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From November 2013 to late February 2014, protesters gathered on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (“Independence Square”) in a series of demonstrations that came to be known as the Euromaidan. Those protests involved several distinct stages, culminating in the removal of Pres. Viktor Yanukovych, which in turn precipitated a violent separatist movement in the eastern regions of the country.

In late November 2013 Yanukovych had signaled his willingness to sign an association agreement with the European Union. In return, the Europeans demanded that he release opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko from prison and initiate constitutional and legal reforms. After a visit with Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Yanukovych opted not to sign the agreement. It seemed that Ukraine would commit itself to the Eurasian Economic Union, a Russian-led EU analogue that would include Kazakhstan and Belarus as members when it came into existence on January 1, 2015.

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A History of War

Within hours of Yanukovych’s about-face, protesters took to the streets. They were mainly young people, alerted by social networks and text messages, and they soon established a camp on the Maidan. Although the level of daily participation fluctuated over time, every Sunday masses converged on the Maidan; at the action’s peak, 500,000 gathered in central Kyiv. The authorities initially deployed the Berkut riot police without serious confrontations, but on the night of November 30 the order was given to clear the square by force. Dozens were injured in the ultimately ineffective effort, and the protests were reenergized by the assault.

On December 16 Putin offered Ukraine $15 billion in loans and reduced gas prices to offset a shortfall in the country’s finances that had been sparked by the near depletion of its hard currency reserves. The parliament enacted draconian anti-protest laws on January 16, 2014, that limited freedom of speech and assembly, outlawed nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and established a virtual dictatorship under Yanukovych. Though they were repealed only 12 days later, the measures steeled the protesters. In an effort to preserve his rule, Yanukovych removed Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and offered government posts to opposition leaders Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Vitali Klitschko, but both declined.

While Russia solidified its hold on Crimea throughout the spring, small groups of armed men took over administrative buildings in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv. On May 11 separatists held referenda and declared the formation of autonomous “people’s republics” in Donetsk (DNR) and Luhansk (LNR), but the separatist movement in Kharkiv largely fizzled. In the Donets Basin (Donbas), skirmishes between Russian-backed militias and government forces intensified, and dozens of pro-Russian separatists were killed in a battle over Donetsk’s international airport.

On May 25 chocolate magnate Petro Poroshenko easily won the Ukrainian presidential election, which took place without the participation of Crimea and much of the Donbas. Poroshenko promised to step up an Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) to regain the occupied territories. In separatist regions the new governments were taken over by militants, including some from Russia. The most prominent among them was Strelkov, the nom de guerre of Igor Girkin, a former colonel with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), who established his headquarters in Slov’yansk. Poroshenko was inaugurated on June 7, and he immediately introduced a proposal to restore peace in separatist-controlled regions. Fighting continued, however, and on June 13 government forces reclaimed the city of Mariupol.

ATO forces liberated Slov’yansk on July 5, but Strelkov and about 8,000 men established a new base in Donetsk. Units under Strelkov’s command were believed to have been responsible for the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 near Hrabove on July 17. All 298 people aboard, most of whom were citizens of the Netherlands, were killed. On August 14 Strelkov reportedly resigned his position and left Ukraine. A Dutch inquiry would later determine that the aircraft was shot down by a Russian-made Buk surface-to-air missile system, and four individuals—all of whom were associated with the Russian-backed military operation in eastern Ukraine—were identified as suspects. The most prominent among these was Strelkov; in November 2022 a Dutch court found Strelkov and two others guilty of murder.

By the end of July, the EU and the U.S. had increased sanctions on Russia, freezing bank accounts and banning travel by prominent officials. In late August regular Russian troops entered Ukraine and surrounded Ukrainian troops at Ilovaisk, where they killed hundreds. In spite of overwhelming evidence of direct Russian participation in the conflict, the Kremlin insisted that it was not intervening in Ukraine. After separatist forces opened a new front that once again threatened the key port city of Mariupol, Poroshenko decided to abandon the ATO operation. On September 5 representatives from Ukraine, Russia, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and the two breakaway republics met in Minsk, Belarus, to conclude a cease-fire agreement.

Snap parliamentary elections held on October 26 bolstered the position of pro-European parties, with Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front and the Poroshenko Bloc winning the most votes. On November 2 the DNR and the LNR held elections for “People’s Councils,” and separatist leaders Aleksandr Zakharchenko and Igor Plotnitsky claimed victory.

In spite of repeated violations by both sides, the Minsk protocol remained in place in mid-December. Poroshenko’s government faced the dual task of introducing radical reforms and ending corruption while dealing with an unpredictable adversary in Moscow. Right-wing militants, largely shut out in elections, were prominent in street fighting and in Ukrainian volunteer battalions. An estimated 700,000 refugees had fled from the Donbas to Russia, with thousands more displaced to other areas of Ukraine. By year’s end more than 4,700 people had been killed and more than 10,000 had been wounded in the fighting. As winter fell, indiscriminate artillery fire and limited access to basic services such as heat, water, and electricity led the UN to label the situation for civilians in the DNR and the LNR as “extremely dire.”

On February 12, 2015, the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany agreed on a 12-point peace plan (dubbed Minsk II) that proposed, among other things, the cessation of fighting, the withdrawal of heavy weapons, the release of prisoners, and the removal of foreign troops from Ukrainian territory. The tenuous peace held, and heavy weapons were pulled back by both sides in early September 2015. Frequent violations of the truce left over 9,000 dead and more than 20,000 wounded by year’s end, however. Ukrainian authorities estimated that over 2,000 Russian troops had been killed since the beginning of fighting in April 2014, but Russian officials continued to deny any involvement in the conflict. In May 2015 Putin had signed a decree banning the release of information about the deaths of Russian soldiers during “special operations.” In December 2015 Russian hackers cut electricity to some 225,000 people in western Ukraine. Additional cyber attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure would follow as the war in the Donbas settled into a state of frozen conflict for the next six years.

In 2019 Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine. In his hit television show Servant of the People, the actor and comedian had portrayed an everyman who followed an unlikely path to the presidency. Life would imitate art as Zelensky’s anti-corruption platform earned him widespread support, and he defeated Poroshenko in a landslide. Zeleknsky pledged to bring the conflict in the Donbas to a close, but his efforts were complicated when he was drawn into a political scandal in the United States. The U.S. Congress had authorized some $400 million in military aid for Ukraine, but U.S. Pres. Donald Trump held up the release of that security assistance. In a phone call with Zelensky on July 25, 2019, Trump implied that the aid would only be released if Zelensky “would do us a favour” by endorsing a pair of unsubstantiated claims about Trump’s political opponents. Zelensky never provided the “quid pro quo” that Trump had requested, and the funds were finally made available in September 2019. Trump’s attempt to pressure a foreign government for personal political gain led the U.S. House of Representatives to launch impeachment proceedings against him in December 2019.

Between October and November 2021, Russia began a massive buildup of troops and military equipment along its border with Ukraine. Over the following months, additional forces were dispatched to Belarus (ostensibly for joint exercises with Belarusian personnel), the Russian-backed separatist enclave of Transdniestria in Moldova, and Russian-occupied Crimea. By February 2022 Western defense analysts estimated that as many as 190,000 Russian troops were encircling Ukraine and warned that a Russian incursion was imminent. Putin dismissed these accusations and claimed that an accompanying Russian naval buildup in the Black Sea was a previously scheduled exercise. While Western leaders consulted with both Zelensky and Putin in an effort to stave off a Russian invasion that appeared inevitable, Putin issued demands that included de facto veto power over NATO expansion and the containment of NATO forces to countries that had been members prior to 1997. This would, in effect, remove the NATO security umbrella from eastern and southern Europe as well as the Baltic states. These proposals were flatly rejected. British and American intelligence services also took the unprecedented step of “pre-bunking” Russia’s manufactured casus belli by revealing classified information about Russia’s intentions.

On February 21, 2022, Putin responded by recognizing the independence of the self-proclaimed people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin ordered Russian troops into Ukrainian territory as “peacekeepers,” and Russian military activity in the Donbas—ongoing since 2014 but consistently disavowed by the Kremlin—at last became overt. Western leaders, pledging solidarity with Ukraine, responded by levying a raft of sanctions against Russian financial institutions. In the early hours of February 24, Zelensky, speaking in Russian, addressed the Russian people directly, delivering an impassioned plea for peace but vowing that Ukraine would defend itself.

It seems clear that Putin’s plan had been to seize Kyiv in a matter of days and to install a pro-Moscow government. In the early hours of the invasion, an elite Russian paratrooper unit captured Hostomel Airport, just 6 miles (10 km) northwest of the Ukrainian capital, in an airborne assault. Teams of mercenary assassins from the Kremlin-backed Wagner Group were dispatched to Kyiv with orders to eliminate key figures in the Ukrainian government. Despite the obvious personal danger, Zelensky remained in the capital, even going so far as to film himself standing on the street in central Kyiv. When the United States offered to evacuate him from the combat zone, Zelensky reportedly said, “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.”

Russian troops in Belarus crossed the Ukrainian border and occupied the Chernobyl nuclear plant as part of a general advance on Kyiv along the west bank of the Dnieper River. Russian forces in Crimea pushed north and captured Kherson on March 2; it would be the only regional capital taken by the Russians in the initial offensive. Elsewhere, the Russian advance stalled in the face of a determined Ukrainian defense. An attempted Russian encirclement of Kharkiv failed, despite that city’s close proximity (20 miles [32 km]) to the Russian border, and the thrust toward Kyiv collapsed due to stiff Ukrainian resistance and obvious shortcomings in Russia’s logistics capabilities.

Millions of Ukrainians fled the country as Russia indiscriminately targeted civilian populations with rockets and artillery strikes. On March 16 as many as 600 people were killed in the besieged city of Mariupol when a Russian air strike leveled the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theatre. It was widely known that the building was being used as the city’s main bomb shelter, and the theatre’s set designer had painted the word “CHILDREN” on the pavement outside in massive Cyrillic letters that were visible even in satellite imagery. By late March some four million Ukrainians had fled the fighting; this represented Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II. The overwhelming majority would find safety in Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic.

As the war entered its second month, it was clear that the offensive against Kyiv had grossly miscarried. The Russian paratroopers at Hostomel had been isolated and subjected to furious Ukrainian artillery bombardment, and the Russian troops occupying the Kyiv suburbs of Irpin and Bucha were conducting a horrifying campaign of violence against the civilian populations of those cities. After the Russians were forced to withdraw from Irpin and Bucha, Ukrainian forces uncovered mass graves, bodies that showed clear signs of torture, and other evidence of war crimes. Elsewhere along the front, the Russians targeted cultural sites, hospitals, water treatment plants, and other civilian infrastructure in a brazen violation of the Geneva Conventions. Looting of civilian homes and businesses was also widespread in areas under Russian occupation.