On 24 February 2022, according to multiple outlets, Russia invaded Ukraine [3, 7, 11]. Four years and four months later, the war grinds on with a casualty toll that has passed 100,000 dead on both sides and displaced more than 8.2 million people within Ukraine by the end of 2023 [17, 22, 27]. The event that was supposed to galvanize the West into a transformative confrontation with revanchist autocracy has instead settled into a rhythm of incremental attrition. The question is no longer whether Ukraine can win quickly, but whether anyone still believes it must.
The invasion began as theatre: President Putin's televised declaration of a 'special military operation' to 'demilitarize' and 'denazify' Ukraine, as reported across Russian and international sources [12, 16, 21, 24]. The rhetoric was absurd—Putin's claim that Ukraine was run by neo-Nazis, as multiple sources note [5, 16, 24], was propaganda so crude it insulted its own audience. But the tanks were real. Russian forces struck from multiple directions, targeting Kyiv and other cities, in what was the largest European land war since 1945 [3, 7, 11]. The initial Western response was unified and severe: sanctions, arms shipments, rhetorical solidarity. Ukraine's resistance, fierce and effective, turned what Moscow expected to be a quick decapitation into a protracted bloodbath.