A brief history of the Russia-Ukraine war | Explained

History of Russia-Ukraine war: Ukraine conflict escalates as U.S. shifts policy, Europe struggles, and Russia advances, leaving Ukraine in dire straits.

The story so far:

The Ukraine conflict has witnessed dramatic developments in recent weeks. U.S. President Donald Trump has brought in a 180-degree shift in U.S’s policy towards the war. Disagreements between Kyiv and Washington on how to end the war have led to an unprecedented public spat between Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Mr. Trump in the Oval Office, following which the U.S. paused all military aid for the war-torn European nation. Within a day, Mr. Zelenskyy ‘regretted’ the spat, announced Kyiv’s readiness to declare a partial truce and work with Mr. Trump to achieve lasting peace. Europe seems caught off guard as the geopolitical glacial plates are shifting fast. Russia is watching and waiting, while the war grinds on.

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When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, he probably thought the war would be over within days. So did Ukraine’s western partners, including the U.S., who vacated their embassies in Kyiv right before the war began. But when Ukraine, armed with U.S.-supplied weapons, denied a quick victory to the Russians, the West stepped in. The U.S., under the Biden administration, adopted a two-pronged approach towards the war — impose biting sanctions on Russia to weaken its war machinery and economy, and arm Ukraine to the teeth to fight the Russians on the battlefield. “We want to see Russia weakened,” Mr. Biden’s Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said in April 2022. This approach was relatively successful in the war’s initial phase. By September 2022, Russian troops were forced to withdraw from the settlements they had captured in the Kharkiv Oblast in the northeast. In November, Russia pulled back forces from Kherson city and parts of Mykolaiv on the right bank of the Dnipro River in the south.

But in between Russia’s retreats from Kharkiv and Kherson, President Vladimir Putin had doubled down on the war: he annexed four Ukrainian oblasts — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — and announced a partial mobilisation. The message from the Kremlin was that it was ready to fight a long war. On the economy front, Mr. Putin pivoted towards Asia where the huge markets of China, India and others helped Moscow offset the impact of the sanctions.

In 2023, Russia gradually turned the tide of the war, inch by bloody inch. It took Soledar in January and Bakhmut in May, after a months-long campaign. In 2024, Russia expedited its battlefield advances by capturing Avdiivka in February, Krasnohorivka in September and Vuhledar in October. At no point since 2023, had Ukraine seemed capable of defeating the Russians and recapturing the lost territories. In June 2023, Ukraine launched a much-awaited counteroffensive, with advanced western weapons, in the south, but it fizzled out in the face of Russia’s dogged defence.

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