Quick Take: A Military History of the Ukrainian War, 2022-2025

The war that changed everything

The Ukraine became a member republic of the Soviet Union in 1918, and over the next seven decades it was expanded as part of Soviet plans to minimize the weight of the Russian Federation, the largest constituent of the USSR and the one with the longest and strongest nationalistic movement.

By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, to its historical core of Ruthenia (never a part of the Russian Empire) the Ukrainian Republic incorporated not just historically Russian cities like Kharkov and Odessa, but also the Donbass and Crimea, almost entirely Russian-speaking areas where Ukrainian was never spoken in history, with zero connection with the new independent nation that emerged in December, 1991.

This was a problem. How big of a problem, that’s a matter for never-ending debate. In fact, any attempt at a quickie history of Russo-Ukrainian relations between 1991 and 2022 is going to be like running across a minefield while blind-folded, and singing La Bamba. Bombs are going to explode. So I will do it very quickly. For those who want more detail on that specific period that I’m willing to provide here, I recommend hitting those trusty old friends, books, but a pretty decent, short replacement is here online, in a history of 25 years of Putinism.

So, the summary of pre-war relations between Russia and the Ukraine: they were generally smooth throughout the two decades after 1991, as pro-Western and pro-Russian politicians battled it out in not-extremely-dirty elections. The country was, throughout, pretty evenly divided among pro-Russian and pro-Western blocs, on a very neat and tidy east-to-west distribution mirroring the percentage of Russian speakers on each half of the Ukraine.

Widespread corruption and emigration, however, meant that the Ukraine was among the worst economic performers of all former Soviet republics, well below the growth levels reached by the likes of Belarus, Georgia and Russia itself. Well below. Not even close.

This poor economy was a major factor fueling protests openly funded by the West that led to the toppling of a democratically-elected — if utterly corrupt and inefficient — pro-Russian politician named Viktor Yanukovych, in what can only be described as a foreign-led coup against just one of many, many culprits of everything that had gone wrong in the Ukraine prior to that time.

Whatever else it was, the “Maidan Revolution” of 2014 clearly represented a rupture of the previous elite agreement to share power between pro-Westerns and pro-Russians. The Ukraine, to Russia’s dismay, rapidly turned West, pedal to the metal.

As Russian troops secured control of strategic Crimea, they refrained from openly supporting pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass until they came close to being crushed by the Ukrainian army¹. Ukrainian forces, at the time — not quite as much now — were heavily dependent on a relatively small but extremely important hard-core of openly Fascistic and Nazi military units wearing swastikas, who identified with the pro-Nazi quislings that were briefly used as useful idiots by German occupiers in 1941-44.

OK, fine, not so useful. Idiots? Yup, absolutely:

I’m eager to read in the comments from the usual suspects who will claim that Ukrainian members of far-right militias who had Nazi symbols tattooed all over their bodies…

…and take part in torch-lit processions wearing imitation Wehrmacht uniforms actually are devout Buddhists. Moving on.

The “Minsk Agreements” of 2015 froze the Donbass conflict in place. They were actually supposed to end it, but in 2022 several Western politicians — notably Angela Merkel — and the oligarch the Americans made Ukrainian president in 2015 explained that they were actually a ruse meant to gain time to train and rearm the Ukrainian army for the next conflict in which it would retake both the Donbass and Crimea, never internationally recognized as a Russian province. I won’t contradict such respected people.

By late 2021, that the agreements were a ruse and the Ukrainians were becoming more and more aggressive along the line of contact was so obvious to the Russians that Vladimir Putin came up with an ultimatum for the West, as it started moving large troops concentrations to the Ukrainian borders.

The George W. Bush administration famously had invited both the Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO in 2008, in a move seen with horror by many European allies who had heard, over and over again, Russian officials tell them that such an invitation was the “brightest of red lines” for the world’s foremost nuclear power, as a top American official put it.

There’s an advantage to having a senile dude who calls people “lying dog-faced pony soldier” as president: he may ignore bright red lines, or not even know about them. I won’t get into the Burisma-Hunter Biden swamp, a pretty straightforward bribery operation, here. Suffice to say that both NATO and the US both shrugged off Russia’s ultimatum — a series of requests that they refused to negotiate over — and Russia invaded in February 2022.

The invasion was a near-disaster for the Russians. Putin, clearly, was like most anticipating that the Ukrainian government would fold on contact, so he moved into a huge country, the size of France, with 150,000 soldiers and no real fallback plan. The US and everybody else were prepared to withdraw, but it turned out that the Ukrainian army and government had indeed been hardened by seven years of preparations, so the immediate Ukrainian counter-attack stopped the Russians on their tracks, well outside of Kiev and the country’s second-largest city, Kharkov.

Amid a wave of anti-Russian sentiment sweeping the US and the West — in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art quietly changed the name of an 1899 painting by the French Impressionist Edgar Degas from Russian Dancer to Dancer in Ukrainian Dress, the sort of step it wouldn’t take during the worst of anti-Communist McCarthyism — the first few months of the war were terrible for Russia. The US and its allies froze hundreds of billions of dollars held abroad by Russia’s Central Bank in an unprecedented and open attempt to crash Russia’s currency.

Surprised by unexpectedly strong Ukrainian resistance and broad Western support for Kiev, Russian negotiators almost immediately proposed negotiations for a peace deal. By mid-March, both sides described preliminary peace terms reached during meetings in Belarus and Istanbul, and Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said Russia would cease military operations “in a moment,” if only Ukraine would declare neutrality and also merely grant autonomy to the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.

Russian concessions were nothing short of stunning: the treaty envisioned in the communiqué would proclaim Ukraine as a permanently neutral, non-nuclear state, with its sovereignty guaranteed by various foreign powers, almost all of them American allies. Ukraine wouldn’t allow foreign troops on its soil but would reopen talks with Russia – with a 15-year deadline – over control of Crimea, which Russia had always rejected beforehand; not only that: while in 2013 Russia had balked at the Ukraine signing an association agreement with the EU, Russia now agreed to “facilitate” the Ukraine’s full accession to the bloc².

This was a Russian admission of failure, understood as such by NATO, which pushed for the Ukraine to take the offensive against what it saw as a rattled, demoralized enemy. That month, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky made a public admission about the sort of pressure he found himself under:

“There are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives.”

In April 2022, Western countries convinced the Ukrainian government to reject the deal. Zelensky accepted his fate and resumed a noisy anti-Russian rhetoric.

In the three months to July, US national security agents crowed publicly about helping the Ukrainian forces sink the Moskva warship, bragged about guiding the targeted killing of Russian generals and openly backed the ceremonial publication in the Ukraine of an enemies list of 72 foreigners — including many prominent Americans — who were labeled “information terrorists” and “war criminals.”³

In Aug. 2022, Darya Dugina – daughter of the prominent Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin – was murdered just outside of Moscow by Ukrainian agents. In September 2022, the Nord Stream pipeline was spectacularly destroyed in what was first presented first as Russian self-sabotage and later as a rogue Ukrainian operation that went unpunished by Germany, owner of a 50% interest in the expensive infrastructure.

As Western advisors, mercenaries, tanks and other weapons poured into the Ukraine, a few days after the pipeline was destroyed a British spy plane with about 30 Royal Air Force personnel on board flew along the coast of Crimea, gathering intel of the kind used to sink the Moskva and assassinate generals. A Russian fighter fired a missile that glitched and missed, removing a possible casus belli for WW3.

Red lines drawn before by NATO itself at the start of the war, to avoid a nuclear conflagration, were crossed one after the other, with American officials gloating to the New Yorker magazine that they were using with Putin the strategy used to slow-boil frogs so they don’t jump out of the pot. The Russians, meanwhile, were told in no uncertain terms not to cross any lines themselves: in September-October, the Biden administration – concerned about intelligence indicating possible plans for the use of Russian tactical nukes – threatened Russia with repercussions perhaps including all-out nuclear war and, in a move that possibly was more effective, sought to enlist China’s help to stop the Russians from using the nukes⁴.

November 2022 was the peak of Ukrainian success. Following earlier withdrawals from the Kiev area, over that month the Russian army pulled back from the western shore of the Dnieper in southern Ukraine, effectively giving up any chance at taking Odessa, and also from much of the region of Kharkov.

In hindsight, this was the war’s deciding moment. People with little knowledge of history love to make comparisons between Adolf Hitler and anyone they don’t like, like Vladimir Putin. In November 2022, Putin understood the army was overextended and battered, forced to hang on to more land than it could possibly defend, and accepted his generals’ counsel to retreat to more defensible lines and save manpower: exactly the opposite of what Hitler did a hundred times all over the Eastern and Western fronts, 100% the non-Hitler thing to do.

The reality of Russian retreat, however, sent NATO, especially traditional enemies of Russia that were occupied or absorbed by the Soviet Union, into a feeding frenzy. When the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley suggested early in November that a ceasefire with Russia could be achievable, to negotiate from a position of strength, he was immediately forced to rectify by the Biden administration.

A huge chance for peace with strength, and what amounted to at least a tactical victory by the Ukraine was lost. In DC, there was a superior imperative that was oft-repeated: Russia had to be bled white.

This was a cold-blooded calculation that, simply put, the mass killing of Russians and the crippling of their country is in the US’ benefit. It was not overconfidence that Russia could be actually defeated, even in the best case scenario. President Biden knew this; that month, reportedly told adviser Jake Sullivan that Russia’s credible nuclear threat put the US in a conundrum (as quoted by Robert Woodward):

“If we do not expel Russia completely from Ukraine, then to some extent we will allow Putin to achieve what he wants. And if we manage to kick them out, we risk nuclear war. Putin will not allow himself to be driven out of here without the use of nuclear weapons. So we're stuck. Too much success - nuclear, too little - incomprehensible long-term consequences.”

So, the bleeding went on. Thing with wars, though, is that two sides fight them. And the other side had a plan. Putin and generals hunkered down, and pushed a drive to get volunteers to bulk up their forces. In the meantime, they put their faith in the chancer Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose private mercenary army, the Wagner Group, was reinforced with convicts so it could spearhead the main Russian offensive over that winder; this ended with the costly capture of a non-descript town called Bakhmut, turned into a victory for the ages by Russian propagandists.

As Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky became the true Hitler of the war by requesting resistance at all costs and that not a single village was surrendered without a fight, the US kept up the pressure: in March 2023, Putin became the second sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court (after Serbia’s Milosevic, who died in custody in 2006, before his trial concluded), for the alleged kidnapping of Ukrainian minors.

In June 2023, just as the Ukraine launched an ill-fated summer offensive against Russian positions, Germany’s foreign affairs minister Annalena Baerbock was blunt, reflecting the EU position on the matter: "I will put Ukraine first no matter what my German voters think or how hard their life gets." All over that summer, and before, the FBI was actively cooperating with the Ukrainian intelligence agency SBU to censor people from many nationalities in Big Tech platforms including Twitter, Google and Facebook, removing comments seen as negative for the Ukrainian cause and canceling social media access for those who didn’t comply⁵.

To a large degree, national security hawks in Washington DC (and their counterparts in European and Asian client states) saw the Ukrainian War as a way to replay the Vietnam War more effectively, on the basis of a more solid, reliable client state to support (European Ukraine rather than fickle, Asian South Vietnam) and with fewer escalation concerns, given the supposedly feeble state of Russia’s military and industrial production – a stance that was only reinforced by Russia’s poor military performance during the first year of the war.

A lack of concern about escalation with a nuclear-armed state, in particular, stood in contrast with the careful approach to escalation displayed by the Johnson and Nixon administrations in Vietnam. The Russian frog was supposed not to notice the increase in escalation temperature, so more and more previously stated Russian red lines were crossed, regarding the provision of air defense systems, long-distance missiles, targeting support, combat airplanes, etc.

This approach essentially absorbed the lessons provided by revisionist, neocon-inspired Vietnam War books of the Bush administration era, like Mark Moyar’s 2008 “Triumph Forsaken.” In the last sentence of that particular book, Moyar summarized what he saw as the fundamental American mistake: "The war in Vietnam... was not to be a foolish war fought under wise constraints, but a wise war fought under foolish constraints."

US war planners also relied on the experience gained during the 1990s Yugoslavian wars, to some extent a small-scale preview of the one in Ukraine. There, Croatia took advantage of the military fervor of far-right nostalgics of the Ustachi period, and many would openly refer to Serbs as subhuman beings to be exterminated for the sake of mankind, much like Russians were openly derided in the West as Orcs after 2022. A similar plan was in play for Azov-style Ukrainian nazis: let them get themselves killed for the wider good, and later forced into swallowing everything that membership of the Western bloc entails, from LGBQT parades to remembrances of the Holocaust their grandpas were so enthusiastic about.

Thus, it was Azov and the multiple units it spawned, many led or trained by Azov veterans, that was front and center during the Ukrainian summer offensive of 2023. By this time, however, the neo-Nazis who had saved the day for the Ukrainian state in the Donbass in 2015 were a tiny minority within a large Ukrainian army filled with NATO-trained conscripts that may have outnumbered Russian troops on the Ukraine by two to one.

The Russian generals knew this. They also, it turned out, knew American history better than the Americans, and replayed the Battle of Gettysburg for their benefit.

There’s a reason why the Battle of Gettysburg, which eventually decided the American Civil War, was fought in the summer of 1863 outside a hamlet a whopping 75 miles north of the White House. Robert E. Lee, the Confederate commander, knew he was running out of time to beat its superior rival, and so he gambled on taking the Gettysburg heights, knowing full well that Lincoln wouldn’t allow the main confederate force sit astride the roads leading to three of the North’s main cities, Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore.

Lee’s plan was daring (he was operating hundreds of miles away from his supply bases), beautiful and simple: he would fortify the heights and wait for the Federals to assault them, so he would nullify their numerical superiority. And they would attack, they had to because Lincoln wouldn’t have it otherwise.

In 1863, Lee’s troops arrived in Gettysburg one or two days late and found the heights defended by the Federals, which explains the ferocity of Lee’s attacks against them. He understood that pushing those defenders out was the only way to save his campaign and his war. He failed.

One hundred and sixty years later, the Russians did a Gettysburg on the Ukrainians. They knew the enemy had been given endless supplies of money and material and had to attack. The Ukrainians simply had to. So the Russians built up their fortifications and waited. As a matter of fact, there were several Gettysburgs that they Russians kept, and a few that they lost; perhaps the most symbolic was Robotyne, a village north of the Sea of Azov that was taken by the Ukrainians at a huge cost in men and armor.

The Ukrainian offensive, in the end, was so meaningless that Russia actually experienced a small coup while it was still ongoing — led by Prigozhin and his Wagner Group — and yet a few days of chaos within the Russian lines had no effect whatever on the war.

By September 2023, the Ukrainian offensive had failed miserably and Prigozhin was dead (killed). A month later, the Biden administration became distracted by a Hamas terror campaign against Israel in Oct. 2023, and the subsequent crisis triggered by an Israeli response that caused the destruction of much of Gaza, as well military tension and strikes and counter-strikes in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the Red Sea.

The Ukrainian War started to disappear from the headlines from that point. It had always been a conflict dominated by defensive technology, and thus a war of attrition and small, gradual gains, but the pace became glacial as the Russians slowly accumulated more and more troops, and the Ukrainians started to see mounting losses and declining recruitment rates.

This loss of attention — similar to that seen with the Spanish Civil War over the last year of operations there — is a great shame, because it hid from the general public the last great Russian defensive triumph of the war, the so-called Krynky Campaign: in this operation nine-month operation, precisely from Oct. 2023, the Ukrainian army, spurred by British advisers, tried to conduct a Normandy-style crossing of the Dnieper River just east of the city of Kherson, seeking to open another front all the way to Crimea, with — again — absolutely disastrous consequences.

Kit Klarenberg has written extensively about the Krynky debacle here. I’ll just add how ironic it is that it was British advisors who talked the Ukrainians into crashing headfirst, over and over, against entrenched Russian infantry with artillery superiority.

The greatest British military commander of all-time, Arthur Wellesley — Duke of Wellington — made his career in the Spanish Peninsular War of 1808-1814 precisely by relying on superior artillery that offset his smaller numbers. He combined this with his preferred tactic of advancing into enemy lines and then retreating to a better, preferably uphill position to meet the unavoidable French counterattack, a bit like Lee liked it; those who know about the decisive Waterloo Campaign of 1815 will immediately understand that this, precisely, is the trick Wellington played on Napoleon in the French Emperor’s final battle.

Particularly after the Krynky Campaign was shelved in June, the year 2024 was dominated by slow Russian gains in the central Donbass (hugely fortified Ukrainian strongholds Avdiivka, Vuhledar, Kurakhove and Toretsk fell one after another) and ever more desperate Ukrainian ploys to again international attention and support for their war: more assassinations and sabotages, wonder weapons run and controlled by NATO targeting objectives within Russia and the ultimately harebrained British idea of occupying a chunk of Russian territory, near the historical WW2 battlefield of Kursk, mostly to make a propagandistic point.

By the time Donald Trump won the US presidential election in November, few dared to proclaim rosy futures for the Ukrainian war effort. Only the most enthusiastic Western friends of the Ukraine kept displaying blue and yellow flags:

The writing may have been on the all, and yet it’s striking just how hard and how well the Ukrainians fought.

A final note: it’s impossible to say much about the casualties on either side. As it’s common in wars, both sides have made outlandish claims about the other side’s disastrous losses and soldier-wasting tactics constantly. Russian propaganda is not very valuable and Western propaganda has been atrocious throughout.

If I had to speculate, I’d say the Ukrainians probably lost more men, because most war casualties were the result of shelling and the Russians have had a significant edge there for the whole war, but I just don’t have enough information to state that with any confidence. We may never know for sure.

As a former employee of two of the West’s main media outlets, I’m extremely disappointed in my former colleagues when it comes to the coverage of this war. When I became a journalist I didn’t sign up to spread NATO (or anybody else’s) propaganda, but apparently many of them did. And I know the pay is not even that great.

In 2022, when it invaded the Ukraine, Russia had two fundamental missions it publicly stated: to ensure that the Ukraine would not join NATO and to “denazify” that country, meaning to curtail the influence of Azov types and their hysterical anti-Russian agitation.

The new US president, Donald Trump, yesterday said that he will start direct peace negotiations with Russia that will almost certainly leave the country out of NATO. Will this lead to Ukrainian “denazification”? I have no idea, so it’s possible that Russia, after three years of war, ends up achieving only 50% of its initial objectives.

What is clear is that Russia has now annexed five Ukrainian provinces (including Crimea) and that in the final settlement it will keep all or most of them. The Ukraine has also lost 20%-30% of its population as refugees or fresh new Russian citizens, unlikely to return. The country is completely wrecked, filled with tombstones and mutilated war veterans, as well as bankrupted for the ages. So, good work, Bidens, Zelensky and everybody else. Good work.

1. This was not because of Putin’s tender feelings towards the Ukraine. As several commentators noted at the time, the Russian takeover of the Crimea, an overwhelmingly Russian-speaking region that was the main bank for pro-Russian votes in the Ukraine, effectively meant that Russia gave up on any chance at a future victory of pro-Russian parties in Ukrainian elections. By keeping the Donbass regions within the Ukraine, as Manchurian Candidates, Russia at least guaranteed that the pro-Russian parties would survive as meaningful, influential counterparts to the rabid nationalists of Western Ukraine.

2. See “The Talks That Could Have Ended the War in Ukraine: A Hidden History of Diplomacy That Came Up Short—but Holds Lessons for Future Negotiations,” by Samuel Charap & Sergey Radchenko, 16.4.2024. That this text, whose authors saw the draft peace agreement, was published by Foreign Policy, the magazine owned by the quasi-government DC think-tank Council on Foreign Relations, indicates that these details were verified by the US State Department. Also see “Ukraine-Russia Peace Is as Elusive as Ever. But in 2022 They Were Talking,” (NYT, 15.6.2024). As the NYT reported, “an examination of the documents shows that the two sides clashed over issues including weapons levels, the terms of Ukraine’s potential membership in the European Union, and specific Ukrainian laws on language and culture that Russia wanted repealed. Ukraine’s negotiators offered to forgo NATO membership, and to accept Russian occupation of parts of their territory. But they refused to recognize Russian sovereignty over them.” On April 15, 2022, the report added, Russia agreed to leave the issue of Crimea in limbo; as the NYT reports, the Russians were desperate to stop the fighting, not necessarily because they were losing since, in their view, they weren’t: “Some of the Ukrainian negotiators who spoke to The Times thought that Mr. Putin had come to the table so quickly because he never expected his army to stumble so spectacularly. But as far as they could tell, the Russians sitting across from them had little sense of how badly their troops were doing.” The NYT did identify what it called a “deal-breaker” for the talks: Russia inserted a clause saying that all states guaranteeing Ukraine’s independence, including Russia (also US, UK, France and China), had to approve the response if Ukraine were attacked: “In effect, Moscow could invade Ukraine again and then veto any military intervention on Ukraine’s behalf — a seemingly absurd condition.” However, the talks in fact continued beyond April 15^th – when the insertion was made – into the following month. The poison-pill explanation also apperas suspect because, over the previous two years, Ukrainian officials claimed that they abandoned the talks over concerns that Moscow could not be trusted, particularly in light of the alleged Russian atrocities that surfaced in Bucha just as the Istanbul talks progressed. That is, of course, absurd, as the Foreign Policy report concedes: the alleged massacre at Bucha was public much earlier and, during an April 4^th visit to Bucha, when asked if the peace talks would continue, the Ukrainian leader replied: “Yes, because Ukraine must have peace.” Zelensky reiterated that message the following day: “Every tragedy like this, every Bucha will affect negotiations. But we need to find opportunities for these steps.” The main factor in Ukraine’s decision-making, therefore, was almost certainty the message that Zelensky’s camp revealed in May 2022: the previous month, just as the Istanbul talks were advancing, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson paid a visit to inform Zelensky that the West did not support a peace deal with Russia, and that the Ukrainians should “keep fighting” instead.

3. The list included Senator Rand Paul, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and university professors John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs.

4. This was reported by Bob Woodward in his book “War” (2024). The book is largely a hagiographic piece about Biden – then rapidly falling into senility – that concludes with the assertion that “President Biden and his team will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership.”

5. See “The FBI’s collaboration with a compromised Ukrainian intelligence agency to censor American speech,” an “Interim Staff Report of the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” 10.7.2023.