essay on war between russia and ukraine in english

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

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

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

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

The Numbers

Source: OCHA & Humanitarian Partners

Civilians Killed

Source: Oct 20, 2023 | OHCHR

Ukrainian Refugees in Europe

Source: Jul 24, 2023 | UNHCR

Internally Displaced People

Source: May 25, 2023 | IOM

As It Happened

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

Frequently Asked Questions

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

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

Relevant Sources:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Russia, One Year After the Invasion of Ukraine

By Keith Gessen

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. ♦

More on the War in Ukraine

How Ukrainians saved their capital .

A historian envisions a settlement among Russia, Ukraine, and the West .

How Russia’s latest commander in Ukraine could change the war .

The profound defiance of daily life in Kyiv .

The Ukraine crackup in the G.O.P.

A filmmaker’s journey to the heart of the war .

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Michael Schulman

By Bernard Avishai

By David Remnick

By Isaac Chotiner

Russia and Ukraine Explained and Analyzed

Smoke enveloped a Ukrainian air base in Mariupol after a Russian strike Thursday, part of Vladimir Putin’ invasion of his neighbor. Photo by AP/Evgeniy Maloletka

Pardee’s Igor Lukes and Vesko Garčević assess the unfolding crisis: “This is not about Ukraine alone. This is about the future of democracies everywhere”

Rich barlow.

With troops on the ground and rockets from the air, Russia attacked Ukraine Thursday as Vladimir Putin made good on months of threats against a neighboring country that he claims, falsely, wasn’t a country at all until communist Russia created it. The invasion, the largest attack by one European nation on another since World War II, has had widespread global impact, causing stock markets to plummet, oil prices to soar, and NATO countries, including the United States, to threaten aggressive consequences for Russia. 

Among the sanctions against Russia from President Biden that are already in place, or expected soon, are restricting Russia’s access to large financial institutions, cutting it off from advanced technology that could hinder its communications, and sanctioning members of Putin’s closest inner circle. Biden has sent troops to fortify NATO allies, but vows they won’t engage in the Russia-Ukraine war.

For perspective on the stunning developments, BU Today asked two Pardee School of Global Studies professors, Igor Lukes and Vesko Garčević, to assess the crisis. Lukes , a professor of history and of international relations, specializes in Central European history and contemporary Russia (he watched the 1968 Russian invasion of Prague as a teenager). Garčević is a professor of the practice of international relations, specializing in diplomacy, security, and conflict, and in Europe. He has served as Montenegro’s ambassador to several nations and international organizations, including NATO.

With Igor Lukes and Vesko Garčević

Bu today: how dangerous is the european situation, and why should americans care about it.

Igor Lukes: The situation is dangerous. Russia has committed a massive force to seize a peaceful sovereign country that never presented any threat. This will trigger limited countermeasures by NATO. Diplomats and politicians of all nationalities—including Russia’s last plausible partner, China—had warned Putin not to use force. He dismissed their concerns. Launching this attack on Ukraine, he has irreparably damaged the post–Cold War order. Should Americans care? Yes, they should. This is not about Ukraine alone. This is about the future of democracies everywhere. But even the most fervent supporters of Ukraine must bear in mind John Quincy Adams’ view that America, although a champion of universal freedom, “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” The Ukrainians are on their own as they face Putin’s armed force.

Vesko Garčević: Vesko Garčević: The world should care about it, because it puts the European security architecture in question. And not just the European architecture; it’s international norms, like respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty of other countries. [If] the big ones can take small countries as booties in world affairs… I come from a small country, therefore I understand it very well.  On top of it, Russia has more nuclear warheads than three NATO states—the United States, the UK, and France— put together . It has the third largest conventional army in the world. And it has a veto in the UN Security Council, which prevents the council from taking any measures in this case. Russia knows its power very well. It’s exercising its power right now in front of our eyes, and I would say that very much matters to somebody who lives in the United States as much as somebody who lives in Europe.

BU Today: Russia is not the military threat that it once was, correct?

Vesko Garčević: Garčević:  I would disagree with that. We can speak about other problems that Russia is facing, like economic crisis and the political system, but whether it is on the same level as the USSR or lagging behind, it is still powerful enough to match the power of other big powers. It has a security culture of an empire that implies they can use power in the way they are using it right now. I would just refer to the open letter signed by 73 European security experts a couple of weeks ago in which they highlighted the military might of Russia.

Igor Lukes: Lukes: The threat has changed. Nobody expects the Russian troops to come pouring through the Fulda Gap in Germany on their way to the English Channel to install the flag of communism along the way. Putin’s objective is to degrade and destabilize the West to camouflage his failure to improve Russia. Looking at the collapsing global markets today, he is rubbing his hands.

BU Today: Some observers say that Putin’s end game is to revive the Soviet empire, while others suggest he has real security concerns, whether unfounded or not. Which is your view?

Vesko Garčević: Garčević: It has something to do with both of those. I would say Russia sees itself more as tsarist Russia than the USSR. They think in terms of spheres of influence, and they need to have buffer zones around them because—I’m speaking of their official narratives—of a need of enlargement; they would like to get security guarantees.  It’s not the first time that Russia brought up this issue. In the ’90s, they believed that they would be able to create, along with Americans and others, some type of umbrella security organization in Europe. It’s about the influence of Russia in regions they consider historically, intimately, inherently part of their sphere of influence. An essay by Putin last year referred to Ukraine as a nation that doesn’t exist as such; the same narrative, according to media reports, Putin used in meetings with other world leaders. I can disagree, but I can recognize the idea of a sphere of influence of Russia.

Igor Lukes: Lukes:  In 2005, Putin said that the “collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the [20th] century.” However, I reject the chimera of Putin’s alleged “security concerns.” Note that Russia, after months of deceptive signals—maskirovka—has attacked its neighbor. The much weaker Ukrainian troops were deployed in a defensive pattern because they had no plan to attack Russia. Under such circumstances, who should feel insecure? Stalin, generations of Soviet arms control negotiators, and now Putin have all sought to gain unilateral advantage by claiming that Russia’s historical experience with foreign invasions justified their disproportionate demands. It is easy to refute the myth of Russia’s vulnerability and victimhood, provided one has patience with a bit of history. The British noted in 1836 that since Peter the Great (1672-1725), the boundaries of Russia had extended 700 miles toward Berlin, 500 miles toward Constantinople, 630 miles toward Stockholm, and 1,000 miles toward Teheran. In 1848, a clear-sighted Central European historian warned the Frankfurt Assembly: “You are aware of the power possessed by Russia; you know that this power, already grown to colossal size, increases in strength and pushes outward from the center from one decade to the next. Every further step that it may be able to take…threatens the speed and creation and imposition of a new universal monarchy, an unimaginable and unmentionable evil, a calamity without limit or end.” This trend was only accelerated by Joseph Stalin, who extended his dominion from Berlin to Vladivostok. The Russian state began emerging in the 15th century and grew into the biggest country on this planet. This could hardly have happened as a result of foreign invasions.

BU Today: We’ve long been told Putin is a master chess player in international affairs. But some say he’s miscalculated and bitten off too much with Ukraine. Which is it?

Igor Lukes: Lukes: Putin is an improviser. He started in 2000 by promising to focus on Russia’s unprecedented population decline, public health, environment, and education. He dropped all of those needed reforms because they took too long and were not properly spectacular. Instead, he focused on military reform, weapons development, killing his critics at home and abroad. Nobody should mistake this mediocre KGB lieutenant colonel for a strategist. With his war on peaceful Ukraine, he has unified NATO, his neighbors, including Finland and Sweden, and the European Union. His troops may swiftly overwhelm the regular Ukrainian forces. But they will merge with the civilians, and later, at a time of their choosing, come out at night; it will hurt.

Vesko Garčević: Garčević: Even great chess players make mistakes. I would not say this action has not been carefully planned. A year ago, there were Russian troops on the border of Ukraine, staging something similar, but this was put on hold. Russia didn’t decide to invade Ukraine on a whim—Putin simply woke up one morning and [said], let’s go and invade Ukraine. But that doesn’t mean that this is not a miscalculation. I think for the long run, Russia, and particularly Russian citizens, will pay a steep price. Even if they have immediate gains—one may be to install a puppet government in Ukraine—for the long run, this may not be a right calculation. Because Russia should cooperate with the world and not live as a pariah in world affairs.

BU Today: Several analysts, and history, suggest sanctions won’t be effective. Are there any that the West has imposed, or might impose, that could make Putin negotiate a settlement?

Igor Lukes: Lukes: I agree that sanctions won’t change anything, but they won’t be pleasant. I hope that they will be tailored to hit the Kremlin clique rather than the innocent Russian people. I’d like to see the oligarchs and Putin’s family expelled from the palaces in the West, deported to Russia, their accounts frozen. The banks that finance Russian intelligence services need to be cut off. Putin has turned himself into an international pariah, below the level of Kim Jong Un. Treat him accordingly.

Vesko Garčević: Garčević: I come from a country, [the former] Yugoslavia, that was under sanctions [during the Bosnian and Kosovo wars of the 1990s]. I experienced myself what it means. General economic sanctions don’t work. They affect ordinary people. I just discussed with my students: imagine you live in an authoritarian regime which controls the economy. Once space shrinks, who benefits are those who are connected to the regime. There are not many options on the table, and I think Putin knows that, because Ukraine is not a NATO member. You cannot invoke Article 5 [obligating NATO to defend members under attack]. But you cannot also sit still, looking at what’s going on in front of all eyes. Well-crafted sanctions that target people that are behind [the regime], freezing their assets—or what the UK just did, kicked out [Russian billionaire Roman] Abramovich from the UK—those types of sanctions, but trying to avoid that ordinary people suffer, this is the only way to go. For the long run, I think this [invasion] tells us that Russia feels cornered. Not many countries will side with Russia. But in the short run, militarily, Russia outmatches Ukraine. They may reach Kiev or destabilize Ukraine to bring to power somebody who is similar to [pro-Russia] Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia. They will eliminate any potential threat that Ukraine may turn to the West. If Ukraine becomes a prosperous, democratic country, that’s a message for Russians, too. 

BU Today: Are fears that Putin will threaten other nations if he succeeds in Ukraine warranted? Is this the start of a new and unstable Cold War?

Vesko Garčević: Garčević: When it comes to Russia’s intentions, I’m not sure that they’re going to go further. There is NATO, and the situation is different in the Baltic states. I tweeted that if Ukraine teaches us something, it teaches that for the Baltic states, the best decision they made was to join NATO. [Otherwise], they would have been targeted potentially by Russia on the same pretext—they have a Russian national minority that may call the mother state to intervene to protect their rights. But Russia may play in another part of Europe, like the Balkans, where I come from. The Balkans are not fully integrated into the European Union or NATO. It can be seen as an easy target, low-hanging fruit. It is what many people are concerned about, including me. There are also people [there] very supportive of Russia. 

Igor Lukes: Lukes: Excepting the crises in Berlin, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Able Archer in 1983 [when a NATO military exercise panicked Russia into readying nuclear forces], the Cold War was a stable and predictable affair. The Kremlin leaders, including Stalin and Brezhnev, were rational actors. Putin is not. Therefore, he is a threat to the world order, and he is probably proud of it.

Explore Related Topics:

• International Relations
• Share this story
• 12 Comments Add

Senior Writer

Rich Barlow is a senior writer at BU Today and  Bostonia  magazine. Perhaps the only native of Trenton, N.J., who will volunteer his birthplace without police interrogation, he graduated from Dartmouth College, spent 20 years as a small-town newspaper reporter, and is a former  Boston Globe  religion columnist, book reviewer, and occasional op-ed contributor. Profile

Comments & Discussion

Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.

There are 12 comments on Russia and Ukraine Explained and Analyzed

This is a great read, Rich. Thanks to all for the insight.

I have to confess to not sleeping well over this the past few nights. Let’s keep the folks of Ukraine in our thoughts.

Thank you for a great article. I tend to agree with most of what the two professors say, but would like to put Professor Lukes’ statements about Russian expansion since the 15th century in context.

Many years ago, at the time of the Cold War, I also read the figures about Russia having expanded xxx miles towards the West … xxx miles towards the South … xxx miles towards the East … In fact, an analyst calculated the number of square miles per year!!! If I am not mistaken, the piece was triggered by British concerns that the Russians were advancing in Central Asia and approaching India … hence the Anglo-Afghan Wars

There is no doubt that Russia expanded … but this was very much part of the massive European expansion of the 18th and 19th century. It was no different from the United States expansion towards the Pacific , or the mighty overseas empires of Portugal, Spain, Britain and France.

The Russians were “somewhat lucky” because Siberia was virtually empty, but they fought nasty wars in the Caucasus and elsewhere … they even partitioned Poland with the Prussians and the Austrians … and they fought endless wars with the Ottoman Turks for control of today’s Ukraine and the Balkans.

It cannot be denied that Russia was an expanding empire but she was far from unique.

However, the invasions they suffered are not a myth, and Hitler was only the last.

They had Napoleon also coming from the West … and before that Swedes and Poles … and from the East they had Tatars and Mongols who destroyed their state several times.

The Russians are afraid of the outside world and it is actually a wonder that they have not invaded more! They genuinely fear the West and cannot think of NATO as purely defensive. They have a siege mentality.

I read somewhere that during the 1980s the CIA went to Ronald Reagan and convinced him that the Russians were truly scared … so Reagan moderated his “Evil Empire” statements.

It is true that we cannot trust Putin. But because of their history, I find it difficult to believe that the Russians will ever trust the West.

Since the 1939 invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union or Russian army attacked or intervened militarily in Finland (1940), Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania (1940), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), Afghanistan (1980), Georgia (2008), and now Ukraine. The Russian argument of being surrounded by enemies does not stand ground in confrontation with their aggressive history of expansionism and brutal russification and/or Sovietization of territories they tried to subjugate.

“Igor Lukes: The situation is dangerous. Russia has committed a massive force to seize a peaceful sovereign country that never presented any threat.”

Ukraine has been wanting to join NATO. That presents a threat to Russia. It appears that this is the root cause due to which Putin decided to invade.

Ukraine may have tried to gain membership to NATO, but it was not granted nor is there any indication that it’s status would change. This is demonstrated by the Western governments not commuting troops directly to the conflict

And once Russia takes over Ukraine they will look around and see there are now many more NATO countries next to them. Then what will they do to alleviate that ‘threat’?

Only those who have lived through the horrors of total war will understand what is going on. Academic deliberation is pointless at this time.

Ukrainians have the right to join any organization they want as they are an independent country. Putin’s feelings are of no relevance here. The military aggression, killing, and subjugating countries and their populations to the will of the strongman can’t be tolerated. The peers of BU students in Ukraine are dying to defend their abandoned and imperfect country, while some BU academics are falsely portraying the USA as the ultimate evil and source of all wrongs. Ask the Ukrainians who they look to most for help! The test of this American generation is coming whether we like it or not.

BU Students and staff should organize a peaceful march on Comm Ave or Marsh Plaza to show support for Ukraine . This is the least we can do .

This is not a crisis, this is war. Please show some integrity with your headlines for once.

Please inform people about the real story behind Luganks and Donetsk. How Ukrainian air force bombed the middle of the city right near the kindergarten and a children’s playground in an attempt to kill the leaders of Lugansk, how there was a massive internal war in Donetsk. How LNR and DNR formed. All of that is vital information.

Also, how about you guys look into other wars going on right now? Saudi bombing Yemen, Israel bombing Syria, USA bombing Somali, Turkey bombing Rojava. Please talk about the fact that since 1945 81% of all wars were started by USA.

I am not saying either side is right or wrong. All I am stating is facts and I am trying to bring them to light. I want people to make decisions for themselves and be able to think and not just consume the information they are told to believe.

As a Ukrainian, it is very painful to hear some of the comments about Ukrainian “crisis”. It has always been about Russian Aggression. Ukrainian nation is the stronger in spirit, patriotic, talented, courageous, and now desperately in need for help! Not debating who is right or wrong, but the world unity and support to the nation that is so brave and standing alone! in front of the 3rd largest army in the world. We are defending not only our land, but the whole concept of democracy and other countries that are lucky enough not to be neighbors with the country aggressor.

“Igor Lukes: The situation is dangerous. Russia has committed a massive force to seize a peaceful sovereign country that never presented any threat.”

Exactly! However, what is missing here is to mention 2008 Georgia. This was the first time Russia openly invaded independent sovereign nation. And what did Obama and Angela Merkel do? Symbolic sanctions and staying quite. This is exactly what motivated Putin to become an international bully and go after Crimea and Eastern Ukraine at first and then attack the rest of the country.

The US, EU & NATO made huge mistakes in dealing with Russia and treating Putin as a rational decision-maker.

Post a comment. Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Latest from BU Today

Protests unfold in and around nickerson field during bu’s 151st commencement, quotes, comments, and cheers from bu’s 151st commencement, sights and sounds from boston university’s 151st commencement, “i’m excited to embark on this journey we call life”, bu celebrates 7,600 graduates at buoyant 151st commencement, “we are called, my friends, to be peacemakers,” rev. walter e. fluker tells boston university’s baccalaureate audience, class of 2024 chobanian & avedisian school of medicine graduates urged to become changemakers, bu’s commencement student speaker is proud of being a changemaker, anthony hollenberg named new president of boston medical center, three inspiring bu master’s and professional graduates who plan to give back to their communities, from masks to mortarboards: class of 2024 reflects on a unique four years, introducing the winners of the 2024 metcalf awards, bu’s top teaching honors, capture the moment: use #bu2024 to be featured on the jumbotron at commencement, new cas class teaches the history of empires through fashion and beauty, for these identical triplets, bu was a chance to stand apart as individuals, seniors share some of their favorite memories of their time at bu, for this bu employee, commencement will be a family affair, seniors have some advice for their first year selves, bu softball claims patriot league title, begins ncaa tournament play friday, kahn award will carry theater arts major madeline riddick-seals back to alabama.

• Conflicts and crisis management
• Defence and deterrence
• Global security challenges
• Historical republications
• NATO and its member countries
• NATO partners and cooperative security
• Personal perspectives
• Terrorism and violent extremism
• Wider aspects of defence and security
• Women, peace and security
• Miscellaneous

What is published in NATO Review does not constitute the official position or policy of NATO or member governments. NATO Review seeks to inform and promote debate on security issues. The views expressed by authors are their own.

The consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for international security – NATO and beyond

• Robert Pszczel
• 07 July 2022

February 24, 2022, is likely to engrave itself on the history template of the contemporary world. Russia’s unprovoked, unjustified and barbaric invasion of Ukraine is not only a manifestation of a huge security danger that has shattered peace in Europe.

More structurally, it has broken the entire security architecture built patiently on the continent over many decades, including international commitments agreed in the last 30 years. As the top UK general recently observed, it is dangerous to assume that the war on Ukraine is a limited conflict. This could be “ our 1937 moment “, and everything possible must be done in order to stop territorial expansion by force, thereby averting a war similar to the one that ravaged Europe 80 years ago. Mobilising our resources must start today.

The magnitude of damage resulting from the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is immense and still increasing. Whole cities – like Mariupol – are being razed to the ground. Pictured: City of Mariupol © CNN

This is also a war against the West

The magnitude of damage is immense and still increasing. Ukrainians (military and civilians alike) are being killed simply because they are Ukrainians. Whole cities – like Mariupol – are being razed to the ground. Evident atrocities fitting the criteria of war crimes are being perpetrated and accompanied by genocidal talk on Russian state TV. Hundreds of thousands of people, including children, have been forcefully deported to Russia. Over six million (at the time of writing) have had to flee Ukraine; many more have been internally displaced. Hospitals, infrastructure, cultural treasures, private homes and industrial centres are either destroyed or pillaged , with stolen goods being sent to Russia in an organised manner.

The suffering of Ukraine presents a moral challenge to Europe and the world. Human rights and the UN Charter have been trampled upon and our values mocked. Indifference is simply not an option. As convincingly explained by Nicholas Tenzer: this is a war against the West too.

According to its own terminology, Putin’s regime has chosen confrontation with the “collective West”, irrespective of the costs for Russia itself. All efforts comprising security and confidence-building measures, or institutional arrangements designed to preserve peace, suddenly look very fragile when faced with blunt force. After many months of Moscow engaging in sham dialogue and blatantly lying to other countries and institutions, including NATO and the OSCE, all trust has been eroded. Moreover, by creating economic shocks in the energy markets and weaponising famine as a political instrument, Russia has further globalised the consequences of its war.

Russian threats

Russia has also purposefully raised the level of risk for the possible use of nuclear weapons, the main goal primarily being to discourage Western Allies from offering military support to Ukraine and to instil fear in decision-makers. A long-held taboo that made an actual application of nuclear force unthinkable has been verbally discarded. While many experts calculate that risk to be low - not higher than five percent - Putin and his aides have chosen to abandon the rational caution exercised by the majority of his Soviet predecessors. Compared to Cold War practice, today, Kremlin propagandists and officials engage in highly irresponsible rhetoric advocating for the use of Russia’s nuclear arsenal against Ukraine, and possibly even against NATO states. This is backed by exercises (at least two this year) openly testing the Russian military’s ability to fire nuclear warheads at Western targets and protect Russia from possible counter-strikes. The Russian president has even shown his willingness to bring Belarus into the nuclear equation. Such brinkmanship has contributed to the return of nuclear arms into the power competition on a global stage.

Russia tests nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile Sarmat on 20 April 2022. © Reuters

With or without a nuclear threat dimension, Russia’s neighbours already have valid reasons to fear the Russian predator. They feel that, if not stopped in and by Ukraine, Putin may entertain aggression against other territories. The historic decision by both Finland and Sweden to apply for NATO membership points to the gravity of this threat. Small countries, such as Moldova and Georgia, but also Moscow’s formal allies such as Kazakhstan, may fear becoming Putin’s next target. The Kremlin has not made any attempt to assuage these fears, but has instead amplified them via direct menaces, propaganda and intimidation levers. Latest examples include curtailing gas supplies for political reasons, violating the airspace of a NATO country, threatening Lithuania, and using economic blackmail against Collective Security Treaty Organization member, Kazakhstan .

International response – good and not so good news

NATO and the European Union have, to a large extent, responded effectively in the first months of the war. US leadership has once again proven essential in successfully mobilising international efforts, especially in coordinating military support to Ukraine. NATO’s response to the war, balancing increasingly strong support to Ukraine with a justified reluctance to avoid open conflict with Russia, has been more or less vindicated. The majority of European countries turned to the tried and tested protective security umbrella of NATO, backed by American military capabilities. The G7 and EU have proven agile in tightening sanctions.

But, as the aggression continues, with Russia concentrating its efforts on gaining control of eastern and southern Ukraine via a war of attrition, Western unity is being tested. Divergent interpretations over sanctions that affect the transport of prohibited goods to Kaliningrad illustrate this problem.

The United Nations and the OSCE have not been able to offer meaningful responses, mainly due to the paralysing effect of Russia’s veto. Moreover, solidarity with Ukraine is not yet universal among all UN members.

Russia's long-term prospects are dim, but the threat is present

The myth of the invincible Russian military machine has evaporated in the space of a few weeks. The initial goals of the invasion have clearly not been achieved. Russian forces had to withdraw from the vicinity of Kyiv and were beaten off in many other locations. Ukrainian bravery and excellent use of limited resources (reinforced by foreign assistance) have so far proven a strong match against the badly led, poorly motivated and organised opponent, who are also experiencing logistic and technical problems, like faulty equipment. Corruption, a disease at the heart of the Russian state, displayed itself on a grand scale in the conduct of the military operation. Russia’s human losses are enormous and, in spite of censorship, becoming known to the Russian public.

The West can attempt to facilitate the export of grain from Ukraine in order to undermine the Russian blockade of Ukrainian Black Sea ports. Picture © Euromaidan Press

After more than four months of fighting, it is Russia that is experiencing manpower shortages. Fearing protests, the Kremlin is reluctant to call for mobilisation and is forced to take extraordinary steps (e.g. extending the age limit for volunteers ready to join the war), opting for a covert form of recruitment, like through the use of reservists. Numerous cases of conscription offices being set on fire in Russia suggest strongly that many young people are opposed to being sent to the frontlines in Ukraine. Almost four million Russians have travelled away from Russia so far in 2022, many choosing not to return for the time being. It is the largest such exodus since the Bolshevik revolution and could result in an enormous country-wide brain drain; something that is already being experienced in the IT sector.

Furthermore, the war has proven costly. On 27 May, Finance Minister Siluanov admitted that “money, huge resources are needed for the special operation”. He also confirmed that 8 trillion roubles (USD $120b) were required for the stimulus budget. Sanctions are starting to bite and will set the Russian economy - which is not able to produce a huge range of goods without foreign technology or parts – back for decades. Overall, unemployment is set to rise while GDP is unlikely to grow.

Putin has turned Russia into an international pariah and the country will not recover its reputation for a long time. In spite of the totalitarian nature of the Russian political system today, some signs of dissent (even amongst high ranking diplomats ) show a growing recognition of these facts. As one astute Russian expert put it, Putin has “amputated Russia’s future”. Russia is bound to be a weaker, less influential actor for the foreseeable future.

But barring Putin’s sudden departure - which would trigger a political transformation in Moscow - Russia will still present a dangerous threat to security in Europe. The regime, led by a delusional and ageing dictator, is prone to irrational decision-making. But the ruthless conduct of the military campaign (e.g. indiscriminate use of blanket shelling) means that even incompetent Russian forces can achieve gains against the Ukrainian military , though it is being modernised at record pace.

A transformative Madrid Summit, but the clock is ticking

Ukraine’s ability to contain Russian aggression will shape the security environment for years to come. At its Summit in Madrid in June 2022, NATO recognised this and offered an upgraded package of support. The volume and speed with which more sophisticated weapons systems (including heavy artillery, missile systems, armoured vehicles, and air defence systems) are supplied to Ukraine in the coming weeks will be decisive in preventing Russia from overrunning Ukraine’s defences. The onus is on individual Allies to ensure such help now.

Norwegian troops arrive to reinforce NATO Enhanced Forward Presence in Kaunas, Lithuania, on 27 February 2022. © Reuters

Special funding assistance will be required for long-term training and the modernisation of Ukrainian forces, de facto bringing them to NATO standards. This is necessary, as Ukrainian weapon stocks composed of Soviet-standards equipment are depleted, and availability of such arms outside Ukraine is limited too. Crowdfunding military equipment for Ukraine – already successful in Lithuania – shows that the general international public is sympathetic and wants to play its part in this process. To help Kyiv to counterbalance Russia’s size advantages and scorched earth tactics, Allies should consider more military exercises to show NATO’s readiness and strength. Creative solutions are also quickly needed to undermine the Russian blockade of Ukrainian Black Sea ports, facilitating the export of grain.

While the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997 – though effectively torn to shreds by Russia – was not formally revoked at the Summit, any self-restrictions which NATO took on as part of the agreement should now be considered null and void. Crucially, Allies have finally attributed responsibility where it lies, calling Russia “the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security” in their new Strategic Concept.

Putin’s war has not yet tested the credibility of NATO’s Article 5 collective defence guarantees. Thus far, the very existence of Article 5, coupled with NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence (which now includes more than 40 000 forces under direct NATO’s operational command), have offered sufficient deterrence. But Putin’s increasingly irrational behaviour together with Moscow’s readiness to use the most destructive missiles and weapons systems against foreign territory targets (something practiced in Syria) in the immediate vicinity of NATO territory creates a new reality. Moscow has shown its readiness to use indiscriminate force for no justifiable military reasons and to engage in war crimes, all while Putin openly discusses the reclamation of lands held by tsarist Russia. Not surprisingly, NATO Allies bordering Russia are concerned by the potential loss – even temporary - of parts of their territory, and having seen the obliteration of Mariupol and Kharkiv, have become alarmed by direct missile threats to their cities and critical infrastructure.

Sanctions are starting to impact the Russian economy. Pictured: Russians queue up to withdraw cash from an ATM in St Petersburg. © Reuters

A more ruthless form of deterrence, by denial rather than punishment, based on a beefed-up forward defence seems the only appropriate response. The new NATO Strategic Concept , which was adopted in Madrid on 29 June, explicitly takes NATO in that direction (para. 21). Substantial and persistent military presence, backed by the prepositioning of equipment and strategic pre-assigning of combat forces is now part of the new NATO Force Model. The goal of massively increasing the availability of troops at high readiness is essential for effective deterrence. But concrete pledges of national contributions, like those announced by US President Biden on 29 June, must follow quickly from all Allies.

The credibility of collective defence will also depend on the quick implementation of already-announced pledges for increased defence spending and the prioritisation of defence planning efforts based on the scenario of large-scale conflict in Europe. In this context, appropriate stockpiles of military equipment are essential. As current levels are eminently insufficient, procurement practices and defence industry production capacity must be adapted, and stocks augmented quickly.

Paragraphs 28 and 29 of the new Strategic Concept leave no ambiguity on the continued role played by nuclear weapons as the ultimate guarantee of Allied security. But to disable the corrosive effect of Moscow’s nuclear blackmail against Allies, a more robust declaratory nuclear policy by NATO is in order. Moreover, the use of nuclear weapons against targets in Ukraine – however improbable - cannot be ruled out. Allies should thus consider, as a matter of urgency, persuasive signalling to Russia about possible conventional military responses (e.g. a disabling of Russian military targets in the Black Sea) that would come as a result of such acts. Only the certainty of retaliation can dissuade the Kremlin from seriously contemplating such an option.

Concrete decisions will matter more than any new organisational organigrams, and sophisticated plans or strategies are valuable only as long as they are made real. Russia has started to relish its role as a predator, and it is using brutal force to achieve its imperialist goals. Even weakened, Russia remains capable of inflicting heavy damage upon others. Only strong deterrence and credible force will be able to stop it. Counter-intuitively, preparing for a possible war with Russia is the best approach to prevent it.

Meeting of the North Atlantic Council at the level of Heads of State and Government – NATO Summit in Madrid, Spain, 29 June 2022. © NATO

The collective West (and specifically NATO) can count on its likely ability to contain an aggressive Russia, at least in the long run. But Ukraine’s defeat of the aggressor is the indispensable goal in this context as it would severely limit Russia’s ability to attack other countries, provide time to augment collective defence and consolidate international unity against aggression. Madrid Summit decisions have supplied key elements of the required strategy. There is no time to lose in implementing them.

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

Opinion 7 opinions on the war in Ukraine after one year

One year after Russia invaded Ukraine , Post Opinions is looking back at what has transpired and forward to what is to come.

The selection of opinions below forms a snapshot of that coverage, intended to help you understand the war.

These charts suggest peace isn’t coming anytime soon

By Michael O’Hanlon, Constanze Stelzenmüller and David Wessel of the Brookings Institution

After gathering data on territory, economics, refugees and more, O’Hanlon, Stelzenmüller and Wessel came to the same conclusion : The war could last for quite some time.

“Pressure to make peace could rise within and outside Ukraine and Russia in 2023 (or thereafter),” they write . “But the data doesn’t suggest that will happen right now.”

How to break the stalemate in Ukraine

By the Editorial Board

The Post’s Editorial Board reviewed the year of war and looked for solutions .

“To thwart Russia and safeguard Ukraine’s sovereignty, the United States and its European allies have little choice but to intensify their military, economic and diplomatic support for Kyiv,” the Editorial Board concluded .

Why Ukraine will win the war

By Mark Hertling, retired Army lieutenant general

Hertling examined five phases of the war and says Ukraine’s forces significantly outperformed Russia’s in each one.

“Ukraine’s armed forces have admirably adapted in each phase of this fight, learning lessons from training they received over the past decade, and from the scars earned on the battlefield itself,” he writes . “And Russia has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to do the same.”

How the war will enrich Ukraine when it’s over

By Iuliia Mendel, journalist and former press secretary for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

Sharing a story of a New Year’s Eve delivery she received while hiding in her bathroom from Russian strikes, Mendel shows how she believes the war will make Ukraine stronger when it’s over .

“Today’s war heroes, organizers and businesspeople will be the leaders of tomorrow,” she writes . “The energies unleashed by this war will enrich the country that comes after it.”

What a year of war has revealed of three leaders

By David Ignatius , Post Opinions columnist

Three figures have largely defined the war so far: Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Biden. Ignatius looks at what we’ve learned about each leader over the last year.

“Putin was convinced that his cold-eyed, brutal resolve would outlast everyone else’s,” Ignatius writes . “But a year on, Putin’s staying power begins to look questionable, while Zelensky and Biden have never looked stronger.”

You can’t understand the war without knowing history

By Timothy Snyder, the Levin professor of history at Yale University

Snyder dives into the contrast between the historical importance of this war and the lack of coursework in history.

“Ukrainian history makes today’s world make more sense,” he writes .

Putin can win only if Hawley-esque isolationists multiply

By George F. Will , Post Opinions columnist

Will homes in on how American politics could affect the war’s result .

“Putin can win only by Ukraine’s allies choosing to lose by not maximizing their moral and material advantages,” he writes . “He is counting on Western publics’ support for Ukraine being brittle, and especially on the multiplication of Josh Hawleys.”

What to know about Ukraine’s counteroffensive

The latest: The Ukrainian military has launched a long-anticipated counteroffensive against occupying Russian forces , opening a crucial phase in the war aimed at restoring Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty and preserving Western support in its fight against Moscow.

The fight: Ukrainian troops have intensified their attacks on the front line in the southeast region, according to multiple individuals in the country’s armed forces, in a significant push toward Russian-occupied territory.

The front line: The Washington Post has mapped out the 600-mile front line between Ukrainian and Russian forces .

How you can help: Here are ways those in the United States can support the Ukrainian people as well as what people around the world have been donating.

Read our full coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war . Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for updates and exclusive video .

Enter your email address and we'll make sure you're the first to know about any new Brookings Essays, or other major research and recommendations from Brookings Scholars.

[[[A twice monthly update on ideas for tax, business, health and social policy from the Economic Studies program at Brookings.]]]

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

Chrystia freeland.

May 12, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putin's Big Lie

Chapter 1: putin's big lie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click here to learn more about the linguistic kinship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does "My Ukraine" mean to you?

Share a thought or photo using #MyUkraine.

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

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

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

Little Reform, Big Corruption

Chapter 2: little reform, big corruption.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maidan and the Return of History

Chapter 3: maidan and the return of history.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn more about Putin

Mr. putin: operative in the kremlin.

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

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

Russia and the New World Disorder by Bobo Lo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See what others are saying:.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue and Yellow vs. “Little Green Men”

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

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

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

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

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

The Threat and Promise of Ukrainian Democracy

Chapter 5: the threat and promise of ukrainian democracy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author Biography

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

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

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

Join the conversation on Twitter using #BrookingsEssay or share this on Facebook.

This Essay is also available as an eBook from these online retailers: Amazon Kindle , Barnes & Noble , Apple iTunes , Google Play , BLIO ,--> Ebooks.com , and on Kobo .

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

Read the other Brookings Essays:

1775 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036 Contact Media Relations

More Brookings Essays Published 5/12/2015

©2015 The Brookings Essay Terms and Conditions Brookings Privacy Policy

Filed under:

• The dangerous new phase of Russia’s war in Ukraine, explained

Vladimir Putin’s war is still raging, signaling a frightening escalation on the ground.

Share this story

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Twitter
• Share this on Reddit
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: The dangerous new phase of Russia’s war in Ukraine, explained

Russia’s war in Ukraine has stretched on for more than three weeks, a relentless bombardment of the country’s cities and towns that has led to more than 800 civilian deaths , destroyed civilian infrastructure , and forced more than 3.3 million people to flee Ukraine, creating a new humanitarian crisis in Europe.

The devastation is far from over.

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

Why Ukraine? 

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

The stakes of Putin’s war

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

How other countries are responding

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

How to help

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

The scale of the Russian invasion — the shelling of major cities like Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv, in the east — hinted at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s larger aims: Seizing control of Ukraine, with the goal of regime change. Though its military is far bigger than Ukraine’s, Russia’s apparently confounding strategic decisions and logistical setbacks , combined with the ferocity of Ukraine’s resistance , have stymied its advance.

That has not stopped a catastrophe from unfolding within Ukraine, even as it has prompted Western allies to effectively wage economic warfare against Moscow with unprecedented sanctions .

It will only get worse as this war grinds on, experts said. “Despite the surprisingly poor military performance of the Russian military to date, we’re still in the early opening phase of this conflict,” said Sara Bjerg Moller, an assistant professor of international security at Seton Hall University.

This toll is expected to climb, especially as the Russian offensive intensifies around Ukrainian cities, where shelling and strikes have hit civilian targets , and as efforts at high-level Ukraine-Russia negotiations have so far failed . All of this is happening as Russian forces appear to be preparing to lay siege to Kyiv .

“This war is about the battle of Kyiv,” said John Spencer, a retired Army officer and chair of urban warfare studies at the Madison Policy Forum.

Taking Kyiv would mean taking control of Ukraine — or at least deposing the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president whose defiance has galvanized the Ukrainian resistance. Most experts believe Russia will prevail, especially if it can cut off Kyiv, and the Ukrainian resistance, from supplies.

Just because Russia may ultimately succeed militarily does not mean it will win this war. A Ukrainian insurgency could take root. The political, domestic, and international costs to Russia could challenge Putin’s regime. The West’s sanctions are throttling Russia’s economy, and they could do lasting damage. Russia’s war has strengthened the Western alliance in the immediate term, but that political will could be tested as energy prices spike and as the war and refugee crisis wear on.

“War is never isolated,” Zelenskyy said in a video address Thursday. “It always beats both the victim and the aggressor. The aggressor just realizes it later. But it always realizes and always suffers.”

The war in Ukraine is likely going to become more violent

Russia’s strategic setbacks have undermined its mission to take Ukraine, but it has only exacerbated the brutal and indiscriminate war, not even a month old.

The longer and harder the Ukrainian resistance fights, the more likely Russia may deploy more aggressive tactics to try to achieve their aims. “This is what we would call a war of attrition. They are trying to grind down the Ukrainian people’s morale, and unfortunately, that includes the bodies of Ukrainians,” Moller said.

Urban warfare is particularly calamitous, as civilians who have not evacuated are often caught in the middle of battles that happen block-by-block. Russia’s military tactics in cities — witnessed in places like Syria and Grozny in Chechnya in 1999 — have shown little regard for civilian protection. Spencer, the urban warfare specialist, said even Putin is limited, to a degree, by the rules of war, and so he is likely to claim that civilian infrastructure — like hospitals — are also military targets.

NEW campaign update from @TheStudyofWar and @criticalthreats : #Russian operations to continue the encirclement of and assault on #Kyiv have likely begun, although on a smaller scale and in a more ad hoc manner than we expected. https://t.co/tt5uYJacyg pic.twitter.com/ZoQRaOwNHF — ISW (@TheStudyofWar) March 9, 2022

But urban warfare is, by nature, murky and complex and often far more deadly. Even if Russia attempts precision attacks, it can have a cascading effect — Russia bombs alleged military targets, those operations move, Russia bombs again. “You’re going to use so many of them, the end result is the same as if you just used indiscriminate, mass artillery barrage,” said Lance Davies, a senior lecturer in defense and international affairs at the UK’s Royal Military Academy.

Even in the early days of this war, Russia’s efforts are already having this effect. “They’re causing tremendous damage to civilian infrastructure,” said Rachel Denber, the deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch. “They’re taking many, many civilian lives.” Denber pointed to the use of weapons in heavily populated areas, including those that are explicitly banned, like cluster munitions. Human Rights Watch documented their use in three residential areas in Kharkiv on February 28. “You put that in a city like Kharkiv, and if it’s a populated area, no matter what you were aiming at, no matter what the target, it’s going to hurt civilians,” she said.

The United Nations has confirmed at least 2,149 civilian casualties, including 816 killed as of March 17, though these numbers are likely undercounts, as intense fighting in some areas has made it difficult to verify statistics.

All of this is exacerbating the humanitarian catastrophe on the ground in Ukraine, as shelling cuts off power stations and other supply lines, effectively trapping people within war zones in subzero temperatures without electricity or water, and with dwindling food, fuel, and medical supplies. In Mariupol, a city of 400,000 that has been under Russian siege for days, people were reportedly melting snow for drinking water . Humanitarian groups say the fighting is making it difficult to deliver aid or to reach those civilians left behind — often elderly or disabled people, or other vulnerable populations that didn’t have the ability to flee.

Ukrainian and Russian officials agreed to a temporary ceasefire to establish humanitarian corridors out of six cities on March 9, but the enforcement of those safe passages has been spotty, at best. According to the United Nations, on March 9, evacuations did happen in some places, but there was “limited movement” in the vulnerable areas, like Mariupol and the outskirts of Kyiv. Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of shelling some of those routes , and have rejected Russia’s calls for refugees to be evacuated to Russia or Belarus. Russian officials have blamed disruption on Ukrainian forces .

The fighting across Ukraine has forced about 9.8 million people to flee so far, according to the United Nations . Nearly 6.5 million people are internally displaced within Ukraine, although tens of thousands of Ukrainians were already forcibly displaced before Russia’s invasion because of the eight-year war in the Donbas region. Many have taken refugee in oblasts (basically, administrative regions) in western and northwestern Ukraine.

Another 3.3 million Ukrainians have escaped, mostly to neighboring countries like Poland, Romania, and Moldova. It is Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II, and host countries and aid agencies are trying to meet the astounding needs of these refugees, most of whom are women and children.

“They need warmth, they need shelter, they need transportation to accommodations,” said Becky Bakr Abdulla, an adviser to the Norwegian Refugee Council who is currently based in Poland. “They need food, they need water. Many need legal aid — their passports have been stolen, they’ve forgotten their birth certificates.”

How the war in Ukraine began, and what’s happened so far

For months, Russia built up troops along the Ukrainian border , reaching around 190,000 on the eve of the invasion. At the same time, Russia issued a series of maximalist demands to the United States and NATO allies, including an end to NATO’s eastward expansion and a ban on Ukraine entering NATO, among other “security guarantees.” All were nonstarters for the West.

But the short answer to why Russia decided to follow through with an invasion: Vladimir Putin.

From Putin’s perspective, many historians of Europe have said, the enlargement of NATO , which has moved steadily closer to Russia’s borders, was certainly a factor. But Putin’s speech on the eve of his invasion offers another clue: the Russian president basically denied Ukrainian statehood , and said the country rightfully belongs to Russia.

But Russia’s history of incursions, invasions, and occupations under Putin — including Chechnya, Georgia, and Crimea — have foreshadowed a new, even more brutal war. Seen through this lens, he is not a madman, but a leader who came to power with the lethal siege of Grozny in Chechnya in 1999, who has pursued increasingly violent policy, and who has been willing to inflict civilian casualties to achieve his foreign policy goals.

In 2014 , Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine that culminated in the occupation of the Crimea peninsula in the south. Later that year, Russia deployed hybrid tactics, such as proxy militias and soldiers without insignia, to attack the Donbas region, where 14,000 people have died since 2014. On February 22, in the days before Putin launched a full-fledged war on Ukraine, he sent Russian troops into Donbas and declared two provinces there independent.

This time, according to former State Department Russia specialist Michael Kimmage, Putin miscalculated the difficulty of taking over Ukraine. Still, as the days go on, this war could escalate to unimaginable levels of violence. “If Putin really is feeling very threatened, it’s possible that he will dig in his heels, double down and take a lot of risks in order to prevent any potential loss of power,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former intelligence officer who’s now a senior fellow and director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

Russia is committing possible war crimes in Ukraine, and Ukrainians are responding with their full military force. They have also developed a strong civil resistance enabled by volunteers of all stripes. “All the nation is involved, not only the army,” said a Ukrainian person who has been supplying medicines.

According to a conservative estimate by US intelligence , around 7,000 Russian personnel have died so far — more troops than the US lost over two decades of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But Russia’s initial setback could lead to increasingly brutal tactics. “We’re looking at World War II kinds of atrocities. Bombing of civilians, rocket fire and artillery, smashing cities, a million refugees; that what looked impossible before now looks within the realm,” said Daniel Fried, a former ambassador to Poland and current fellow at the Atlantic Council.

How the West has responded so far

In the aftermath of Russia’s Ukrainian invasion, the United States and its allies imposed unprecedented sanctions and other penalties on Russia, acting with a swiftness and cohesion that surprised some observers, including, most likely, Putin himself .

“The US and the Western reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is essentially blowing the lid off of sanctions,” said Julia Friedlander, director of the Economic Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council. “Never in the past have we accelerated to such strong sanctions and economic restrictions in such a quick period of time — and also considered doing it on one of the largest economies in the world.”

There’s a lot of sanctions, and the US and its partners have only increased the pressure since. President Joe Biden announced on March 8 that the US would place extreme limits on energy imports from Russia — the kind of last-resort option that few experts thought might happen because of the shock to energy prices and the global economy. (Europe, far more dependent on Russian energy imports, has not joined these sanctions.) On March 11, Biden pushed Congress to strip Russia of its “most favored nation” status, which would put tariffs on Russian goods, though it’s likely to have limited impact compared to the slew of sanctions that already exist.

Ukraine’s resistance in the face of Russian aggression helped push Western leaders to take more robust action, as this fight became framed in Washington and in European capitals as a fight between autocracy and democracy. A lot of credit goes to Zelenskyy himself, whose impassioned pleas to Western leaders motivated them to deliver more lethal aid to Ukraine and implement tougher sanctions.

Among the toughest sanctions are those against Russia’s central bank. The US and European Union did this in an effort to block Russia from using its considerable foreign reserves to prop up its currency, the ruble, and to undermine its ability to pay for its Ukraine war. Russia had tried to sanction-proof its economy after 2014, shifting away from US dollars, but the EU’s decision to join in undermined Russia’s so-called “ fortress economy .”

The US and the EU also cut several Russian banks off from SWIFT, the global messaging system that facilitates foreign transactions. As Ben Walsh wrote for Vox , more than 11,000 different banks use SWIFT for cross-border transactions, and it was used in about 70 percent of transfers in Russia . Even here, though, certain banks were excluded from these measures to allow energy transactions, and EU countries, like Germany, are so far blocking efforts to expand these penalties .

The US has targeted numerous Russian banks, including two of Russia’s biggest, Sberbank and VTB . The US, along with other partners, have put bans on technology and other exports to Russia, and they’ve placed financial sanctions on oligarchs and other Russian officials, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin himself . Russian oligarchs have had their yachts seized in European vacation towns because of these sanctions, and the US has launched — and, yes, this is real — Task Force Kleptocapture to help enforce sanctions, although oligarchs’ actual influence on Putin’s war is limited .

These penalties are widespread — besides Europe, partners like South Korea and Japan have joined in. Even neutral countries like Switzerland have imposed sanctions ( though there are loopholes .) Big Tech companies, cultural institutions , and international corporations , from Mastercard to McDonald’s , are pulling out of the country.

Experts said there are still some economic penalties left in the toolbox, but what’s already in place is massively damaging to the Russian economy. Russia’s economy is expected to dramatically shrink; its stock market remains closed . And even if these sanctions are targeted toward Russia’s ability to make war, the damage done to the Russian economic system will inevitably trickle down to ordinary Russians.

The fallout will not be limited to Russia. Biden’s announcement of an oil embargo against Russia has increased energy prices ; what Biden, at least, is calling “Putin’s price hike.” And Russia may still engage in some sort of countermeasures, including cyberattacks or other meddling activity in the West.

How we get out of this

The US is doing almost everything it can without officially being a party to the conflict. The US has funneled 17,000 anti-tank missiles so far, including Javelins missiles , to Ukraine. On March 16, the US announced $800 million in additional military aid , including thousands of anti-armor weapons and small arms, 800 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and millions of rounds of ammunition.

Biden rejected the US enforcement of a no-fly zone in Ukraine , a military policy that polls surprisingly well among Americans but essentially means attacking any Russian aircraft that enters Ukrainian airspace. Seventy-eight national security scholars came out against a no-fly zone, saying that scenario would edge the US too close to a direct conflict with Russia.

So far, negotiations between Russia and Ukraine have faltered . Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, has said that the fighting could stop if Ukrainians agreed to neutrality (and no NATO membership), and agreed to recognize Crimea as Russian and the Donbas region as independent. “Is this a serious offer?” said Fried, the former ambassador who had experience working with Peskov. “It could be posturing. The Russians are liars.”

Zelenskyy has signaled some openness to neutrality , but Ukraine is going to want some serious security guarantees that it’s not clear Russia is willing to give.

The US’s absolutist rhetoric has complicated those efforts. Biden, in his State of the Union address , framed this conflict as a battle between democracy and tyranny. Even if a strong argument can be made in favor of that, given Putin’s actions, such language poses challenges for Western diplomats who must forge an off-ramp for Putin to end this war.

“If it’s good against evil, how do you compromise with evil?” said Thomas Graham, a Russia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Putin does need a face-saving way to back down from some of his demands. But if we have a compromise solution to this conflict, we’re going to need off-ramps as well, to explain why we accept that less than a total defeat for Putin.”

In a Politico essay , Graham and scholar Rajan Menon proposed a framework for a negotiated outcome that begins with confidence-building measures between the US and Russia, rebuilding arms control treaties. The US and NATO would pledge that neither Ukraine nor Georgia will join NATO in the next several years or decades, though the possibility may be open someday. This would culminate in a “new security order for Russia,” they write . Russian academic Alexander Dynkin circulated a similar idea in the lead-up to the war.

Gavin Wilde, a former director for the National Security Council who focused on Russia during the Trump administration, says the opportunities for a diplomatic resolution have not yet been exhausted. “The conundrum we found ourselves in quite a lot with Russia is, you have to talk to them. Because lives are at stake. These are two nuclear powers, and you have to keep talking,” he said.

What a Russian victory would mean for the world

The world has been galvanized by Ukraine’s small victories in this conflict.

Still, Ukraine faces long odds. By the numbers , the Russian military budget is about ten times that of Ukraine. The Russian military has 900,000 active troops, and the Ukrainian military has 196,000. Ukrainians may have the tactical advantage and the spirit to persevere, but structural factors weigh in Russia’s favor.

This all presages what could be a long, drawn-out war, all documented on iPhones. “It’s not going to be pretty,” says Samuel Charap, who studies the Russian military at RAND. A siege of major Ukrainian cities means “cutting off supply lines to a city and making it intolerable for people to resist — to engender surrender by inflicting pain.”

Still, Russia’s performance so far has been so poor that the scales may ultimately tip toward Ukraine. Mark Hertling, who was the top commander of the US Army’s European forces before retiring in 2013, says that the corruption within the Russian military has slowed down the advance.

“Unless it’s just a continuous shelling — but I don’t think Russia can even sustain that with their logistics support. They have already blown their wad quite a bit in terms of missiles and rockets,” Hertling said. “They’re having trouble moving, they’re having trouble resupplying. And when you have those two things combined, you’re going to have some big problems.”

However this plays out, the cruel effects of this war won’t just be felt in Ukraine. It’s truly a global crisis . The comprehensive sanctions on Russia will have massive implications for the Russian economy, hurting citizens and residents who have nothing to do with their autocratic leader. There will also be vast knock-on effects on the world economy, with particularly frightening implications for food security in the poorest countries. Those effects may be most visceral for stomachs in the Middle East; Egypt and Yemen depend on Russian and Ukrainian wheat.

The unprecedented sanctions may have unprecedented impact. “We don’t know what the full consequences of this will be, because we’ve never raised this type of economic warfare,” Graham said. “It’s hard to overestimate the shock that the Russian military operation has caused around the world and the fears that it has stoked about wider warfare in Europe.”

Will you support Vox today?

We believe that everyone deserves to understand the world that they live in. That kind of knowledge helps create better citizens, neighbors, friends, parents, and stewards of this planet. Producing deeply researched, explanatory journalism takes resources. You can support this mission by making a financial gift to Vox today. Will you join us?

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via

In This Stream

Russia-ukraine crisis.

• Ukraine is finally getting more US aid. It won’t win the war — but it can save them from defeat.
• Europe’s embrace of Ukrainian refugees, explained in six charts and one map

What the death of Iran’s president could mean for its future

Biden promised to defeat authoritarianism. reality got in the way., if trump wins, what would hold him back, sign up for the newsletter today, explained, thanks for signing up.

Check your inbox for a welcome email.

Oops. Something went wrong. Please enter a valid email and try again.

• IAS Preparation
• UPSC Preparation Strategy
• 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.

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.

Also read: India – Russia relations

India’s stand

• India called for “a peaceful resolution of the situation through sustained diplomatic efforts for long-term peace and stability in the region and beyond”.
• Immediately after the annexation, India abstained from voting in the UN General Assembly on a resolution that sought to condemn Russia.
• In 2020, India voted against a Ukraine-sponsored resolution in the UN General Assembly that sought to condemn alleged human rights violations in Crimea.
• India’s position is largely rooted in neutrality and has adapted itself to the post-2014 status quo on Ukraine.

Way forward

• The US along with other western countries is expected to revive the peace process through diplomatic channels in mitigating the tensions between Ukraine and Russia which would be a time-consuming process.
• Experts recommend more dialogues between the west and Russia that exert emphasis on the issue surrounding Ukraine.
• Ukraine should approach and focus on working with its Normandy Format allies, France and Germany, to persuade the Russian government to withdraw assistance for its proxies and allow for the region’s gradual safe reintegration into Ukraine.
• The Russian military expansion in Ukraine can be prevented on the geoeconomic grounds that will hamper its trade in the region especially with the Nord Stream pipeline that can carve out a way of resolving the ongoing crisis as pointed out by an expert.
• Ukraine’s internal disturbances need to be addressed to revive the Minsk II agreement for the development of peace in the region and dissolve the ongoing tensions.

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

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Your Mobile number and Email id will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Request OTP on Voice Call

Post My Comment

IAS 2024 - Your dream can come true!

Download the ultimate guide to upsc cse preparation.

• Share Share

Register with BYJU'S & Download Free PDFs

Register with byju's & watch live videos.

Russia’s new front in the Ukraine war

Fierce fighting has been taking place in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region where Russia has opened up a new front in the war. Al Jazeera’s John Holman has been to an evacuation centre for people fleeing nearby villages, and explains what’s going.

• International

May 15, 2024 - Russia's war in Ukraine

By Heather Chen, Sana Noor Haq, Adrienne Vogt and Maureen Chowdhury, CNN

Our live coverage of  Russia's war in Ukraine has moved here .

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrives in Beijing at the start of a 2-day state visit to China

From CNN's Abel Alvarado

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Beijing early Thursday morning local time to begin a two-day state visit to China, according to TASS and Chinese state media CCTV.

Russia is stepping up disinformation campaign against Zelensky, US intelligence shows

From CNN's Alex Marquardt

Russia has stepped up its disinformation efforts to discredit Ukraine’s  President Volodymyr Zelensky  and raise questions about his legitimacy in recent months, US intelligence agencies have observed.

A recently downgraded intelligence assessment shared with CNN says that Russia has seized on various recent events to fuel criticism about Zelensky’s abilities and place as Ukraine’s leader, a senior Biden administration official said in an interview.

Russia has spread disinformation about Zelensky since before the war started but recent intelligence shows “it’s definitely increasing,” the official said.

Russia has highlighted two main areas in this recent disinformation push, the intelligence indicates: Ukraine’s  painful withdrawal  from the eastern city of Avdiivka and the fact that Ukraine postponed its presidential election scheduled for this Spring due to the war.

Wider impacts: The US is more concerned about the impact of the disinformation on countries abroad than on Ukrainians’ confidence in Zelensky, the official said.

“That’s why we’re briefing our allies and partners about this,” the official said. “We want to make sure that this type of Russian disinformation doesn’t take hold and other countries that might not realize, ‘Oh, of course, they can’t hold elections because they’re in a state of martial law as a consequence of Russia’s war.’”

Dive deeper into Russia's disinformation campaign and what it could mean.

Blinken visits Kyiv and reaffirms US support for Ukraine as fighting in Kharkiv intensifies. Here's the latest

From CNN staff

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken concluded his trip to Kyiv on Wednesday, where he reaffirmed the Biden administration's support for Ukraine as Russia's advances continue in the Kharkiv region of the country.

Earlier Wednesday, Blinken announced $2 billion in foreign military financing for Ukraine and said much-needed ammunition and weapons are being rushed to the front lines. The US State Department acknowledged that the $2 billion in foreign military financing is coming primarily from the recently passed Ukraine Security supplemental and $400 million of it is coming from existing Foreign Military Financing (FMF) that had not previously been allocated to Ukraine.

Blinken also said that the US remains "committed" to helping Ukraine win the war against Russia, but it is not encouraging strikes on Russian territory. Blinken added that Washington strongly supports a Ukrainian peace summit set to take place next month in Switzerland. 

Here are more of the latest headlines:

• Kharkiv and Russian gains: Ukrainian officials suggested further gains by Russian forces on Wednesday in the Kharkiv region, as Moscow continues its push into northeastern Ukraine. The town of Vovchansk, located about 60 kilometers (or about 37 miles) northeast of Ukraine's second-largest city of Kharkiv, is seeing some of the most intense battles in areas near the border, with one police official saying Russian forces are already in the town.
• Zelensky: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will halt all international events scheduled for the coming days, his office announced, as Russian troops push into the northeastern Kharkiv region .
• UNICEF report: At least 1,993 children in Ukraine have been killed or wounded since Moscow launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022, according to the UN's children's agency (UNICEF), reiterating calls for a ceasefire. On average, at least two children lose their lives in Ukraine every day, UNICEF reported on Tuesday.

US not encouraging Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory, Blinken says 

From CNN's Radina Gigova in London 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US remains "committed" to helping Ukraine win the war against Russia, but it is not encouraging strikes on Russian territory. 

“We’ve not encouraged or enabled strikes outside Ukraine but ultimately Ukraine has to make decisions for itself about how it's going to conduct this war, a war it's conducting in defense of its freedom, of its sovereignty, of its territorial integrity and we’ll continue to back Ukraine with the equipment it needs to succeed," Blinken said on Wednesday during a joint news conference with Ukrainian Foreign Minster Dmytro Kuleba in Kyiv. 

Blinken also announced that the US will provide an additional $2 billion in foreign military financing for Ukraine, adding "we put this together in a first-of-its-kind defense enterprise fund."

The fund will have three components, Blinken said, including:

• Providing weapons for Ukraine now
• Investing in Ukraine's defense industrial base
• Financing military equipment purchases from other countries

"Of course, everyone's eyes are focused on the situation in the east and northeast, Kharkiv in particular. And so the newest support that I just announced, but particularly the $60 billion supplemental, we know is coming at a critical time," Blinken said. 

Zelensky condemns shooting of Slovakia's pro-Russian prime minister

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called a shooting attack on Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico "appalling."

"We strongly condemn this act of violence against our neighboring partner state's head of government. Every effort should be made to ensure that violence does not become the norm in any country, form, or sphere," Zelensky wrote in a post on X Wednesday.

Fico was shot multiple times, according to a statement on his official Facebook page, adding he is currently in a life-threatening condition.

"We sincerely hope Robert Fico recovers soon and express our solidarity with the people of Slovakia," Zelensky continued.

For context: Fico won a third term as Slovakian prime minister last October after running a campaign that criticized Western support for Ukraine. Ahead of the election, Fico made no secret of his sympathies toward the Kremlin and blamed “Ukrainian Nazis and fascists” for provoking Vladimir Putin into launching the invasion, repeating the false narrative Russia’s president has used to justify his invasion.

Fico, who began his fourth term last October, has shifted Slovakia’s foreign policy toward pro-Russian positions and initiated reforms in criminal law and media regulations, raising concerns about the erosion of the rule of law.

Fico also had pledged an immediate end to Slovak military support for Ukraine and promised to block Ukraine’s NATO ambitions in what would upend Slovakia’s staunch backing for Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials suggest there are more Russian gains amid ongoing push in Kharkiv region 

From CNN's Radina Gigova and Maria Kostenko 

Ukrainian officials suggested further gains by Russian forces on Wednesday in the Kharkiv region, as Moscow continues its push into northeastern Ukraine.

The town of Vovchansk, located about 60 kilometers (or about 37 miles) northeast of Ukraine's second-largest city of Kharkiv, is seeing some of the most intense battles in areas near the border, with one police official saying Russian forces are already in the town. 

"The situation in Vovchansk is extremely difficult. The enemy is taking positions on the streets of Vovchansk," said Oleksii Kharkivskyi, chief patrol officer of the Vovchansk Police Department, urging residents to evacuate. 

Gen. Serhii "Marcel" Melnyk, the commander of the Kharkiv city defense forces, also suggested there have been changes in Ukrainian positions in Vovchansk and a possible tactical withdrawal. 

"Heavy fighting is ongoing. In some areas, near Vovchansk and Lukiantsi, Ukrainian defenders were forced to move to more favorable positions to more effectively use their forces and defend the region from the offensive," Melnyk said Wednesday. 

At least 24 people, including four children, were injured as a result of Russian shelling in various parts of the Kharkiv region on Wednesday, Melnyk said.

The Ukrainian monitoring group DeepStateMap indicated on Wednesday that Russian forces have reached northeastern parts of Vovchansk as they continue to push further south into Ukrainian territory. Russian forces have taken control of more than nine villages near the border in recent days. 

Mandatory evacuations continue from all northern border settlements, according to Roman Semenukha, deputy head of Kharkiv Regional Military Administration. Nearly 8,000 people have been evacuated from these areas since May 10, when Russia launched its push. 

Nearly 2,000 children have been killed or injured since Russia invaded Ukraine, says UNICEF

From CNN's Sana Noor Haq

At least 1,993 children in Ukraine have been killed or wounded since Moscow launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022, according to the UN's children's agency (UNICEF), reiterating calls for a ceasefire.

On average, at least two children lose their lives in Ukraine every day, UNICEF reported on Tuesday.

“Ukraine’s children urgently need safety, stability, access to safe learning, child protection services, and psychosocial support," the agency said in a statement. "More than anything, Ukraine's children need peace."

Mental health impact: The war in Ukraine has "harmfully affected" the mental health and wellbeing of children , UNICEF said, adding that half of teenagers report trouble sleeping. At least one in five suffer intrusive thoughts and flashbacks.

Loss of education: Almost half of children enrolled in school in Ukraine have been robbed of in-person education, according to the report. Nearly one million children across the country cannot access any in-person learning "due to insecurity," UNICEF added.

Earlier this year, CNN reported on Ukrainian children attending newly built bunker schools in the northern city of Kharkiv, as daily Russian strikes rained down overhead.

US secretary of state announces $2 billion in foreign military financing for Ukraine

From CNN's Radina Gigova in London

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Wednesday the provision of additional $2 billion in foreign military financing for Ukraine and said much-needed weapons and ammunition are being rushed to the front lines. 

"Ukraine is facing this renewed brutal Russian onslaught," Blinken said during a news conference in Kyiv, speaking alongside Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, adding he discussed weapons deliveries with Kuleba and President Volodymyr Zelensky. 

"We are rushing ammunition, armored vehicles, missiles, air defenses. Rushing them to get to the front lines to protect soldiers, to protect civilians," Blinken said, pointing out that air defenses are "a top priority."

Blinken also said Washington strongly supports a Ukrainian peace summit set to take place next month in Switzerland. 

This post has been updated with the latest comments from Blinken.

Please enable JavaScript for a better experience.

Advertisement

Supported by

Russia and Ukraine Engage in Dueling Air Assaults Behind the Front Lines

Both sides have been looking for ways to inflict damage beyond the battlefield, targeting military logistics hubs and urban centers.

• Share full article

By Constant Méheut

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

Russia and Ukraine targeted each other’s territory on Sunday with drone attacks and airstrikes that hit urban centers and energy facilities, as both sides look for ways to inflict damage beyond the battlefield.

The Russian military said it had shot down nearly 60 Ukrainian drones over the Krasnodar region of southwest Russia, which Ukraine has increasingly targeted in recent weeks because it is home to energy and military facilities supporting combat operations.

Local Russian officials said an oil refinery had been struck in the attack. A Ukrainian security official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters, said Ukrainian drones had hit the refinery as well as a military airfield in the region. Russian officials did not comment on the reported strike on the airfield.

Ukrainian officials said Russia struck northeast Ukraine, including the city of Kharkiv, killing at least 10 civilians and wounding more than 20 people. Russia has not commented on the strikes, which could not be independently confirmed. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, has been pounded by Russian missiles in recent months, in what military experts say is a Russian tactic intended to create panic and force residents to flee.

Facing an Endless Barrage, Ukraine’s Air Defenses Are Withering

As Russia shifts its tactics and Ukraine's ammunition dwindles, more missiles are getting through Ukraine's air defenses.

Strikes on logistical hubs and troop concentrations deep behind enemy lines have been a constant in this war. But it has become all the more important for Ukraine as it seeks to relieve troops who are struggling to contain Russian advances on the ground by disrupting Moscow’s military operations.

Since the fall, Russia has had the upper hand on the battlefield, allowing it to launch assaults on different parts of the more than 600-mile front line to probe and break through Ukrainian defenses. Most recently, it has opened a new front in Ukraine’s northeast, near Kharkiv, quickly capturing several settlements and forcing the Ukrainian army to redeploy units there from other battlefield hot spots.

Now, Russia is looking to make the most of the situation by breaking through the thinned-out Ukrainian lines.

Ukraine’s General Staff reported more than 80 Russian attacks occurred on Saturday. Many of them took place in the southeastern Donetsk region, which Russia annexed in 2022 but does not fully control. In particular, Ukraine’s military said it had repelled a large Russian attack involving tanks on Chasiv Yar, a Ukrainian stronghold that is one of Russia’s main targets in the Donetsk region.

Over months of bloody assaults, Russia has gradually clawed back at Ukrainian land. Pasi Paroinen, an analyst from the Finnish Black Bird Group, which analyzes satellite images and combat footage from the battlefield, said that Russia had gained more territory so far this year than it lost during Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive last year.

Part of Ukraine’s strategy to disrupt this slow but steady advance has been a sustained air campaign against Russian facilities that supply fuel and other refined oil products to tanks, ships and fighter jets.

On Sunday, six Ukrainian drones struck an oil refinery in Slavyansk, in Russia’s Krasnodar region, forcing the plant to halt operations, according to TASS , Russia’s state news agency.

The campaign also appears intended to undermine the Russian energy industry, which is at the core of Russia’s economy and war effort. The United States said in a report released last week that the strikes had “disrupted about 14 percent of Russia’s oil refining capacity” and that by mid-March, domestic gasoline and diesel prices had risen by 20 to 30 percent in Russia. The report only covered a two-month period from late January to late March.

Russia also said on Sunday that it had intercepted nine Ukrainian missiles heading toward Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that Moscow illegally annexed in 2014. Moscow has turned the peninsula into a military logistics hub to funnel troops and ammunition to the battlefield in the south. It has also been used as a launchpad for drone and missile attacks.

Constant Méheut reports on the war in Ukraine, including battlefield developments, attacks on civilian centers and how the war is affecting its people. More about Constant Méheut

Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine

News and Analysis

The Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s talks with President Vladimir Putin of Russia were a show of solidarity  between two autocrats battling Western pressure.

Ukraine asked the Biden administration to provide more intelligence  on the position of Russian forces and military targets inside Russia.

NATO is inching closer to sending troops into Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces . The move could draw the United States and Europe more directly into the war.

Putin’s Victory Narrative: The Russian leader’s message to his country appears to be taking hold : that Russia is fighting against the whole Western world — and winning.

A Boxing Win Offers Hope: The Ukrainian boxer Oleksandr Usyk became the world’s undisputed heavyweight champion, a victory that has lifted morale  in a country struggling to contain Russian advances.

Frozen Russian Assets: As much as $300 billion in frozen Russian assets is piling up profits and interest income by the day. Now, Ukraine’s allies are considering how to use those gains to aid Kyiv .

How We Verify Our Reporting

Our team of visual journalists analyzes satellite images, photographs , videos and radio transmissions  to independently confirm troop movements and other details.

We monitor and authenticate reports on social media, corroborating these with eyewitness accounts and interviews. Read more about our reporting efforts .

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Russia-Ukraine war: Ukraine says Russia attacking border in northern Kharkiv region and replaces commander on frontline – as it happened

Kharkiv region’s governor says Russia is attempting to stretch front line; Ukrainian commander responsible for north-eastern frontline replaced

• Putin removes Sergei Shoigu as Russia’s defence minister
• 13 May 2024 Summary of the day
• 13 May 2024 Ukraine says Russian troops had 'partial success' near one village in Kharkiv region
• 13 May 2024 Strikes kill four in occupied Ukraine, Russian border region
• 13 May 2024 Zelenskiy says Ukraine troops in 'fierce' border battles with Russians
• 13 May 2024 Ukraine replaces commander for northeastern Kharkiv frontline
• 13 May 2024 Russian forces attacking border in northern Kharkiv region, Ukraine says
• 13 May 2024 Russia ready if west wants to fight for Ukraine on battlefield, Lavrov says
• 13 May 2024 Opening summary

Russia’s new defence minister Andrei Belousov has said that soldiers need better access to housing, hospitals and welfare benefits.

Reuters reports:

Belousov, an economist who previously served as deputy prime minister, underlined the need to take better care of Russia’s soldiers in comments to a parliamentary committee, his first since Putin named him on Sunday to replace Sergei Shoigu in a surprise move.

State media quoted him as saying there was too much bureaucracy surrounding the payment of benefits to military personnel. There were also issues with housing and medical treatment.

The comments by Belousov, who has no military background, appeared aimed at demonstrating to members of the armed forces that he understands their concerns and will work to improve their conditions.

Germany has rejected a no-fly zone over Ukraine enforced by the Nato military alliance and has not changed its stance, a government spokesperson said on Monday, after recent domestic calls for such a move by a cross-section of German lawmakers.

The spokesperson said:

We rejected that at the time and I think the same applies to the different requests that are now being made.

The Russian army has improved the tactical position of its troops near four settlements in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region - Vesele, Neskuchne, Vovchansk and Lyptsi, according to the Russian Defence Ministry.

Reuters could not independently confirm battlefield reports. Russia says it has already seized at least nine villages in Kharkiv region, opening a new northeastern front in the war.

Ukraine replaces commander for northeastern Kharkiv frontline

The Ukrainian commander responsible for the northeastern Kharkiv frontline was replaced during the Russian offensive , a military command said on Monday.

Nazar Voloshyn told RBC-Ukraine media that the decision to appoint Brigadier General Mykhailo Drapatyi to the position was taken on 11 May. He gave no reason.

Russian forces have, in recent days, made small but significant gains right along the border in the Kharkiv region, according to BBC reporting .

Their advances are only a few miles deep but have swallowed up around 100km (62 miles) of Ukrainian territory. In the more heavily defended east of Ukraine, it has taken Russia months to achieve the same.

Russia claims its forces have now entered the border town of Vovchansk, which Ukraine disputes.

The town has come under heavy bombing in recent days, and several thousand residents have been evacuated.

Russian forces attacking border in northern Kharkiv region, Ukraine says

Russian forces are attacking the border of Ukraine’s northern Kharkiv region in small groups in an attempt to stretch the front line , the region’s governor said on Monday.

Oleh Syniehubov told local TV:

The enemy is trying to deliberately stretch it (front line), attacking in small groups, but in new directions, so to speak.

He added that Ukrainian forces were holding Russian troops back but there was a real threat that the fighting could spread to new settlements.

Here are the latest images coming out of Ukraine:

Russia ready if west wants to fight for Ukraine on battlefield, Lavrov says

If the west wants to fight for Ukraine on the battlefield, Russia is prepared for it , acting Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was quoted as saying by the state-run RIA new agency on Monday.

The Kremlin said last week that sending Nato troops into Ukraine would potentially be extremely dangerous, and that Moscow was closely watching a Ukrainian petition calling for such an intervention.

Lavrov, who has served two decades as foreign minister, was speaking at a parliamentary hearing on his renomination to the post in a new government being formed after Putin started a fresh six-year term this month.

RIA also cited him as saying that peace talks on Ukraine due to take place in Switzerland next month without Russia’s participation amounted to an ultimatum to Moscow.

He compared the situation to “a reprimand for a schoolchild” whose fate was being decided by teachers while he was out of the room, the agency said.

You can’t talk to anyone like that, especially to us. The conference... boils down to restating an ultimatum to Russia.

Drones launched by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) caused fires at an oil depot and power substation in Russia’s Belgorod and Lipetsk regions , a Ukrainian intelligence source told Reuters on Monday.

The attack damaged “Oskolneftesnab” oil depot near the city of Staryi Oskol in Russia’s Belgorod region and “Yeletskaya” power substation in the Lipetsk region.

The intelligence source said:

Russian industry which works to wage war with Ukraine will remain a legitimate target for the SBU. Measures to undermine the enemy’s military potential will continue.

Ukraine is planning record electricity imports from five European countries on Monday after reporting significant energy infrastructure damage following Russian strikes , the energy ministry has said.

Imports are expected to rise to 19,484 megawatt hours (Mwh), beating the previous record high of 18,649 Mwh recorded at the end of March after the first wave of Russian attacks on the Ukrainian energy sector.

Opening summary

Welcome to our latest live coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine .

This morning Ukraine time, two people were killed in shelling of the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, according to its Russian-installed mayor, Alexei Kulemzin.

Here’s a snapshot of the latest key developments.

Ukraine’s top military commander admitted on Sunday that the situation in the north-eastern Kharkiv region was “difficult” as Russia continued an assault in the area . Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi denied that the Russians had made a significant breakthrough, but said his forces were on the back foot. “[We] are fighting fierce defensive battles. The attempts of the Russian invaders to break through our defences have been stopped,” he wrote on Telegram.

At least 15 people were killed and 20 injured on Sunday when part of a Russian apartment block collapsed after being struck by fragments of a missile, launched by Ukraine and shot down by Russia, Russian officials said . In one of the deadliest attacks to date on the region of Belgorod, Russian officials said Ukraine launched an attack involving at least 12 missiles, including Tochka ballistic missiles and Adler and RM-70 Vampire multiple launch rocket systems. There was no immediate comment from Ukraine. Kyiv has previously said targeting Russia’s military, transport and energy infrastructure undermines Moscow’s war effort. Belgorod lies close to the border and is considered a vital stop for Russian supply lines . Russia’s defence ministry called Sunday’s salvo a “terrorist attack on residential areas”. Online footage showed rescuers searching for survivors among the remnants of the building’s stairwell, then fleeing the scene as part of the roof crashed to the ground.

The Russian defense ministry said on Sunday that its forces had captured four villages in Kharkiv, in addition to five villages reported to have been seized on Saturday . Ukraine did not confirm the claims.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday that fighting was going on in a string of villages in the Kharkiv region . In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy also noted fierce battles in various parts of Donetsk region to the south-east. He said “defensive battles” were taking place along large sections of the border in Kharkiv.

The town of Vovchansk, among the largest in the north-east with a prewar population of 17,000, emerged as a focal point in the battle. Volodymyr Tymoshko, the head of the Kharkiv regional police, said on Sunday afternoon that Russian forces were on the outskirts of the town and approaching from three directions. “Infantry fighting is already taking place,” he said.

Tymoshko said Russian tactics in Vovchansk mirrored those used in the battles for Bakhmut and Avdiivka in the Donetsk region, in which heavy aerial attacks were accompanied by droves of infantry assaults . “Now the Russians are simply wiping it [Vovchansk] off the face of the earth and advancing with the scorched earth method. That is, they first scorch a specific area and then the infantry comes in, and they always advance in this way,” he said.

At least 4,000 civilians have fled the Kharkiv region since Friday , when Moscow’s forces launched the operation, Gov Oleh Syniehubov said in a social media statement

Russian President Vladimir Putin removed his longtime ally Sergei Shoigu as defence minister in the most significant reshuffle to the military command since Russian troops invaded Ukraine more than two years ago . In a surprise announcement, the Kremlin said Andrei Belousov, a former deputy prime minister who specialises in economics, will replace Shoigu. Putin proposed that Shoigu take the position as head of Russia’s powerful security council.

Lithuanians voted on Sunday in a presidential election expected to hand a new term to incumbent Gitanas Nauseda, a staunch supporter of Ukraine in its two-year war with Russia, after a campaign focusing on security concerns in the Baltic states . Across the region, voters are worried the former Soviet republics that make up the Baltics, now members of the Nato military alliance and the European Union, could be the targets of Russian aggression in the future.

We’ll be keeping you updated on everything you need to know throughout the day.

• Ukraine war live

Most viewed

Ukraine war latest: Ukraine 'destroys Russian Black Sea minesweeper'

Ukraine's navy says it has destroyed a Russian Black Sea fleet minesweeper. Meanwhile, an attack on a residential area in Kharkiv left six civilians injured - with Ukraine saying it is investigating the bombing as a potential war crime.

Monday 20 May 2024 08:54, UK

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

• Big picture: What you need to know as a new week begins
• Six killed - including pregnant woman - in strikes on Kharkiv recreation area
• Russia takes control of village in Kharkiv - defence ministry
• We'll be back tomorrow with live updates

This week kicks off with all eyes on northeastern Ukraine, after Russia opened a second front when it invaded across the border from the Belgorod region into the Kharkiv region.

Our coverage remains paused today, but you can find an overview of the war as it stands below.

Second front

Russian forces have advanced between five and 10km into the Kharkiv region, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

Moscow is prioritising the seizure of Vovchansk -the largest settlement near the border - said the Institute of the Study of War, which could provide Russian forces with a staging ground to launch a second phase of the offensive.

The objectives of this phase are unclear, but Russian officials have previously identified Lyptsi as a target.

Vladimir Putin has claimed capturing the city of Kharkiv is not part of the plan, but a former Ukrainian president said he cannot be trusted.

The offensive has been deadly for civilians - with 10 people killed in Russian strikes on Sunday, local governor Oleh Syniehubov said.

Russian forces have also captured 40 civilians from a town in Kharkiv, the head of the investigative department of the Kharkiv regional police, Serhii Bolvinov, said.

Meanwhile, anti-Putin Russian paramilitary soldiers have joined Ukrainian troops to defend the new frontier.

The Black Sea and the occupied Crimean peninsula remain targets for Ukrainian forces.

They attacked Belbek airfield on Tuesday, destroying elements of an air defence missile battery, including a radar system and launchers. 

This comes after three successful attacks between 16 April and 12 May, the UK defence ministry said.

Ukrainian Defence Forces also destroyed a Black Sea fleet minesweeper, the Ukrainian navy said.

Elsewhere on the frontline

Ukrainian troops reported the war was entering a critical phase and they remain desperate for ammunition.

Colonel Pavlo Palisa, fighting near Chasiv Yar, said Russia was preparing for a major push to break Ukrainian lines in the east.

Ukrainian gun commander Oleksandr Kozachenko said his unit's US-supplied howitzer, which once hurled 100 shells a day, is now reduced to fewer than 10.

Beyond the battlefield

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy rejected the French president's call for a truce between Russia and Ukraine during the Paris Olympics, saying it could give Russia the upper hand.
• Poland said it would invest £2bn to make its eastern border "impossible to pass for a potential enemy", prime minister Donald Tusk said.
• Russia's ambassador to the UK said the UK was a de facto participant in the war. Moscow said it saw the US and UK as responsible for recent attacks on Russian soil because they were allowing Ukraine to use Western weapons against targets there.

Putin in China

The Russian president was in Beijing last week, meeting leader Xi Jinping.

They agreed to expand military drills, warned against the risk of nuclear conflict and talked up the idea of weakening the West.

The pair signed an agreement for "new era" strategic cooperation, criticising the US and marking support for Russia's "sovereignty and territorial integrity".

We're pausing our coverage of the Ukraine war for the moment.

Scroll through the blog below to catch up on today's developments.

Russian forces likely intend to launch the second phase of their offensive following their anticipated seizure of Vovchansk, three miles from the Russian border, according to the latest analysis from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said yesterday that Russian forces advanced between five and 10 kilometres in the northern Kharkiv region before Ukrainian forces stopped Russian advances.

The ISW says Russian forces are currently prioritising the seizure of Vovchansk because it is likely one of the remaining tactical objectives of the first phase, noting it is the largest settlement immediately on the border that would provide Russian forces with a staging ground to prepare for and launch the second phase.

The Russian objectives of the second phase are not yet clear, the ISW says. It could be to expand the "buffer zone" further in width along the border, or to advance closer to Kharkiv city.

Russian forces have also recently intensified efforts to seize the operationally significant town of Chasiv Yar, the ISW says, seeking to exploit the pressure on stretched Ukrainian forces. 

The number of people killed in Russian strikes on a Kharkiv recreation area has risen from five to six, with an employee of the resort still unaccounted for. 

At least 27 people were injured in the two airstrikes, which came about 20 minutes apart, according to an update from the Kharkiv regional prosecutor's office on Telegram. 

The missing employee was fishing by a reservoir when the attack happened, the update said. 

Two police officers are among the injured, it added. 

The UK's defence secretary has confirmed the military aid that has been "rushed" to Ukraine. 

Grant Shapps said the "world cannot wait" as he urged nations to "step up" and support Kyiv's fight against Russia. 

Among the items sent by the UK are 80 defence missiles, one million rounds of ammunition and 20 Viking amphibious protected vehicles. 

Mr Shapps' tweet comes after he urged allies to give permission to Ukraine to use the weapons they have supplied against targets in Russian-annexed Crimea.

"We have been very, very clear with the world and helpful to Ukraine - for example, providing permissions for our weapons to be used throughout the whole of Ukraine ... that includes Crimea, which was taken by Putin in 2014," he told the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: 

"Now, we do not get into how we would allow targeting with our weapons to be used outside of that. But we do provide our weapons to Ukraine in order for them to defend their country."

Pressed on Volodymyr Zelensky's calls for weapons to be available for strikes inside Russia, Mr Shapps said: "I can't go into the specifics of those private conversations about how the weapons are precisely used."

Finland will propose a law that would see it turn back migrants to Russia without processing their asylum applications - despite this potentially breaching its international human rights commitments.

Finland shut its border with Russia last year to stop a growing number of arrivals from countries including Syria and Somalia.

It accused Moscow of weaponising migration against Finland and the European Union, an assertion the Kremlin denies. 

"As this phenomenon is in Russia's hands - who comes, where from and when, to Finland's border - we cannot permit it," Prime Minister Petteri Orpo told reporters.  

"Therefore we have to augment our legislation." 

The bill would allow border authorities to turn back asylum seekers who cross from Russia, with or without using force. But it would not apply to children and disabled people.

The proposal will go to parliament next week, where it will be submitted to the constitutional committee for review. It will need five-sixths of votes cast in parliament to pass - the high bar required for constitutional matters - and success is not certain. 

The General Staff of Ukraine's armed forces have published their daily operational update... 

It says "intense" fighting is ongoing along almost the entire frontline, with 78 "combat clashes" already today, compared to 110 for the entirety of yesterday. 

The Russian forces became increasingly active on the Kharkiv front, with seven clashes reported so far today.

The situation in Kharkiv is "dynamic", it says, with Russian troops trying to push back the Ukrainian units near Vovchansk, Starytsia and Lyptsi.

Russia said on Saturday its forces had captured the village of Starytsia, bringing the total number of villages it has taken in the Kharkiv region to 13.

Russia has been pushing ahead with a ground offensive in recent days that opened a new front in northeastern Ukraine's Kharkiv region and put further pressure on Kyiv's overstretched military. 

Russian forces have also increased their activity on the Siversk front and are attempting to break through Ukrainian defences in Bilohorivka, Verkhnokamianske and Rozdolivka, the update says. 

Oleksandr Usyk defeated British boxing star Tyson Fury to become the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world on Saturday night.

But Fury says the outcome was down to the Ukraine war. 

He disputed his loss after the match, saying: "I believe I won that fight. I think he won a few rounds but I won the majority of them.

"His country is at war, so people are siding with the country at war. Make no mistake, I won that fight in my opinion."

In response, Ukrainian Usyk said he was "ready for rematch," but later added: "I don't think about rematch now, I want to rest."

After today's attacks President Volodymyr Zelenskyy again called on Western allies to supply Kyiv with additional air defence systems to protect Kharkiv and other cities. 

He said there were reports "every hour" of fresh attacks. 

"Missiles, bombs, artillery are the only things that allow Russia to continue its aggression," he said on Telegram. 

"The world can stop Russian terror - and to do so, the lack of political will among leaders must be overcome."

"Two Patriots for Kharkiv will make a fundamental difference," he said, referring to Patriot missile defence systems. 

Air defence systems for other cities and sufficient support for soldiers on the front line would ensure Russia's defeat, the president added. 

This morning, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said the delay in giving aid to Ukraine gave Russia a window of opportunity for its new offensive. 

Five people have died in strikes on two villages in the Kupiansk district in Kharkiv, local officials say. 

It brings the number of people killed in the Kharkiv region today to 10, after five people died in strikes on a recreation area in a northern suburb of the city of Kharkiv.

Local governor Oleh Syniehubov said Russian forces shelled two villages with a self-propelled multiple rocket launcher. 

At least nine people were injured in the attacks. 

Be the first to get Breaking News

Install the Sky News app for free