that the ratio for attacker to defender in urban operating environments increases from 3:1 to 6:1. 44

Considering the large number of cities in Ukraine’s occupied areas, as well as their breadth and the depth of the front that Kyiv’s forces would have to work through, this poses a significant challenge. Hypothetically, Russian forces might strong-point places like Donetsk City, Mariupol, Melitopol, Simferopol and Sevastopol, creating a network of interlocked spikes in required strength—from 3:1 to 6:1—and thus increasing the overall combat power required by Ukraine to remove Russian military forces from the country.

Moreover, if Ukraine is able to remove Russian land forces from Ukraine, the question of insurgency must also come into the equation. Retaking physical territory is one thing; securing the loyalty of the people in that territory is quite another. Vast portions of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, as well as the entirety of Crimea, have been occupied by Russia for a decade. The political loyalties, cultural affiliation and domestic politics of the population in those areas are far from certain at this point. Thus, the chance for an insurgency in the Donbas and Crimea must also be considered when calculating the means—in this case, human capital—required to conduct operations to reclaim and hold lost territory.

Already running short of needed ammunition, to include artillery, missiles and air defense missiles, Ukraine’s ammunition crunch is likely to accelerate through 2024. This is yet another concern raised by Zaluzhnyi in his recent essay on what Ukraine needs to survive and win against Russia. 45 At the time of this writing, Congress has failed to approve the Department of Defense’s latest funding requests for Ukraine. Whether they move forward on that remains to be seen. Nonetheless, for the purpose of continuing the discussion, let’s assume that Congress approves the funding in March 2024. But by that time, that lapse in funding will have created a lapse in support to Ukraine, exacerbating an already tenuous ammunition situation and potentially creating something far more critical. As it currently stands, Ukrainian units are approaching the point at which they are able to do little more than defend their positions and maintain the front lines. 46 Moving forward in time, Ukrainian units will not be able to conduct robust offensive operations—which would require methodically penetrating Russian defensive belts and destroying Russian land forces in stride—because they will not have enough ammunition.

A lag will also develop between the time in which Congress authorizes funds for Ukraine, the time that the military can deliver the equipment associated with those funds to Ukraine’s armed forces and the time that the Ukrainian armed forces can put that equipment to use on the battlefield. In the interim period between Congressional approval and the Ukrainian forces putting the equipment to use in the field, the risk of Russian tactical and operational military offensive operations increases, while Ukraine’s risk of successful defensive operations decreases. Therefore, one might expect to see Russian land forces attempting to penetrate Ukrainian lines in the coming months in an effort to exploit Ukraine’s ammunition crisis and, as noted earlier, to take additional territory to strengthen its bargaining position later down the road.

Having examined Ukraine’s strategic ends and the challenges presented to those ends by both Ukraine’s risks and means, the ways is a fairly simple discussion. Ukraine’s limited manpower and ammunition base already limits what Ukraine can do offensively. If Russian forces in Ukraine do actually approach 670,000, and the 3:1 ratio (or 6:1 ratio) are accurate planning considerations, Kyiv would have to generate, at a minimum, the men, materiel and ammunition for a two million-soldier army to retake the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea. Moreover, this does not account for any counterattacks that might follow Ukrainian success or for potential insurgencies in any of those newly liberated areas.

In recent conversations on the subject, Michael Kofman and Franz-Stefan Gady made mention of this and suggested that, for the foreseeable future, Ukrainian forces are limited to defensive operations along the contact line and to small, limited objective offensives with operations rarely exceeding platoon size. 47 Hardly a way to win a war. Although Gady’s assessment of Ukraine’s position was more optimistic than Kofman’s, both analysts suggest a very challenging 2024 for Kyiv’s armed forces. Considering the strategic balance, Gady and Kofman are correct—Ukraine will be quite challenged in 2024 to do much more than defend the contact line with sufficient force to prevent Russian breakthroughs. Avdiivka is a case in point.

Avdiivka—located along the contact line in Donetsk oblast—is the conflict’s current hot spot. Russian land forces continue to use “meat assaults” to attrite Ukrainian men, materiel and equipment in the city in hopes of extending their territorial annexation and exhausting Ukraine’s ability to continue fighting. 48 After months of fighting, Russia appears to be on the cusp of claiming the city. 49 Accurate casualty numbers are challenging to identify at this point, but reports indicate that thousands of troops on both sides have died as the struggle for the city churns through men and resources. Holding the line against robust Russian attacks, like that at Avdiivka, is likely to be the maximum extent of Ukrainian operations through 2024.

Ukrainian Strategic Assessment: Summary

The most basic finding is that Ukraine has culminated and is not capable of offensive operations at the scale and duration required to retake the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea or Crimea. What’s more, the Ukrainian armed forces will require a significant augmentation of land power to remove Russia from Ukraine’s territory. Precision strikes and air power will help in this endeavor, but Ukrainian infantry and armored forces must still move into the terrain, clear the terrain of Russian land forces, hold the terrain and then prevail against any Russian counterattacks. Therefore, onlookers should not expect any grand Ukrainian offensive through 2024. Ukraine might attempt one or two smaller scale offensives to nibble away Russian held territory, but anything larger exceeds Ukraine’s means.

If U.S. support to Ukraine remains frozen for an extended period of time, Ukraine’s ability to just hold the contact line with Russia will deteriorate further. U.S. weapons, ammunition and military equipment are vital to Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. Each day without that support adds more fragility to Ukraine’s supply network, its artillery forces and its land forces. It means increasing weaknesses proliferating through the Ukrainian armed forces and Kyiv’s inability to develop useful military strategy. In short, 2024 looks bleak for Ukraine and for its ability to meet its political-military objectives.

If, however, U.S. support to Ukraine is unlocked relatively soon, Ukraine’s ability to defend itself will still see a slight dip in capability, but it will likely rebound quickly. Nonetheless, Ukraine’s manpower challenges will still prevent it from any large-scale offensives during 2024. The influx of long-range precision strikes, air power and intelligence from the United States—and other Western nations—will help mitigate some of the personnel challenges, but certainly not completely obviate that concern. Therefore, the attritional grind of forces aligned on opposing trench networks is likely to characterize the conflict throughout 2024.

The Russo-Ukrainian War is currently in stasis. This stalemate is the result of competing strategies, one of which is focused on the retention of annexed territory—and the other on the vanquishment of a hostile force from its territory without the means to accomplish that objective. Considering the balance in relation to each state’s ends, Russia is currently winning the war (see Table 3). Russia controls significant portions of Ukrainian territory, and they are not likely to be evicted from that territory by any other means than brutal land warfare, which Ukraine cannot currently afford. What’s more, it is debatable if Ukraine will be able to generate the forces needed to liberate and hold the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea. It would likely take an international coalition to generate the number of troops, combat forces and strike capabilities needed to accomplish the liberation of Ukraine’s occupied territory. This international coalition materializing is extremely unlikely to happen.

As stated in the Introduction, land wars fought for territory possess different military end goals than irregular wars, counterinsurgencies and civil wars. Moreover, a strategy’s ends must be supported first by its means, and secondarily, by resource-bound ways to accomplish those ends. Thus, precision strike strategies and light-footprint approaches do not provide sufficient forces to defeat industrialized armies built to fight wars based on the physical destruction of opposing armies and occupying their territory. Robust land forces, capable of delivering overwhelming firepower and flooding into territory held by an aggressor army, are the future of war, not relics of 20th century armed conflict. This is not a feature of conflict specific to Europe, but, as John McManus notes, something that has also been proven in east Asia during U.S. operations in the Pacific theater during World War II. For instance, McManus notes that the U.S. Army employed more divisions during the invasion of The Philippines than it did during the invasion of Normandy. 50 Given the considerations that policymakers face regarding a China-Taiwan conflict scenario, it is useful to take into account McManus’ findings, as well as the realities of war laid bare in Ukraine. If China were to invade Taiwan, with the intention of annexation, then similar factors to that of the Russo-Ukrainian War are worth weighing. Large, robust land forces would be required to enter, clear and hold Taiwan.

Moreover, Russia’s operations in Ukraine illustrate that mass beats precision, and not the other way around. Precision might provide a tactical victory at a single point on the battlefield, but those victories of a finite point are not likely to deliver strategic victory. Further, denigrating Russia’s mass strategy as “stupid” misses the point. If Russia delivers strategic victory, it cannot be that illogical, regardless of how dubious the methods. Ultimately, Russia’s operations in Ukraine show that mass, especially in wars of territorial annexation, are how a state truly consolidates its gains and hedges those military victories against counterattacks.

Finally, the Russo-Ukrainian War illustrates how important it is to eliminate an enemy army to insulate one’s state from see-saw transitions between tactical victories. Clausewitz asserts that an undestroyed army always presents the possibility of returning to the battlefield and undercutting its adversary’s aims. Ukraine’s inability to eliminate Russia’s army and remove it from the battlefield in Ukraine means that Kyiv will have to continually wrestle with the Kremlin aggressively pursuing its aims in Ukraine. Ukraine’s inability to generate the size of force, coupled with the destructive warfighting capabilities needed to destroy Russia’s army in Ukraine and to occupy and hold the liberated territory, means that this war of attrition will likely grind on until either Ukraine can generate the force needed to evict Putin’s army from Ukraine, Ukraine becomes strategically exhausted and has to quit the conflict, or both parties decide to end the conflict. Regardless of the outcome, 2024 will likely continue to see Russia attempting to strategically exhaust Ukraine; meanwhile, Kyiv will do its best to maintain its position along the contact line as it tries to recruit and train the army needed to destroy Russia’s army and to liberate its territory.

Amos Fox is a PhD candidate at the University of Reading and a freelance writer and conflict scholar writing for the Association of the United States Army. His research and writing focus on the theory of war and warfare, proxy war, future armed conflict, urban warfare, armored warfare and the Russo-Ukrainian War. Amos has published in RUSI Journal and Small Wars and Insurgencies among many other publications, and he has been a guest on numerous podcasts, including RUSI’s Western Way of War , This Means War , the Dead Prussian Podcast and the Voices of War .

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Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, Meatgrinder: Russian Tactics in the Second Year of Its Invasion of Ukraine (London: Royal United Services Institute, 2023), 3–8.
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The views and opinions of our authors do not necessarily reflect those of the Association of the United States Army. An article selected for publication represents research by the author(s) which, in the opinion of the Association, will contribute to the discussion of a particular defense or national security issue. These articles should not be taken to represent the views of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, the United States government, the Association of the United States Army or its members.

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Ukraine invasion — explained

The roots of Russia's invasion of Ukraine go back decades and run deep. The current conflict is more than one country fighting to take over another; it is — in the words of one U.S. official — a shift in "the world order." Here are some helpful stories to make sense of it all.

How the Ukraine-Russia war is playing out differently on 3 separate fronts

A damaged statue of Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin in a central square in Sudzha, in the Kursk region of western Russia, on Aug. 16. Ukrainian troops say they've taken control of Sudzha, one of more than 80 towns and villages they've captured since a cross-border invasion of Russia on Aug. 6. -/AP hide caption

KYIV, Ukraine — The front line in the Russia-Ukraine war stretches for more than 600 miles. Yet roughly speaking, it breaks down into three separate fronts — in Ukraine's north, east and south — which are all playing out differently.

The latest front is just across Ukraine's northern border, where Ukrainian troops carried out a surprise invasion into Russian territory on Aug. 6, and are solidifying their positions two weeks after that breakthrough.

In eastern Ukraine, Russian forces are making steady advances and are closing in on a town that's crucial for Ukraine's military supply lines.

And in the south, in the Black Sea, Ukraine has delivered an ongoing series of powerful blows to the Russian navy and carved out a channel that allows it to export its wheat and other agricultural products.

A Ukrainian military vehicle filled with captured Russian troops travels on the Ukrainian side of the border with Russia on Tuesday. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Ukraine has captured hundreds of Russian fighters since it launched its invasion into the Kursk region of western Russia on Aug. 6.

Ukrainian forces attack a second border region in western Russia

Here's a closer look at all three.

In the north, a "buffer zone"

Ukraine said over the weekend it knocked out two bridges that cross the Seym River in western Russia, rendering them useless.

This cuts off key transportation routes that Russia could have used to send reinforcements into the Kursk region, with the intent of driving out the Ukrainian forces that have been taking and holding ground for the past two weeks.

However, it also suggests Ukraine is adopting a defensive position and is not looking to advance deeper into Russia, at least in this area.

In video remarks Sunday night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was trying to keep Russia away from the border region it has used to stage attacks against Ukraine.

"The creation of a buffer zone on the aggressor's territory is our operation in the Kursk region," Zelenskyy said.

In May, the Russians attempted to advance on the city Kharkiv, just 20 miles inside Ukraine. Ukraine halted the Russian ground offensive, though the city and surrounding areas still come under frequent Russian airstrikes with glide bombs that are difficult to defend against.

Viktoria Kitsenko poses for a portrait in front of Epicenter, the hardware superstore where she was working when it was hit with a Russian missile, killing 19 people in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on May 26.

Ukraine's Kharkiv has withstood Russia's relentless strikes. Locals fear what's next

After lightning advances in the first few days of its incursion, Ukraine's forces inside Russia have been making only limited gains in the past week. Ukraine is still providing limited details of the operation, but Zelenskyy, military analysts and a range of media reports indicate Ukrainian forces are solidifying their positions.

Ukraine's military says it has taken more than 80 villages and towns and now controls more than 400 square miles in the Kursk region. Those figures cannot be independently confirmed.

The Ukrainians have captured, at minimum, several hundred Russian troops. Ukraine's military allowed journalists to see more than 300 Russian prisoners of war who have been moved across the border and placed in a Ukrainian prison.

Meanwhile, Russia has not yet mounted a significant counterattack. Russian officials says additional troops are on the way, and Russian television has shown columns of troops and equipment heading to Kursk.

But so far, the fighting appears limited to mostly small-scale clashes. The Russians appear to be drawing their forces from other parts of Russia — and not from front-line troops already fighting inside Ukraine.

One of Ukraine's goals with the incursion into Russia is to draw Russian forces away from the front line in eastern Ukraine, but there's no evidence this has happened on any significant scale so far.

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin has not commented on the Ukrainian invasion for the past week, and made a visit Monday to Azerbaijan .

Smoke billows above a bridge on the Seym River in Russia's western region of Kursk. Ukraine's military released the footage on Sunday, saying this was the second bridge on the river it has destroyed in recent days. The bridge could have been a route for Russia to send in reinforcements to the area, where Ukrainian troops invaded Russia on Aug. 6. Ukrainian Armed Forces/via AP hide caption

In the east, Russian troops close in on a key town

Eastern Ukraine is still the main battlefront. The Russians claimed the capture of another small town Monday and are now less than 10 miles from the town of Pokrovsk.

Pokrovsk is a transportation hub that Ukraine uses to send troops and supplies to its front-line positions in the east. If the Russians take the town, Ukraine will have a tougher time supporting forces that are already outnumbered and outgunned.

For the past several days, Ukrainian officials have been urging civilians in Pokrovsk to evacuate to safer areas.

"With every passing day there is less and less time to collect personal belongings and leave for safer regions," local officials in Pokrovsk said in a recent statement.

Throughout the war, Ukraine has had a shortage of troops in the east. By sending thousands of its troops into Russia, Ukraine could be even more vulnerable in areas where it's struggling to stop Russian advances.

Weapons packages from the U.S. and European states are arriving, but not fast enough, according to Zelenskyy.

"We need to speed up the supply from our partners," Zelenskyy said in his Sunday night remarks. "There are no holidays in war. We need solutions, we need timely logistics of announced [weapons] packages. I am especially appealing now to the United States, Great Britain, and France."

In the Black Sea, Ukraine creates an export channel

One of Ukraine's biggest successes over the past year has been driving back the Russian navy in the Black Sea and establishing a shipping channel so it can again export grain and other agricultural products to world markets.

Russia dominated the Black Sea and blocked Ukrainian exports after its full-scale invasion in 2022. A subsequent deal that allowed limited Ukrainian exports fell apart last summer.

But Ukraine has found its own solution. Ukraine has fired missiles from land, hitting Russian ships that ventured too near the coast, and Ukraine also has developed its own sea drones to attack Russian vessels.

Retired U.S. Adm. James Foggo , who worked alongside the Ukrainian Navy in the Black Sea a decade ago, said the sea drones point to Ukraine's naval ingenuity.

"They're jet skis with explosives packed on them," said Foggo, who now heads the Center for Maritime Strategy in Arlington, Va. "They have some kind of remote control from some kind of command center. I don't know what kind of radio control they have on these things, but they're pretty darn good."

The Ukrainian missile and sea drone attacks have forced Russian ships to retreat from the western half of the Black Sea, opening the channel along the western coast for Ukrainian exports.

Ukraine announced last week that it's been one year since this option became available, and 2,300 cargo ships have used the route, an average of more than six a day. Ukraine also says it's approaching its prewar exports of wheat and other farm products at around 5 million tons a month.

Foggo called this a remarkable achievement.

"The Ukrainians, without a floating navy, have been able to destroy about one-third of the [Russian] Black Sea fleet," or about 25 ships and submarines. "That's absolutely amazing," he said.

Ukraine military
Russia-Ukraine
Russia-Ukraine war

9 big questions about Russia’s war in Ukraine, answered

Addressing some of the most pressing questions of the whole war, from how it started to how it might end.

by Zack Beauchamp

A Ukrainian woman stands with her belongings outside a bombed maternity hospital in Mariupol.

The Russian war in Ukraine has proven itself to be one of the most consequential political events of our time — and one of the most confusing.

From the outset, Russia’s decision to invade was hard to understand; it seemed at odds with what most experts saw as Russia’s strategic interests. As the war has progressed, the widely predicted Russian victory has failed to emerge as Ukrainian fighters have repeatedly fended off attacks from a vastly superior force. Around the world, from Washington to Berlin to Beijing, global powers have reacted in striking and even historically unprecedented fashion.

What follows is an attempt to make sense of all of this: to tackle the biggest questions everyone is asking about the war. It is a comprehensive guide to understanding what is happening in Ukraine and why it matters.

1) Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

In a televised speech announcing Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine on February 24 , Russian President Vladimir Putin said the invasion was designed to stop a “genocide” perpetrated by “the Kyiv regime” — and ultimately to achieve “the demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine.”

Though the claims of genocide and Nazi rule in Kyiv were transparently false , the rhetoric revealed Putin’s maximalist war aims: regime change (“de-Nazification”) and the elimination of Ukraine’s status as a sovereign state outside of Russian control (“demilitarization”). Why he would want to do this is a more complex story, one that emerges out of the very long arc of Russian-Ukrainian relations.

Ukraine and Russia have significant, deep, and longstanding cultural and historical ties; both date their political origins back to the ninth-century Slavic kingdom of Kievan Rus. But these ties do not make them historically identical, as Putin has repeatedly claimed in his public rhetoric. Since the rise of the modern Ukrainian national movement in the mid- to late-19th century , Russian rule in Ukraine — in both the czarist and Soviet periods — increasingly came to resemble that of an imperial power governing an unwilling colony .

Russian imperial rule ended in 1991 when 92 percent of Ukrainians voted in a national referendum to secede from the decaying Soviet Union. Almost immediately afterward , political scientists and regional experts began warning that the Russian-Ukrainian border would be a flashpoint, predicting that internal divides between the more pro-European population of western Ukraine and relatively more pro-Russian east , contested territory like the Crimean Peninsula , and Russian desire to reestablish control over its wayward vassal could all lead to conflict between the new neighbors.

It took about 20 years for these predictions to be proven right. In late 2013, Ukrainians took to the streets to protest the authoritarian and pro-Russian tilt of incumbent President Viktor Yanukovych, forcing his resignation on February 22, 2014. Five days later, the Russian military swiftly seized control of Crimea and declared it Russian territory, a brazenly illegal move that a majority of Crimeans nonetheless seemed to welcome . Pro-Russia protests in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine gave way to a violent rebellion — one stoked and armed by the Kremlin , and backed by disguised Russian troops .

Protesters carrying a huge European Union flag.

The Ukrainian uprising against Yanukovych — called the “Euromaidan” movement because they were pro-EU protests that most prominently took place in Kyiv’s Maidan square — represented to Russia a threat not just to its influence over Ukraine but to the very survival of Putin’s regime. In Putin’s mind, Euromaidan was a Western-sponsored plot to overthrow a Kremlin ally, part of a broader plan to undermine Russia itself that included NATO’s post-Cold War expansions to the east.

“We understand what is happening; we understand that [the protests] were aimed against Ukraine and Russia and against Eurasian integration,” he said in a March 2014 speech on the annexation of Crimea. “With Ukraine, our Western partners have crossed the line.”

Beneath this rhetoric, according to experts on Russia, lies a deeper unstated fear: that his regime might fall prey to a similar protest movement . Ukraine could not succeed, in his view, because it might create a pro-Western model for Russians to emulate — one that the United States might eventually try to covertly export to Moscow. This was a central part of his thinking in 2014 , and it remains so today.

“He sees CIA agents behind every anti-Russian political movement,” says Seva Gunitsky, a political scientist who studies Russia at the University of Toronto. “He thinks the West wants to subvert his regime the way they did in Ukraine.”

Beginning in March 2021, Russian forces began deploying to the Ukrainian border in larger and larger numbers. Putin’s nationalist rhetoric became more aggressive: In July 2021, the Russian president published a 5,000-word essay arguing that Ukrainian nationalism was a fiction, that the country was historically always part of Russia, and that a pro-Western Ukraine posed an existential threat to the Russian nation.

Europe’s embrace of Ukrainian refugees, explained in six charts and one map

“The formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us,” as he put it in his 2021 essay .

Why Putin decided that merely seizing part of Ukraine was no longer enough remains a matter of significant debate among experts. One theory, advanced by Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar , is that pandemic-induced isolation drove him to an extreme ideological place.

But while the immediate cause of Putin’s shift on Ukraine is not clear, the nature of that shift is. His longtime belief in the urgency of restoring Russia’s greatness curdled into a neo-imperial desire to bring Ukraine back under direct Russian control. And in Russia, where Putin rules basically unchecked, that meant a full-scale war.

2) Who is winning the war?

On paper , Russia’s military vastly outstrips Ukraine’s. Russia spends over 10 times as much on defense annually as Ukraine; the Russian military has a little under three times as much artillery as Ukraine and roughly 10 times as many fixed-wing aircraft. As a result, the general pre-invasion view was that Russia would easily win a conventional war. In early February, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley told members of Congress that Kyiv, the capital, could fall within 72 hours of a Russian invasion .

But that’s not how things have played out . A month into the invasion, Ukrainians still hold Kyiv. Russia has made some gains, especially in the east and south, but the consensus view among military experts is that Ukraine’s defenses have held stoutly — to the point where Ukrainians have been able to launch counteroffensives .

A soldier walks in front of a destroyed Russian tank in Kharkov, Ukraine, on March 14.

The initial Russian plan reportedly operated under the assumption that a swift march on Kyiv would meet only token resistance. Putin “actually really thought this would be a ‘special military operation’: They would be done in a few days, and it wouldn’t be a real war,” says Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the CNA think tank.

This plan fell apart within the first 48 hours of the war when early operations like an airborne assault on the Hostomel airport ended in disaster , forcing Russian generals to develop a new strategy on the fly. What they came up with — massive artillery bombardments and attempts to encircle and besiege Ukraine’s major cities — was more effective (and more brutal). The Russians made some inroads into Ukrainian territory, especially in the south, where they have laid siege to Mariupol and taken Kherson and Melitopol.

Assessed territory in Ukraine controlled by Russian military (in red).

But these Russian advances are a bit misleading. Ukraine, Kofman explains, made the tactical decision to trade “space for time” : to withdraw strategically rather than fight for every inch of Ukrainian land, confronting the Russians on the territory and at the time of their choosing.

As the fighting continued, the nature of the Ukrainian choice became clearer. Instead of getting into pitched large-scale battles with Russians on open terrain, where Russia’s numerical advantages would prove decisive, the Ukrainians instead decided to engage in a series of smaller-scale clashes .

Ukrainian forces have bogged down Russian units in towns and smaller cities ; street-to-street combat favors defenders who can use their superior knowledge of the city’s geography to hide and conduct ambushes. They have attacked isolated and exposed Russian units traveling on open roads. They have repeatedly raided poorly protected supply lines.

This approach has proven remarkably effective. By mid-March, Western intelligence agencies and open source analysts concluded that the Ukrainians had successfully managed to stall the Russian invasion. The Russian military all but openly recognized this reality in a late March briefing, in which top generals implausibly claimed they never intended to take Kyiv and were always focused on making territorial gains in the east.

“The initial Russian campaign to invade and conquer Ukraine is culminating without achieving its objectives — it is being defeated, in other words,” military scholar Frederick Kagan wrote in a March 22 brief for the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) think tank.

Currently, Ukrainian forces are on the offensive. They have pushed the Russians farther from Kyiv , with some reports suggesting they have retaken the suburb of Irpin and forced Russia to withdraw some of its forces from the area in a tacit admission of defeat. In the south, Ukrainian forces are contesting Russian control over Kherson .

And throughout the fighting, Russian casualties have been horrifically high.

It’s hard to get accurate information in a war zone, but one of the more authoritative estimates of Russian war dead — from the US Defense Department — concludes that over 7,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the first three weeks of fighting, a figure about three times as large as the total US service members dead in all 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan. A separate NATO estimate puts that at the low end, estimating between 7,000 and 15,000 Russians killed in action and as many as 40,000 total losses (including injuries, captures, and desertions). Seven Russian generals have been reported killed in the fighting, and materiel losses — ranging from armor to aircraft — have been enormous. (Russia puts its death toll at more than 1,300 soldiers, which is almost certainly a significant undercount.)

This all does not mean that a Russian victory is impossible. Any number of things, ranging from Russian reinforcements to the fall of besieged Mariupol, could give the war effort new life.

It does, however, mean that what Russia is doing right now hasn’t worked.

“If the point is just to wreak havoc, then they’re doing fine. But if the point is to wreak havoc and thus advance further — be able to hold more territory — they’re not doing fine,” says Olga Oliker, the program director for Europe and Central Asia at the International Crisis Group.

3) Why is Russia’s military performing so poorly?

Russia’s invasion has gone awry for two basic reasons: Its military wasn’t ready to fight a war like this, and the Ukrainians have put up a much stronger defense than anyone expected.

Russia’s problems begin with Putin’s unrealistic invasion plan. But even after the Russian high command adjusted its strategy, other flaws in the army remained.

“We’re seeing a country militarily implode,” says Robert Farley, a professor who studies air power at the University of Kentucky.

One of the biggest and most noticeable issues has been rickety logistics. Some of the most famous images of the war have been of Russian armored vehicles parked on Ukrainian roads, seemingly out of gas and unable to advance. The Russian forces have proven to be underequipped and badly supplied, encountering problems ranging from poor communications to inadequate tires .

Part of the reason is a lack of sufficient preparation. Per Kofman, the Russian military simply “wasn’t organized for this kind of war” — meaning, the conquest of Europe’s second-largest country by area. Another part of it is corruption in the Russian procurement system. Graft in Russia is less a bug in its political system than a feature; one way the Kremlin maintains the loyalty of its elite is by allowing them to profit off of government activity . Military procurement is no exception to this pattern of widespread corruption, and it has led to troops having substandard access to vital supplies .

The same lack of preparation has plagued Russia’s air force . Despite outnumbering the Ukrainian air force by roughly 10 times, the Russians have failed to establish air superiority: Ukraine’s planes are still flying and its air defenses mostly remain in place .

“The Russian Army was not prepared to fight this war” —Jason Lyall, Dartmouth political scientist

Perhaps most importantly, close observers of the war believe Russians are suffering from poor morale. Because Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine was kept secret from the vast majority of Russians, the government had a limited ability to lay a propaganda groundwork that would get their soldiers motivated to fight. The current Russian force has little sense of what they’re fighting for or why — and are waging war against a country with which they have religious, ethnic, historical, and potentially even familial ties. In a military that has long had systemic morale problems, that’s a recipe for battlefield disaster.

“Russian morale was incredibly low BEFORE the war broke out. Brutal hazing in the military, second-class (or worse) status by its conscript soldiers, ethnic divisions, corruption, you name it: the Russian Army was not prepared to fight this war,” Jason Lyall, a Dartmouth political scientist who studies morale, explains via email. “High rates of abandoned or captured equipment, reports of sabotaged equipment, and large numbers of soldiers deserting (or simply camping out in the forest) are all products of low morale.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivers a speech via videoconference to the US Congress at the Capitol on March 16.

The contrast with the Ukrainians couldn’t be starker. They are defending their homes and their families from an unprovoked invasion, led by a charismatic leader who has made a personal stand in Kyiv. Ukrainian high morale is a key reason, in addition to advanced Western armaments, that the defenders have dramatically outperformed expectations.

“Having spent a chunk of my professional career [working] with the Ukrainians, nobody, myself included and themselves included, had all that high an estimation of their military capacity,” Oliker says.

Again, none of this will necessarily remain the case throughout the war. Morale can shift with battlefield developments. And even if Russian morale remains low, it’s still possible for them to win — though they’re more likely to do so in a brutally ugly fashion.

4) What has the war meant for ordinary Ukrainians?

As the fighting has dragged on, Russia has gravitated toward tactics that, by design, hurt civilians. Most notably, Russia has attempted to lay siege to Ukraine’s cities, cutting off supply and escape routes while bombarding them with artillery. The purpose of the strategy is to wear down the Ukrainian defenders’ willingness to fight, including by inflicting mass pain on the civilian populations.

The result has been nightmarish: an astonishing outflow of Ukrainian refugees and tremendous suffering for many of those who were unwilling or unable to leave.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees , more than 3.8 million Ukrainians fled the country between February 24 and March 27. That’s about 8.8 percent of Ukraine’s total population — in proportional terms, the rough equivalent of the entire population of Texas being forced to flee the United States.

Another point of comparison: In 2015, four years into the Syrian civil war and the height of the global refugee crisis, there were a little more than 4 million Syrian refugees living in nearby countries . The Ukraine war has produced a similarly sized exodus in just a month, leading to truly massive refugee flows to its European neighbors. Poland, the primary destination of Ukrainian refugees, is currently housing over 2.3 million Ukrainians, a figure larger than the entire population of Warsaw, its capital and largest city.

The map shows the escape routes for people fleeing the Ukraine crisis. It includes 31 border checkpoints to neighboring countries, and six humanitarian corridors.

For those civilians who have been unable to flee, the situation is dire. There are no reliable estimates of death totals; a March 27 UN estimate puts the figure at 1,119 but cautions that “the actual figures are considerably higher [because] the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration.”

The UN assessment does not blame one side or the other for these deaths, but does note that “most of the civilian casualties recorded were caused by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple-launch rocket systems, and missile and airstrikes.” It is the Russians, primarily, who are using these sorts of weapons in populated areas; Human Rights Watch has announced that there are “early signs of war crimes” being committed by Russian soldiers in these kinds of attacks, and President Joe Biden has personally labeled Putin a “war criminal.”

Nowhere is this devastation more visible than the southern city of Mariupol, the largest Ukrainian population center to which Russia has laid siege. Aerial footage of the city published by the Guardian in late March reveals entire blocks demolished by Russian bombardment:

In mid-March, three Associated Press journalists — the last international reporters in the city before they too were evacuated — managed to file a dispatch describing life on the ground. They reported a death total of 2,500 but cautioned that “many bodies can’t be counted because of the endless shelling .” The situation is impossibly dire:

Airstrikes and shells have hit the maternity hospital, the fire department, homes, a church, a field outside a school. For the estimated hundreds of thousands who remain, there is quite simply nowhere to go. The surrounding roads are mined and the port blocked. Food is running out, and the Russians have stopped humanitarian attempts to bring it in. Electricity is mostly gone and water is sparse, with residents melting snow to drink. Some parents have even left their newborns at the hospital, perhaps hoping to give them a chance at life in the one place with decent electricity and water.

The battlefield failures of the Russian military have raised questions about its competence in difficult block-to-block fighting; Farley, the Kentucky professor, says, “This Russian army does not look like it can conduct serious [urban warfare].” As a result, taking Ukrainian cities means besieging them — starving them out, destroying their will to fight, and only moving into the city proper after its population is unwilling to resist or outright incapable of putting up a fight.

5) What do Russians think about the war?

Vladimir Putin’s government has ramped up its already repressive policies during the Ukraine conflict, shuttering independent media outlets and blocking access to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram . It’s now extremely difficult to get a sense of what either ordinary Russians or the country’s elite think about the war, as criticizing it could lead to a lengthy stint in prison.

But despite this opacity, expert Russia watchers have developed a broad idea of what’s going on there. The war has stirred up some opposition and anti-Putin sentiment, but it has been confined to a minority who are unlikely to change Putin’s mind, let alone topple him.

The bulk of the Russian public was no more prepared for war than the bulk of the Russian military — in fact, probably less so. After Putin announced the launch of his “special military operation” in Ukraine on national television, there was a surprising amount of criticism from high-profile Russians — figures ranging from billionaires to athletes to social media influencers. One Russian journalist, Marina Ovsyannikova, bravely ran into the background of a government broadcast while holding an antiwar sign.

“It is unprecedented to see oligarchs, other elected officials, and other powerful people in society publicly speaking out against the war,” says Alexis Lerner, a scholar of dissent in Russia at the US Naval Academy.

There have also been antiwar rallies in dozens of Russian cities. How many have participated in these rallies is hard to say, but the human rights group OVD-Info estimates that over 15,000 Russians have been arrested at the events since the war began.

Could these eruptions of antiwar sentiment at the elite and mass public level suggest a coming coup or revolution against the Putin regime? Experts caution that these events remain quite unlikely.

Putin has done an effective job engaging in what political scientists call “coup-proofing.” He has put in barriers — from seeding the military with counterintelligence officers to splitting up the state security services into different groups led by trusted allies — that make it quite difficult for anyone in his government to successfully move against him.

“Putin has prepared for this eventuality for a long time and has taken a lot of concerted actions to make sure he’s not vulnerable,” says Adam Casey, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan who studies the history of coups in Russia and the former communist bloc.

Similarly, turning the antiwar protests into a full-blown influential movement is a very tall order.

“It is hard to organize sustained collective protest in Russia,” notes Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard who studies protest movements . “Putin’s government has criminalized many forms of protests, and has shut down or restricted the activities of groups, movements, and media outlets perceived to be in opposition or associated with the West.”

Underpinning it all is tight government control of the information environment. Most Russians get their news from government-run media , which has been serving up a steady diet of pro-war content. Many of them appear to genuinely believe what they hear: One independent opinion poll found that 58 percent of Russians supported the war to at least some degree.

Prior to the war, Putin also appeared to be a genuinely popular figure in Russia. The elite depend on him for their position and fortune; many citizens see him as the man who saved Russia from the chaos of the immediate post-Communist period. A disastrous war might end up changing that, but the odds that even a sustained drop in his support translates into a coup or revolution remain low indeed.

6) What is the US role in the conflict?

The war remains, for the moment, a conflict between Ukraine and Russia. But the United States is the most important third party, using a number of powerful tools — short of direct military intervention — to aid the Ukrainian cause.

Any serious assessment of US involvement needs to start in the post-Cold War 1990s , when the US and its NATO allies made the decision to open alliance membership to former communist states.

Many of these countries, wary of once again being put under the Russian boot, clamored to join the alliance, which commits all involved countries to defend any member-state in the event of an attack. In 2008, NATO officially announced that Georgia and Ukraine — two former Soviet republics right on Russia’s doorstep — “ will become members of NATO ” at an unspecified future date. This infuriated the Russians, who saw NATO expansion as a direct threat to their own security.

There is no doubt that NATO expansion helped create some of the background conditions under which the current conflict became thinkable, generally pushing Putin’s foreign policy in a more anti-Western direction. Some experts see it as one of the key causes of his decision to attack Ukraine — but others strongly disagree, noting that NATO membership for Ukraine was already basically off the table before the war and that Russia’s declared war aims went far beyond simply blocking Ukraine’s NATO bid .

“NATO expansion was deeply unpopular in Russia. [But] Putin did not invade because of NATO expansion,” says Yoshiko Herrera, a Russia expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Regardless of where one falls on that debate, US policy during the conflict has been exceptionally clear: support the Ukrainians with massive amounts of military assistance while putting pressure on Putin to back down by organizing an unprecedented array of international economic sanctions.

Antiwar activists march during a protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Times Square, New York City, on March 26.

On the military side, weapons systems manufactured and provided by the US and Europe have played a vital role in blunting Russia’s advance. The Javelin anti-tank missile system, for example, is a lightweight American-made launcher that allows one or two infantry soldiers to take out a tank . Javelins have given the outgunned Ukrainians a fighting chance against Russian armor, becoming a popular symbol in the process .

Sanctions have proven similarly devastating in the economic realm .

The international punishments have been extremely broad, ranging from removing key Russian banks from the SWIFT global transaction system to a US ban on Russian oil imports to restrictions on doing business with particular members of the Russian elite . Freezing the assets of Russia’s central bank has proven to be a particularly damaging tool, wrecking Russia’s ability to deal with the collapse in the value of the ruble, its currency. As a result, the Russian economy is projected to contract by 15 percent this year ; mass unemployment looms .

There is more America can do, particularly when it comes to fulfilling Ukrainian requests for new fighter jets. In March, Washington rejected a Polish plan to transfer MiG-29 aircraft to Ukraine via a US Air Force base in Germany, arguing that it could be too provocative.

But the MiG-29 incident is more the exception than it is the rule. On the whole, the United States has been strikingly willing to take aggressive steps to punish Moscow and aid Kyiv’s war effort.

7) How is the rest of the world responding to Russia’s actions?

On the surface, the world appears to be fairly united behind the Ukrainian cause. The UN General Assembly passed a resolution condemning the Russian invasion by a whopping 141-5 margin (with 35 abstentions). But the UN vote conceals a great deal of disagreement, especially among the world’s largest and most influential countries — divergences that don’t always fall neatly along democracy-versus-autocracy lines.

The most aggressive anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian positions can, perhaps unsurprisingly, be found in Europe and the broader West. EU and NATO members, with the partial exceptions of Hungary and Turkey , have strongly supported the Ukrainian war effort and implemented punishing sanctions on Russia (a major trading partner). It’s the strongest show of European unity since the Cold War, one that many observers see as a sign that Putin’s invasion has already backfired.

Germany, which has important trade ties with Russia and a post-World War II tradition of pacifism, is perhaps the most striking case. Nearly overnight, the Russian invasion convinced center-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz to support rearmament , introducing a proposal to more than triple Germany’s defense budget that’s widely backed by the German public.

“It’s really revolutionary,” Sophia Besch, a Berlin-based senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, told my colleague Jen Kirby . “Scholz, in his speech, did away with and overturned so many of what we thought were certainties of German defense policy.”

Thousands of people take part in an antiwar demonstration in Dusseldorf, Germany, on March 5.

Though Scholz has refused to outright ban Russian oil and gas imports, he has blocked the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and committed to a long-term strategy of weaning Germany off of Russian energy. All signs point to Russia waking a sleeping giant — of creating a powerful military and economic enemy in the heart of the European continent.

China, by contrast, has been the most pro-Russia of the major global powers.

The two countries, bound by shared animus toward a US-dominated world order, have grown increasingly close in recent years. Chinese propaganda has largely toed the Russian line on the Ukraine war. US intelligence, which has been remarkably accurate during the crisis, believes that Russia has requested military and financial assistance from Beijing — which hasn’t been provided yet but may well be forthcoming.

That said, it’s possible to overstate the degree to which China has taken the Russian side. Beijing has a strong stated commitment to state sovereignty — the bedrock of its position on Taiwan is that the island is actually Chinese territory — which makes a full-throated backing of the invasion ideologically awkward . There’s a notable amount of debate among Chinese policy experts and in the public , with some analysts publicly advocating that Beijing adopt a more neutral line on the conflict.

Most other countries around the world fall somewhere on the spectrum between the West and China. Outside of Europe, only a handful of mostly pro-American states — like South Korea, Japan, and Australia — have joined the sanctions regime. The majority of countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America do not support the invasion, but won’t do very much to punish Russia for it either.

Why India isn’t denouncing Russia’s Ukraine war

India is perhaps the most interesting country in this category. A rising Asian democracy that has violently clashed with China in the very recent past , it has good reasons to present itself as an American partner in the defense of freedom. Yet India also depends heavily on Russian-made weapons for its own defense and hopes to use its relationship with Russia to limit the Moscow-Beijing partnership. It’s also worth noting that India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has strong autocratic inclinations .

The result of all of this is a balancing act reminiscent of India’s Cold War approach of “non-alignment” : refusing to side with either the Russian or American positions while attempting to maintain decent relations with both . India’s perceptions of its strategic interests, more than ideological views about democracy, appear to be shaping its response to the war — as seems to be the case with quite a few countries around the world.

8) Could this turn into World War III?

The basic, scary answer to this question is yes: The invasion of Ukraine has put us at the greatest risk of a NATO-Russia war in decades.

The somewhat more comforting and nuanced answer is that the absolute risk remains relatively low so long as there is no direct NATO involvement in the conflict, which the Biden administration has repeatedly ruled out . Though Biden said “this man [Putin] cannot remain in power” in a late March speech, both White House officials and the president himself stressed afterward that the US policy was not regime change in Moscow.

“Things are stable in a nuclear sense right now,” says Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear weapons at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. “The minute NATO gets involved, the scope of the war widens.”

In theory, US and NATO military assistance to Ukraine could open the door to escalation: Russia could attack a military depot in Poland containing weapons bound for Ukraine, for instance. But in practice, it’s unlikely: The Russians don’t appear to want a wider war with NATO that risks nuclear escalation, and so have avoided cross-border strikes even when it might destroy supply shipments bound for Ukraine.

In early March, the US Department of Defense opened a direct line of communication with its Russian peers in order to avoid any kind of accidental conflict. It’s not clear how well this is working — some reporting suggests the Russians aren’t answering American calls — but there is a long history of effective dialogue between rivals who are fighting each other through proxy forces.

“States often cooperate to keep limits on their wars even as they fight one another clandestinely,” Lyall, the Dartmouth professor, tells me. “While there’s always a risk of unintended escalation, historical examples like Vietnam, Afghanistan (1980s), Afghanistan again (post-2001), and Syria show that wars can be fought ‘within bounds.’”

President Biden meets NATO allies in Poland on March 25 as they coordinate reaction to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

If the United States and NATO heed the call of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to impose a so-called “no-fly zone” over Ukrainian skies, the situation changes dramatically. No-fly zones are commitments to patrol and, if necessary, shoot down military aircraft that fly in the declared area, generally for the purpose of protecting civilians. In Ukraine, that would mean the US and its NATO allies sending in jets to patrol Ukraine’s skies — and being willing to shoot down any Russian planes that enter protected airspace. From there, the risks of a nuclear conflict become terrifyingly high.

Russia recognizes its inferiority to NATO in conventional terms; its military doctrine has long envisioned the use of nuclear weapons in a war with the Western alliance . In his speech declaring war on Ukraine, Putin all but openly vowed that any international intervention in the conflict would trigger nuclear retaliation.

“To anyone who would consider interfering from the outside: If you do, you will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history,” the Russian president said. “I hope you hear me.”

The Biden administration is taking these threats seriously. Much as the Kremlin hasn’t struck NATO supply missions to Ukraine, the White House has flatly rejected a no-fly zone or any other kind of direct military intervention.

“We will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine,” Biden said on March 11 . “Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III, something we must strive to prevent.”

This does not mean the risk of a wider war is zero . Accidents happen, and countries can be dragged into war against their leaders’ best judgment. Political positions and risk calculi can also change: If Russia starts losing badly and uses smaller nukes on Ukrainian forces (called “tactical” nuclear weapons), Biden would likely feel the need to respond in some fairly aggressive way. Much depends on Washington and Moscow continuing to show a certain level of restraint.

9) How could the war end?

Wars do not typically end with the total defeat of one side or the other. More commonly, there’s some kind of negotiated settlement — either a ceasefire or more permanent peace treaty — where the two sides agree to stop fighting under a set of mutually agreeable terms.

It is possible that the Ukraine conflict turns out to be an exception: that Russian morale collapses completely, leading to utter battlefield defeat, or that Russia inflicts so much pain that Kyiv collapses. But most analysts believe that neither of these is especially likely given the way the war has played out to date.

“No matter how much military firepower they pour into it, [the Russians] are not going to be able to achieve regime change or some of their maximalist aims,” Kofman, of the CNA think tank, declares.

A negotiated settlement is the most likely way the conflict ends. Peace negotiations between the two sides are ongoing, and some reporting suggests they’re bearing fruit. On March 28, the Financial Times reported significant progress on a draft agreement covering issues ranging from Ukrainian NATO membership to the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine. The next day, Russia pledged to decrease its use of force in Ukraine’s north as a sign of its commitment to the talks.

American officials, though, have been publicly skeptical of Russia’s seriousness in the talks. Even if Moscow is committed to reaching a settlement, the devil is always in the details with these sorts of things — and there are lots of barriers standing in the way of a successful resolution.

Ukrainian evacuees stand in line as they wait for further transport at the Medyka border crossing near the Ukrainian-Polish border on March 29.

Take NATO. The Russians want a simple pledge that Ukraine will remain “neutral” — staying out of foreign security blocs. The current draft agreement, per the Financial Times, does preclude Ukrainian NATO membership, but it permits Ukraine to join the EU. It also commits at least 11 countries, including the United States and China, to coming to Ukraine’s aid if it is attacked again. This would put Ukraine on a far stronger security footing than it had before the war — a victory for Kyiv and defeat for Moscow, one that Putin may ultimately conclude is unacceptable.

What, exactly, is a “neutral” Ukraine?

Another thorny issue — perhaps the thorniest — is the status of Crimea and the two breakaway Russian-supported republics in eastern Ukraine. The Russians want Ukrainian recognition of its annexation of Crimea and the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions; Ukraine claims all three as part of its territory. Some compromise is imaginable here — an internationally monitored referendum in each territory, perhaps — but what that would look like is not obvious.

The resolution of these issues will likely depend quite a bit on the war’s progress. The more each side believes it has a decent chance to improve its battlefield position and gain leverage in negotiations, the less reason either will have to make concessions to the other in the name of ending the fighting.

And even if they do somehow come to an agreement, it may not end up holding .

On the Ukrainian side, ultra-nationalist militias could work to undermine any agreement with Russia that they believe gives away too much, as they threatened during pre-war negotiations aimed at preventing the Russian invasion .

On the Russian side, an agreement is only as good as Putin’s word. Even if it contains rigorous provisions designed to raise the costs of future aggression, like international peacekeepers, that may not hold him back from breaking the agreement.

This invasion did, after all, start with him launching an invasion that seemed bound to hurt Russia in the long run. Putin dragged the world into this mess; when and how it gets out of it depends just as heavily on his decisions.

Russia-Ukraine war
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Russia's war in Ukraine

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Insights > Russia's war in Ukraine

View of Kyiv including Ukrainian flag and Motherland statue

Like most people around the world, we are shocked and saddened by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

These pages bring together journal articles, book chapters, and expert analysis from Taylor & Francis and Routledge authors and editors that can help us make sense of the situation.

They look at the background to the crisis and the role of media and disinformation in the conflict . They examine what research could tell us about what might happen next – during the conflict and beyond.

We're also offering free access to selected Handbook of Refugee Health chapters and highlighting how institutions in Ukraine can get free access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content .

Related: Our statement on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

A mother holding her young child in a bomb shelter in Ukraine

Recent insights

See all recent insights

18 July 2024

Food security in light of the war in Ukraine: food studies meets defence studies

By arita holmberg in defence studies.

Military helicopters flying over wheat field

14 June 2024

Resilience of primary health care in Ukraine: challenges of the pandemic and war

By elina dale et al. in health systems & reform.

Densist cabinet in small town in Ukraine

4 December 2023

Migration and soft power: the EU's visa and refugee policy response to the war in Ukraine

By matilde rosina in the journal of policy studies.

30 November 2023

The impact of war on human capital and productivity in Ukraine

By balázs égert & christine de la maisonneuve in the journal of policy studies.

17 November 2023

More river pollution from untreated urban waste due to the Russian-Ukrainian war: a perspective view

By vita strokal, anna kurovska & maryna strokal in the journal of integrative environmental sciences.

26 October 2023

How do uncertainties affect the connectedness of global financial markets? Changes during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

By yang wan, wenhao wang, shi he and bing hu in the asia-pacific journal of accounting & economics.

Background and geopolitics

See all background and geopolitics content

Between Dependence and Integration: Ukraine’s Relations With Russia

By rilka dragneva and kataryna wolczuk in europe-asia studies.

Female hands counts big amount of Ukrainian money during salary period in Ukraine

Since it gained independence in 1991, Ukraine's economy has depended heavily on Russia. This article examines Ukraine's response to Russian initiatives and explores how Ukraine aims to extract economic benefits while minimizing its commitments to its eastern neighbor.

Russia and its Allies in Three Strategic Environments

By nikolai silaev in europe-asia studies.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus holding Russian-Belarusian talks at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia

This article provides a geopolitical analysis of Russian alliance policy in three environments: Russia's immediate post-Soviet neighborhood; more distant regions of the Eurasian continent; and the global stage.

Ukraine: Contested Nationhood in a European Context

By ulrich schmid.

This 2021 book explores the common view that Ukraine is a country split between a pro-European West and a pro-Russian East. It looks at the complicated cultural history of Ukraine and highlights the importance of regional traditions for an understanding of the current political situation.

Ukraine: Contested Nationhood in a European Context cover

Book chapter

Diasporic Visions of Democracy and Territory

By jumana bayeh in democracy, diaspora, territory: europe and cross-border politics.

This chapter explores the complexity of territory within the field of diaspora studies. It emphasizes a modern perspective of diaspora, framed by deterritorialization.

Democracy, Diaspora, Territoyr - book cover

Media and disinformation

See all media and disinformation content

Making Sense of the News in an Authoritarian Regime: Russian Television Viewers’ Reception of the Russia–Ukraine Conflict

By maxim alyukov in europe-asia studies.

Do citizens in autocracies trust state media? This study uses Russian television viewers’ reception of the Russia–Ukraine conflict to investigate media perception in an autocracy. It argues that citizens in non-democracies lack the opportunities, motivation, and tools to substantively process news.

Russia Today building in Moscow on a sunny day

Presidential Elections 2018: The Struggle of Putin and Navalny for a Media Agenda

By anastasia kazun and kseniia semykina in problems of post-communism.

In Russia, the mainstream media is largely influenced by the authorities, while the Internet has more freedom.

This study compared the issue agendas of Vladimir Putin and opposition leader Alexey Navalny across traditional and digital media in the run-up to the 2018 presidential election.

TV camera in TV studio with colours of Russian flag on walls in background

Russia's hybrid aggression against Ukraine

By yury e. fedorov in routledge handbook of russian security.

Disinformation and propaganda campaigns are a common method in 'hybrid warfare' – a term that describes a mix of conventional military operations with non-military methods. This chapter exposes the Russian concept of hybrid warfare. It highlights its strategic goals toward Ukraine and outlines the evolution of its war plans from ‘traditional’ to hybrid operations.

Routledge Handbook of Russian Security cover

Russia Today and Conspiracy Theories: People, Power, and Politics on RT

By ilya yablokov and precious n chatterje-doody.

The Russian international media outlet Russia Today (RT) has been widely accused in the Western world of producing government propaganda and conspiracy theories. This book explores for the first time the role that conspiracy theories actually play in the network’s broadcasts.

Free access to Handbook of Refugee Health chapters

The UN reports that almost 8 million people – including many children – have left Ukraine seeking safety, protection, and assistance since the invasion. The war has forced many more to move inside the country.

Worldwide, there are at least 89 million people who have been forced to flee their homes.

The conditions refugees experience during their journeys and how they're received at their destinations will determine their health outcomes as well as the health of those living in host communities.

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Home — Essay Samples — War — Russia and Ukraine War

Essays on Russia and Ukraine War

Writing an essay on the war between Russia and Ukraine is of utmost importance in order to bring awareness to this ongoing conflict and its impact on the global community. This topic is particularly significant as it not only sheds light on the political and military aspects of the war, but also highlights the humanitarian crisis and human rights violations that have arisen as a result.

When writing an essay on this topic, it is crucial to thoroughly research and gather information from reliable sources in order to present a well-informed and balanced perspective. The use of credible sources such as academic journals, news articles, and official reports is essential to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information presented in the essay.

Additionally, it is important to consider the historical, cultural, and geopolitical context of the war in order to provide a comprehensive analysis. This may involve examining the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine, the cultural and ethnic dynamics at play, and the broader geopolitical implications of the conflict.

Furthermore, it is essential to approach this topic with sensitivity and empathy, considering the human impact of the war on individuals and communities. This may involve incorporating personal testimonies, humanitarian reports, and accounts of human rights violations in order to provide a human-centric perspective on the conflict.

Overall, writing an essay on the war between Russia and Ukraine is an opportunity to raise awareness and facilitate a deeper understanding of this complex and multifaceted issue. By approaching this topic with diligence, empathy, and a commitment to accuracy, writers can contribute to a more informed and nuanced discourse on this critical global issue.

What Makes a Good Russia and Ukraine War Essay Topics

When it comes to choosing a compelling topic for an essay on the Russia and Ukraine War, it's important to consider a few key factors. First and foremost, the topic should be relevant and timely, addressing current events and ongoing conflicts. Additionally, it's crucial to choose a topic that is both interesting and thought-provoking, allowing for in-depth analysis and critical thinking. To brainstorm and choose the best essay topic, consider the various aspects of the conflict, such as political, social, and economic implications. It's also important to think about the audience and their level of familiarity with the topic, as well as the potential for original research and unique insights. Ultimately, a good essay topic on the Russia and Ukraine War will be one that is impactful, relevant, and intellectually stimulating.

Best Russia and Ukraine War essay topics

The role of propaganda in shaping public opinion during the Russia and Ukraine War
The impact of the conflict on the geopolitical landscape of Eastern Europe
The humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and its implications for international intervention
The use of hybrid warfare and unconventional tactics in the Russia and Ukraine War
The role of energy politics in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine
The portrayal of the conflict in popular media and its influence on public perception
The implications of the Russia and Ukraine War on global security and stability
The historical and cultural roots of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine
The role of international organizations in mediating the Russia and Ukraine War
The impact of the conflict on the economy and infrastructure of Ukraine

Russia and Ukraine War essay topics Prompts

Imagine you are a journalist embedded in a war zone. Describe the challenges and ethical considerations you would face in reporting on the Russia and Ukraine War.
Write a fictional account of a civilian's experience living in a war-torn region of Ukraine, exploring the psychological and emotional toll of the conflict.
Create a persuasive argument for or against international military intervention in the Russia and Ukraine War, considering the potential consequences and implications.
Imagine you are a diplomat tasked with negotiating a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. Outline your strategy and approach, considering the competing interests and demands of both parties.
Write a comparative analysis of the Russia and Ukraine War and another historical conflict, exploring the similarities and differences in terms of tactics, motivations, and outcomes.

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Six ways the war changed the world.

The ripple effects of Russia’s invasion have reordered lives and upended economies. Here are some of the consequences.

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By Matthew Mpoke Bigg

Published Feb. 24, 2023 Updated Feb. 27, 2023

A year of war in Ukraine has reshaped the world in ways few had predicted. Far beyond the front lines, the ripple effects of Russia’s invasion have reordered lives and upended economies.

Here is a look at the war’s consequences in six key areas.

An orthodox church seen through a barley field in Odesa. Ukraine.

The war helped push global grain prices to record highs, given the importance of Russia and Ukraine as exporters of food crops including wheat. The United Nations warned that millions of people, especially in parts of Africa and the Middle East, were threatened with famine. In July, Moscow and Kyiv signed an agreement to release millions of tons of grain stuck in Ukraine’s Black Sea ports because of a de facto Russian naval blockade. Although Russia briefly suspended its participation in the deal in October, the agreement has largely held, and global grain prices have returned to prewar levels.

The war unleashed the worst global energy crisis since the 1970s. Energy prices soared in many parts of the world as nations reduced or cut off their purchases of Russian fossil fuels. In Europe, gas bills nearly doubled and electricity costs spiked about 70 percent in the first six months of the war. European Union diplomats in December agreed on a $60-per-barrel limit on the price at which Russian oil can be traded outside the bloc in another bid to deprive Moscow of revenue for the war. But with global supplies tight, Russia has remained a dominant exporter, selling more oil and gas to China and India over the last year.

The global economy was just emerging from the pandemic, and the energy crisis and slower growth contributed to higher inflation. Soaring prices ate away at people’s savings and paychecks, causing real wages to fall in many countries and slashing purchasing power. High inflation has become a political headache for leaders in countries including the United States , France and Britain , with governments raising spending to ease the pain for families and businesses using price caps, subsidies and reduced taxes.

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Russia Ukraine Conflict UPSC Notes

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.

Russia – Ukraine Conflict [UPSC Notes]:- Download PDF Here

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Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Last updated on December 29, 2023 by ClearIAS Team

Russia amassed a large number of troops near the Russia-Ukraine border sparking apprehensions on an impending war between the two countries and possible annexation of Ukraine.

Table of Contents

What led to the Russia-Ukraine Conflict?

In December 2021, Russia published an 8-point draft security agreement for the West. The draft was aimed at resolving tensions in Europe including the Ukrainian crisis.

But it had controversial provisions including banning Ukraine from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) , curtailing the further expansion of NATO, blocking drills in the region, etc.

Talks on the draft failed continuously and tensions escalated with the Russian troop buildup in the Russia-Ukraine border.

The crisis has grabbed global headlines and has been dubbed to be capable of triggering a new “cold war” or even a “third world war”.

History of Russia-Ukraine relations

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With over 6 lakh sq. km area and more than 40 million populations, Ukraine is the second-largest country by area and the 8 th populous in Europe.

Ukraine is bordered by Russia in the East, Belarus in the North, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova in the West. It also has a maritime boundary with the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

Ukraine was under different rulers including the Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union.

It gained independence in 1991 following the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Orange Revolution of 2004-05

Following the 2004 Presidential election in Ukraine, a series of protests and civil unrest occurred in the country, dubbed the Orange Revolution.

The corruption and malpractice charges in voting alleged by the protestors were upheld by the Supreme Court and the court annulled the election results. Viktor Yushchenko was declared the winner following the re-election. His campaign colour theme was orange, hence the name.

Euromaidan movement

In 2014, the country grabbed attention for the Euromaidan movement or the Revolution of dignity. The civil unrests were based on goals including the removal of then-President Viktor Yanukovych and the restoration of 2004 constitutional amendments.

Annexation of Crimea

Crimea is a peninsula on the Northern coast of the Black Sea in Eastern Europe. The population includes mostly ethnic Russians but has Ukrainians and Crimeans as well.

In the 18 th century, Crimea was annexed by the Russian empire. Following the Russian Revolution , Crimea became an autonomous region in the Soviet Union.

In 1954, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian by birth, transferred Crimea to Ukraine. But the status of Crimea remained disputed since then.

In February 2014, post-Ukrainian Revolution, Russian troops were deployed in Crimea. A referendum on reunification with Russia was held in March in which 90% population favoured joining Russia. Despite opposition from Ukraine, Russia formally annexed Crimea in March 2014.

Read here for in-depth details of the Euromaidan, Ukrainian revolution, and Crimean annexation.

The Minsk agreements between Russia-Ukraine

Following the 2014 Ukraine revolution and the Euromaidan movement, civil unrest erupted in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions (together called the Donbas region) in Eastern Ukraine which borders Russia.

The majority population in these regions are Russians and it has been alleged that Russia fuelled anti-government campaigns there. Russia-backed insurgents and the Ukrainian military engaged in armed confrontations in the region.

In September 2014, talks led to the signing of the Minsk protocol (Minsk I) by the Trilateral Contact Group involving Ukraine, Russia, and the Organisation for the Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It is a 12 point ceasefire deal involving provisions like weapon removal, prisoner exchanges, humanitarian aid, etc. But the deal broke following violations by both sides.

In 2015, yet another protocol termed Minsk II was signed by the parties. It included provisions to delegate more power to the rebel-controlled regions. But the clauses remain un-implemented due to differences between Ukraine and Russia.

Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is the world’s largest security-oriented intergovernmental organization with observer status at the United Nations. It is based in Vienna, Austria. It has 57 members spanning across Europe, Asia, and North America. India is not a member. Decisions are made by consensus.

Its mandate includes issues such as arms control, promotion of human rights, freedom of the press, and fair elections. It has its origins in the mid-1975 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) held in Helsinki, Finland. In 1994, CSCE was renamed the OSCE. It was created during the Cold War era as an East-West forum.

Russia-Ukraine conflict: Present Day

The latest episode of the Russian troop display near the Ukraine border is linked to all the previous issues. Not just Russia, but the United States and the European Union have stakes in Ukraine.

While Russia shares centuries-old cultural ties with Ukraine, the US and the European Union see Ukraine as a buffer between Russia and the West.

Russia seeks assurance from the West that Ukraine would not be made part of NATO which has anti-Russian ambitions. But the US is not ready to budge on Russia’s demands.

The sudden rise in tensions can be attributed to the following factors:

The newly elected President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been harsh on Russian supporters in Ukraine and has been going against Moscow’s interests.
Perceivably undecisive administration in the US under the new President Joe Biden and Washington’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s immense interest in Ukraine. Putin maintains that Ukraine is the “red line” the West must not cross.

India’s stand on Russia- Ukraine conflict

India has long maintained a cautious silence on the Russia-Ukraine conflict issue. But recently India has spoken in the matter and called for peaceful resolution of the issue through sustained diplomatic efforts for long-time peace and stability.

New Delhi and Moscow have a time-tested and reliable relationship especially with Russia being a major arms supplier to India.

India has risked US sanctions under Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) by the buying S-400 missile defence system from Russia.

On the other hand, India also needs the support of the US and EU in balancing its strategic calculus.

It is also worthwhile to note that India had abstained from voting in a United Nations resolution upholding Ukraine’s territorial integrity following Russia’s Crimean annexation in 2014.

Even this time, India is maintaining a patient approach by hoping that the situation will be handled peacefully by skilful negotiators.

Way forward

The Russia-Ukraine conflict is threatening the delicate balance the world is in right now and escalation can have manifold impacts on a global scale. There is a strong case for de-escalation, as a peaceful culmination of severed relations is for the good of everyone in the region and the world over.

The US can play a central role in the management of the Russia- Ukraine conflict with support from the other European allies like the UK, Germany, and France.

Negotiations and strategic investments should be aimed at creating sustainable resolution of the conflict.

It will not be enough to just smooth over the difficulties, but major attention to be given to structure the military disengagement to minimize the chances of backsliding.

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Russia-Ukraine war

Introduction.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivers a speech to the people of Ukraine after Russia invaded the country.

Ukraine has a long history. The land that is now Ukraine was controlled by many different groups over hundreds of years. In the 1700s most of the land became part of the Russian Empire. In 1917 the Russian Revolution ended the Russian Empire, but Ukraine did not gain independence. By 1922 Ukraine had become part of the newly formed Soviet Union . Rulers in Russia controlled the Soviet Union. The Soviets took over Ukraine’s farms. During the 1930s several million Ukrainians died from starvation.

In 1991 the Soviet Union broke apart, and Ukraine became independent. However, some people in Russia thought Ukraine should still be part of Russia. Vladimir Putin was one of those people. He had ruled Russia for many years. In 2014 he sent troops to a region of Ukraine called Crimea . The troops took control of that region. He also supported people in an eastern section of Ukraine that wanted to break away from Ukraine.

Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine in 2019. He has had to deal with the ongoing fighting in the eastern regions.

Putin began building up troops along the border with Ukraine in late 2021. On February 24, 2022, Putin sent troops into Ukraine. They attacked many different sites as they moved into the country. The Ukrainian troops fought back as did the people of Ukraine. But many thousands of people fled to Poland and other countries to escape the fighting. The fighting caused a great deal of destruction.

The United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries tried to get Putin to stop the war. They sent weapons to help the Ukraine forces. They also imposed sanctions on Russia. Sanctions are economic punishments. They make it hard for Russia to sell their products and to get access to money. The fighting continued, however.

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Ukraine war latest: Zelenskyy brands Putin 'sick old man' in video message; Russia and Ukraine swap 115 prisoners each

Russia and Ukraine have swapped 115 prisoners of war, including some who were captured during Ukraine's invasion in Kursk in recent weeks. In an independence day message to Ukrainians, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Russian president would not dictate his "red lines" to Kyiv.

Saturday 24 August 2024 22:56, UK

Ukraine and Russia exchange 115 prisoners of war
Zelenskyy brands Putin 'sick old man' in video to Ukrainians
Telegram CEO arrested in France - reports
Muted celebrations for Ukraine's independence day
Residents evacuate key eastern town as Russian troops advance
Your questions answered : Is there a larger response to come from Russia over the Kursk invasion?
Live reporting by Katie Williams

That brings an end to our live coverage of the war in Ukraine for this evening - thanks for following along.

We'll be back with any major updates overnight, and will return to our rolling coverage tomorrow.

Before we go, here's a round up of today's key events:

Russia and Ukraine each exchanged 115 prisoners of war as Ukraine marked its 33rd independence day. The Russian prisoners were soldiers captured during Ukraine's invasion of Kursk;
In a video message to the Ukrainian people, Volodymyr Zelenskyy branded Vladimir Putin a "sick old man from Red Square" who would "not dictate any of his red lines to us";
Belarus and Iran congratulated Ukraine on its independence day despite the two countries' close ties with Russia;
At least five people were killed and five others injured in a Russian attack in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region;
Pavel Durov, the founder and chief executive of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested in France , according to French media reports.

The founder and chief executive of the Telegram messaging app has been arrested in France, according to French media reports.

French television network TF1 reports that Pavel Durov was arrested at the Bourget airport outside Paris this evening.

According to the network, the Russian-born businessman had been travelling aboard his private jet and was the target of an arrest warrant in France.

Telegram has not responded to a request for comment by the Reuters news agency.

Mr Durov - who also founded the now-state controlled Russian social media service VK - left Russia in 2014 after resisting government pressure to hand over the data of Ukrainian protesters.

He now lives in Dubai and holds dual citizenship of the United Arab Emirates and France.

Telegram, which launched in 2013, is one of the top five most downloaded apps in the world.

Lithuania has announced a fresh batch of military aid for Ukraine - including drones and air defence missiles.

Prime minister Ingrida Simonyte said the package would help Ukraine "send Russian occupants back to where they belong".

In a post to X, Ms Simonyte said the aid would consist of "short-range air defence systems and missiles as well as anti-drones, guns, ammunition and equipment".

The package would reach Kyiv by September, she said.

Vilnius has also pledged to send around 5,000 Lithuanian-made drones to Ukraine by the end of autumn as well as allocating €35m (£29.6m) to purchase radars and demining equipment.

Polish-supplied tanks are being used by Ukraine in its offensive in the Kursk region, president Andrzej Duda has confirmed.

"We are touched to see how the PT-91 Twardy tanks, given by Poland [to Ukraine] more than one year ago, are defending today Ukraine on the battlefields, fighting in the Kursk region," he said.

Vladimir Putin has vowed a "worthy response" to any use of Western weapons in the invasion.

Mr Duda's visit to Kyiv today coincided with Ukraine's independence day celebrations.

In a speech to mark the occasion, he also expressed confidence that the war "will soon end in [Ukraine's] victory".

"I have never had, and do not have, the slightest doubt that, through their united efforts and struggle, the courageous Ukrainian people will uphold their independence," he said.

A Russian air attack on the Ukrainian city of Sumy this evening has left seven people injured, officials have said.

The Sumy regional administration said on Telegram that Russia carried out a missile attack on civilian infrastructure in the city.

Seven people are wounded, including two who are in a serious condition.

"Take care of yourself and your loved ones, do not ignore the air warning signals," the administration said.

Sumy is the administrative centre of the wider Sumy region, which lies in Ukraine's northeast on the border with Russia.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has signed several laws targeting Russia today - including one that bans religious organisations linked to Moscow.

The series of laws included ratifying a statute that paves the way for Ukraine to join the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The ratification increases the chances of Russia being prosecuted for war crimes it has allegedly committed during its invasion of Ukraine, according to Mr Zelenskyy's office.

Meanwhile, a law has been signed prohibiting the the operation of religious institutions in Ukraine that have links to Russia.

The legislation, which was approved by the Ukrainian parliament earlier this month, created the legal tools for the government to ban a Russia-linked branch of the Orthodox church.

Organisations would have nine months to cut ties with Moscow's linked religious entities under the new law.

Mr Zelenskyy also signed a law offering Ukrainian citizenship to foreigners fighting in his army against Russia.

Ukrainian boxing star Oleksandr Usyk presented Volodymyr Zelenskyy with the coveted WBC heavy weight champion belt as the pair met to mark independence day.

Mr Zelenskyy posted a video of the meeting on his Telegram channel, saying it was an "honour" to receive the belt.

"Thank you for everything you do for Ukraine. For glorifying Ukrainian strength and invincibility. Thank you!" he wrote.

Usyk beat the UK's Tyson Fury to become the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world back in May.

In an interview with Sky News last month, the boxer revealed how he has cried behind closed doors about the war in his country.

Belarus and Iran have both sent their congratulations to Ukraine on its 33rd year of independence from the former Soviet Union, despite the two countries' close ties with Russia.

According to Belarusian news agency Belta, president Aleksandr Lukashenko said his citizens have "always had a special respect and warm regard" for the Ukrainian people.

"We are united not only by the common fate and family ties, but also by the desire to be friends and get along with neighbours," he was cited as saying.

Belarus acted as a staging post for Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Mr Lukashenko is one of Vladimir Putin's key allies.

Meanwhile, the Iranian foreign ministry published a message on social media saying it was congratulating the government and people of Ukraine on its independence.

Tehran is alleged to have provided Moscow with hundreds of deadly drones, as well as other weapons, for use in its war on Ukraine.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has used an independence day message to brand Vladimir Putin a "sick old man from Red Square".

In a video address to the Ukrainian people, Mr Zelenskyy used derisive language to describe Russia's 71-year-old president and his nuclear rhetoric.

"A sick old man from Red Square who constantly threatens everyone with the red button will not dictate any of his red lines to us," the Ukrainian leader said in the video posted to Telegram.

In his speech, Mr Zelenskyy noted that the war started by Russia had spread to its own territory.

"Those who seek to sow evil on our land will reap its fruits on their own soil," he said.

He also said "those who sought to turn our lands into a buffer zone should now worry that their own country doesn't become a buffer federation".

Five people have been injured after a Russian shelling in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region, authorities have said.

The country's state emergency service said Russian forces targeted the village of Novoosynove in the Kupyan district with rockets today.

Four women and a man were injured, it said, while two residential buildings and an area of dry grass caught fire.

"Rescuers extinguished the fire and prevented the flames from spreading to other homes," the emergency service said on Telegram, adding that medics were at the site of the attack.

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Consequences of the Russia-Ukraine War

Consequences of the Russia-Ukraine War Blogs Home

28 Apr 2022

Introduction

History of International Relations has presented us with an arbitrary reminder that conflicts which occur in an anarchic world order have consequences. The conflicts that turn into large-scale wars have immense potential to create destruction and chaos, not only during the passage of war but also in the long future of the countries involved and as well as the world.

It doesn't take much effort to know that the present-day Ukraine-Russian War would have an impact on both countries in the coming years when the war supposedly ends. This is for an obvious fact that the countries involved in the war will see a direct impact on their sovereignty, economy, citizens, resources as well as the behaviour of the future individual state. However, this is not the only direct manifestation of war. Another dimension of war is that it impacts the world. The bigger picture, in the era of globalisation, includes all the countries of the world, in one way or the other and its consequences on the world order.

It is a task to lay out all the future implications of the Russia-Ukraine war, especially when the war is still ongoing. The implications are manifold - humanitarian, economic, and environmental to name only a few. This blog would aim at something more basic and is in no way a complete inquiry of the problem. I will try to sketch the implications of present-day war in three parts. The first part will deal with the implications on Ukraine, the second part will speak of how the war will affect Russia in the future, and the third part will try to see its present-day and near-future implications on the world at large.

The Effect on Ukraine

We have to remind ourselves that the war is still ongoing. There has been no ceasefire and the possibility of peace does not seem to be in the picture immediately either. But hypothetically speaking, even if the war was supposed to end tomorrow, imagine how it would continue to affect the country in the times to come!

War is seen as a breach of the sovereignty of a nation. In the present context of Ukraine, it is difficult to state how and to what extent Ukraine would be further affected. No nation would ever wish to be attacked as it threatens its very existence.

In Ukraine, due to the conflict, the health system will continue to collapse as there's damage to hospitals. The staff to handle medical care is declining while the number of people requiring medical intervention has increased. The WHO warned that the oxygen supply to Ukraine is severely low. Also, the risk to public health continues to be threatening as there is the contamination of water and air.

The post-war period will be immensely difficult as there is enormous destruction of infrastructure and a massive economic loss. The humanitarian crisis will be altogether another story that will require years to get even a little better. The hallmark of war is that its consequences are felt long after the war is over and it takes decades to restore and rebuild. Furthermore, the loss of civilian life and its effect on the country's resources is a story that will be grieved for decades.

Ukraine's loss in terms of human life, economy, environment, resources, and infrastructure, is massive. Even with the solidarity and support provided by international organisations and other countries of the world, the country would still require decades to pull itself from the plunge of war.

Possible Implications for Russia

While the implications on Ukraine are evident, the future of Russia will also be a reminder that war affects everybody, including the aggressor. It is believed by some scholars that this war would deteriorate the socio-economic conditions of Russia since the sanctions by the West are already in place. Some hawks are saying that the Russian authorities might lose control of law and order too in case there are large scale protests and opposition to the war within the country. However, on the contrary, it's very much possible for the authorities to gain more control than to lose any. This is because there is some evidence that suggests that there is an influence of anti-liberals and anti-West among the Russian elites who make important decisions. For example, the security services (Siloviki) do not see a failure of negotiations with the West as negative. Instead, they see it as a way to increase their power.

Criticism within the country will deal with repression. The war has already pushed Russia into isolation from the international world. In such a scenario, the government would try to suppress or at the least, control the media. It is expected that the business elite in the country might have to face an economic shock. The truth of Russia's economic condition is a different picture from the government which claims that it is enough for Russia to sustain itself.

It is possible to witness the control of elections by the government. The quest for "traditional values" or conservatism would gain momentum. In case of any expression of dissatisfaction, it would be met by suppression. There could be an increased control of security services within the domestic politics of Russia. However, the actual consequences of the war within Russia would only be known with time and much later in future. One thing that can be said with certainty is that, there will be consequences on the domestic politics of the nation, and they can very much alter Russia's future. This is following the opinion on the present situation .

Implications for the world

Inflation in economy.

The conflict that occurs in one part of the world has an immense ability to destabilise the whole world’s economy. In this case, where one of the major powers like Russia is involved, it is undoubtedly going to impact the economy in the long run. The unrest is already being experienced in the financial markets. The world had not even recovered economically from the damage inflicted by the Covid-19 pandemic when the war presented itself on the international stage.

Since the European countries are most dependent on Russian oil and gas, it's predicted that the economic consequences of this war will be hard on the region. It's not possible, at least immediately, for Europe to replace the Russian supply of gas and oil. According to a publication of Coface in March 2022, it is estimated that "at least 1.5 percentage point of additional inflation in 2022 which would erode household consumption and, together with the expected fall in business investment and exports, lower GDP growth by approximately one percentage point." This can even bring the GDP to zero if the trend of inflation continues.

Apart from Europe, the other countries of the world will feel the economic shockwaves in the form of inflated prices of various commodities. The most affected items would be food products and energy. There is a wheat grain crisis that is beginning to take its shape. This is especially felt in Sub-Saharan Africa, which imports one-third of its 85 per cent of total wheat imports from either Russia or Ukraine. Countries like Egypt import almost 80 per cent of their total wheat from either country.

When inflation occurs, there will be a decrease in demand, and since Europe is affected the most, the decline of the market in Europe will impact international trade. If we see the area of Asia-Pacific, most countries, like China, Japan, India, Taiwan and Thailand and South Korea, will have to deal with a very high increase in energy imports. The North American region is less dependent on Russia for trade. Hence the significant impact would be felt through its linkage with European countries' decreased demands. However, it would not affect the North American Region as much as it would impact other countries of the world.

IMF Managing Director, Kristalina Georgieva, expressed that we live in a more shock-prone world and we need the strength of the collective to deal with the after effects of this war. Since the war is ongoing, and the implications will continue to change, it is clear that the economy of various regions will suffer a blow, of course at different intensities, where some will be able to balance while others might have more detrimental consequences.

Humanitarian Crisis

Russia's attack on Ukraine has created a humanitarian crisis in Europe that hasn't been witnessed in a long time now. To avoid the brutality of war and escape the impact on personal lives, more than hundred of thousands of Ukrainians started to leave their homes and were pushed to search for shelters that could provide for them with refugees in crisis.

The neighbouring countries are mostly affected by the refugee crisis. As per the UN refugee agency, four million people have been displaced to neighbouring countries, namely, Hungary, Moldova and Poland. Currently, it's estimated that almost 10 million people are pushed to seek shelter and safety. The number of citizens that have turned to be refugees would be a quarter of the Ukrainian population.

Source: Data from UNHCR

The casualties estimated will be dependent on the vulnerability posed by the Russian attacks on highly populated cities. Those who could not flee from the country are left with no choice other than to rely on an acute shortage of water, and no electricity. It'll be a matter of deep concern if Russia employs heavy weapons and destroys civilian areas, like the major cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv.

To some extent, the worsening of the refugee crisis has been prevented by mobilisation exhibited by European nations. Poland has set up temporary shelters, hospitals and food and medical supplies along with information centres for the incoming refugees. The country has absorbed more than 2.2 million refugees so far. A huge number of refugees have taken shelter in other neighbouring countries, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Belarus, and Moldova to name a few.

The European Union has shown its solidarity through a unanimous decision of permitting Ukrainians to enter EU states for three years while sparing them to apply for the long procedure of asylum. Regardless of the efforts by various countries, and international organisations, the war would displace more people from their homes and the refugee crisis is expected to create an urgent need for humanitarian assistance. As of 31 March 2022, UNHCR has calculated that more than 10.5 million people have been displaced either within Ukraine or abroad as refugees, around a quarter of the population.

Environmental Crisis

One aspect often ignored until the devastating consequences are evident is a true story of an environmental crisis. On March 3rd, the Environmental Peacebuilding Association published an open letter backed by 75 countries, to convey their concern over the environmental consequences of the war. It stated that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is leading to massive air, land and water pollution as well as raised concern over the threat of such attacks in an industrialised country.

In an article published by Business Insider, the director of Research and Policy at the Conflict and Environmental Observatory, Doug Weir said that "Every conflict has a unique environmental narrative. For Ukraine, it revolves around the number of technological hazards posed by its large industrial and energy sectors and the increasing intensity of Russia's military actions". He further stated that the short term environmental emergencies could result from damage or disruption to energy or industrial facilities. Whereas in the long term, the environmental issues could go unaddressed.

Environmental damage takes place in every war. The intensity of the crisis can however be more in industrialised countries, like Ukraine. The country has a huge industrial sector, and this can wreak havoc. According to the same report of Insider, Ken Conco, a professor of international relations warned that "War in industrialised areas creates extensive risks of toxic contamination, given the concentration of power generating stations, chemical plants, metalworking, factories and the like."

When Russia took control of Chernobyl, the international community was alarmed because any strike near a nuclear power plant can turn into a nightmare, in no time. Strikes in the vicinity of nuclear reactors, underline the serious risk to human health as well as the environment. It was reported by the Ministry of Environment of Ukraine that there is a rise in local radiation levels due to the stirring of "radioactive dust". These sites already require environmental management and the attack in these areas will cause results that have not been imagined so far.

To conclude, since the war is still not over, the exact magnitude of environmental consequences is difficult to calculate. It is believed that the realisation of the environmental impact of the crisis would take some time. Regardless of that, the presence of environmental damage is obvious. What remains to be done is to decipher the extent to which environmental consequences would be witnessed and the ways by which they will be dealt with. Scholars suggest that the Russia-Ukraine War could leave an everlasting impression on future climate policy.

Annie Pruthi is currently pursuing her masters in Political Science from JMI, New Delhi and is a first division Arts graduate from Delhi University. She is an avid reader and an award-winning best-selling author. Her book "Will You Stay?" recently won the title of "Most Promising Book, 2020 (Fiction)" in the Coimbatore Literary Awards.

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Russia-Ukraine crisis explained ... in 100 words

The Russia-Ukraine crisis is becoming a top global issue, with Russia seemingly preparing to invade.

With tensions high, more people are watching the two countries closely hoping for a peaceful resolution. But for those who aren't aware of the crisis, here is a brief synopsis of the issue.

In true indy100 style, we tried to keep it short, to-the-point, and tried our very best to keep to 100 words, plus the help of some memes.

It begins back in the USSR...

From 1919 to 1991, Ukraine was part of the USSR. The two countries share a border making them deeply connected. But since Ukraine's independence, Russia has expressed desire to reunite the two.

In 2014, ukraine's last pro-russia leader was overthrown. president vladimir putin responded by seizing crimea, a territory of ukraine., ukraine has tried to move away from russian influence, attempting to join the eu and becoming a partner country to nato., now putin is trying to intimidate ukraine by putting troops near the border with invasion looming. now, the world waits. fingers crossed., jermaine jenas's bizarre 'securing the coin' goes viral after bbc sacking, elon musk's own ai system creates video committing armed robbery, cristiano ronaldo surpasses mrbeast youtube record within 24 hours, jd vance's 'medieval' haircut roasted after awkward interaction, ‘world’s oldest pyramid' was not made by humans, archaeologists claim, girls trip interrupted by 'friendly lady' who's in fact shania twain, tom cruise was forcibly kissed at the olympic closing ceremony – sparking debate about consent, what does the project 2025 document actually say, horses are a lot smarter than previously thought, researchers believe, gus walz receives wave of support after ann coulter's 'heartless' post, sir david attenborough honoured for supporting wildlife charities over 60 years, don cheadle has awkward reaction after obama says the 'sequel is usually worse', jd vance asks deli owner asking if they sell food 'they really don't like', jd vance roasted for 'swiss cheese' comment in philadelphia.

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