The Order
On the morning of 24 February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared on state television to announce what he termed a "special military action" against Ukraine . The phrasing was deliberate, clinical—chosen to avoid the word "war." Within hours, Russian missiles struck military and civilian targets across the country . Troops and armoured columns rolled south from Belarus and north from Crimea. Tank treads churned the frozen earth along a front that stretched nearly the length of Ukraine's borders.
Putin's statement was brief and framed in the language of defensive necessity. He said Russia did not plan to occupy Ukraine —a claim that would ring hollow as the operation unfolded. What had begun as a recognition of two breakaway republics in Ukraine's east had, in the span of hours, become a full-scale invasion.
It was a moment that redrew the map of European security, ended three decades of relative peace on the continent, and set in motion a conflict whose consequences—humanitarian, economic, geopolitical—are still being tallied. But the invasion did not arrive without warning. It was the culmination of years of escalating tension, territorial annexation, and a fundamental disagreement over Ukraine's place in the post-Soviet order.
Prelude: Recognition and Deployment
The formal trigger came two days earlier. On 22 February, the Kremlin recognised the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, the two Russian-backed enclaves in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region . These territories had been in a state of frozen conflict since 2014, when Russian-backed separatists seized control following the Maidan Revolution and the ouster of Ukraine's pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych.
Recognition was followed by deployment. Russian troops moved openly into Donetsk and Luhansk, ostensibly as peacekeepers . Moscow framed the move as a response to Ukrainian aggression—a narrative that had been building for months. Ukrainian military intelligence, however, had painted a different picture. Kirill Budanov, Ukraine's military intelligence chief, had described a detailed Russian war plan: artillery and aviation strikes, followed by a land assault and amphibious landings in the southern cities of Odessa and Mariupol .
The international community condemned the recognition and troop movements, but the response was fragmented. The United States warned that Russian forces remained in a "threatening position" . Germany's Angela Merkel expressed dissatisfaction with Russia's military presence in Ukraine . Austria's Chancellor Karl Nehammer declared his country "militarily neutral, but solidary with Ukraine" . Yet the diplomatic efforts to forestall a larger conflict had already failed.
The Denazification Myth
Putin's justification for the invasion centred on two claims: that Ukraine posed a direct threat to Russian security, and that the operation was necessary to "denazify" the country . The latter claim, in particular, drew widespread condemnation and bafflement. Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish; his great-grandparents were killed in the Holocaust. The notion that Ukraine—a vibrant, if imperfect, democracy—was in the grip of a neo-Nazi regime struck historians and political scientists as absurd .
Yet the rhetoric was not random. It was carefully calibrated for a domestic Russian audience. Polling suggested that many Russians accepted Putin's framing of the conflict . The invocation of Nazism tapped into the deep well of Soviet memory, the Great Patriotic War, the 27 million dead. It cast Russia as the liberator, the protector, the righteous force against a resurgent fascism.
Outside Russia, the claim was dismissed as propaganda. Scholars pointed out that far-right groups exist in Ukraine, as they do in many countries—including Russia itself. One such Russian group, the paramilitary unit ДШРГ "Rusich," was documented calling for the torture and execution of Ukrainian prisoners of war . Meanwhile, Ukraine's parliament formally recognised Russia as a terrorist state , and the International Criminal Court opened an investigation into Russian war crimes . In March 2023, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Putin himself, accusing him of responsibility for the unlawful deportation of children from occupied Ukrainian territories .
The Crimean Blueprint
The 2022 invasion was not Russia's first incursion into Ukrainian territory. In 2014, in the chaotic aftermath of the Maidan protests, Russian forces seized Crimea in a swift, largely bloodless operation. The annexation was condemned internationally but never reversed. Documents later revealed that Putin had ordered the operation on 23 February 2014—the final day of the Sochi Winter Olympics—along with plans to extract the deposed president, Viktor Yanukovych .
Yanukovych himself had been a flashpoint. His refusal to sign an association agreement with the European Union in late 2013, under pressure from Moscow, ignited the protests that would eventually topple him . The EU deal was more than a trade pact; it was a statement of intent, a signal that Ukraine was turning westward. Yanukovych resisted, and paid the price. His flight to Russia left a power vacuum that Moscow moved quickly to exploit.
Crimea set the template: swift military action, a veneer of local legitimacy (a hastily organised referendum), and a bet that the West would not respond with force. The bet paid off. Sanctions were imposed, but Crimea remained under Russian control. The message was clear: Moscow would not tolerate Ukraine's drift toward the West, and it was willing to use military force to prevent it.
The Human Cost
Within days of the invasion, the Ukrainian government reported staggering casualties. According to official figures, 837 Ukrainian military personnel had been killed and 3,044 wounded in the early phase of the operation in the east . Those numbers would climb exponentially as the war expanded.
The civilian toll was harder to quantify but no less devastating. Cities were besieged; infrastructure was destroyed; millions fled. Hungary announced it would provide refuge not only to ethnic Hungarians from Ukraine's Transcarpathia region but to all Ukrainian citizens . The exodus became Europe's largest refugee crisis since the Second World War.
The war also drew in unconventional actors. The hacker collective Anonymous claimed responsibility for cyberattacks on Russian websites, part of a broader digital front that opened alongside the physical one . Meanwhile, Russian paramilitary groups with ties to the Wagner Group operated in the conflict zones. One such figure, Yan Petrovsky, a leader of the Rusich unit, was detained in Finland; Ukraine prepared materials for his extradition .
The International Response
The invasion forced a reckoning among Western powers. Germany, long criticised for its dependence on Russian energy and its reluctance to confront Moscow, announced a €2.7 billion military aid package for Ukraine—the largest since the war began . The shift was seismic. For decades, post-war Germany had maintained a policy of military restraint; now it was arming a country at war with a nuclear power.
At the United Nations, the denunciations were sharp. Kenya's ambassador delivered a speech that resonated far beyond the Security Council chamber, drawing a parallel between Ukraine's struggle and Africa's colonial past . It was a reminder that the war, while European in geography, carried echoes of older conflicts over sovereignty and self-determination.
Yet the international response was not uniform. Some nations condemned Russia unequivocally; others hedged. The global South, in particular, proved reluctant to join Western sanctions, wary of being drawn into what many saw as a proxy conflict between great powers. The war exposed fissures in the international order, revealing the limits of multilateral institutions and the persistence of national interest.
The Resistance and the Silenced
Inside Russia, the war was deeply unpopular among certain segments of the population, though dissent was dangerous. Anti-war Russians struggled to make their voices heard . Protests were met with mass arrests; independent media outlets were shut down; the term "war" itself was criminalised. The state narrative was total: this was a defensive operation, a necessary intervention, a fight against fascism.
Yet the cracks were visible. Thousands fled the country to avoid conscription. Soldiers returned from the front with stories that contradicted official accounts. The economic sanctions, while slow to bite, began to reshape daily life. The war that Putin promised would be swift and limited had become something else entirely—a grinding, bloody conflict with no clear end.
The Question That Remains
Two years on, the war continues. The front lines have shifted; the casualty counts have climbed into the hundreds of thousands; the initial shock has given way to a grim normalcy. What began as a "special military action" has become Europe's largest and deadliest conflict since 1945.
The question that haunted the early days of the invasion remains unanswered: what does Putin want? Is it the restoration of a Russian sphere of influence, a rollback of NATO expansion, the subjugation of Ukraine, or something more diffuse—a reassertion of Russian power, a strike against a liberal international order that he sees as hostile and hypocritical?
The invasion revealed the limits of deterrence, the fragility of international law, and the persistence of great-power competition in an age that was supposed to have moved beyond it. It showed that borders can still be redrawn by force, that treaties can be ignored, that the post-Cold War settlement was never as stable as it seemed.
And it demonstrated, perhaps most clearly, that the decisions of a single man—sitting in a television studio on a winter morning, reading a script prepared in secret—can plunge millions into war. The invasion that wasn't supposed to happen did happen. The consequences are still unfolding.