Since the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Russo-Ukrainian War has consumed both countries and involved many more. Hundreds of thousands have been killed, whether by bullets on the battlefield or bombs in their homes, and millions more have fled the region to protect themselves or their family. Although ceasefires have recently made headlines, the seemingly intractable war continues to upend lives.
Conflict in Ukraine has been ongoing since Russia’s invasion and annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and its support of the pro-Russian proxy paramilitaries in Donbas. It enveloped Ukraine from the north, east, and south, near the border with Russia and Belarus in 2022, when Russia invaded the Donbas region of eastern and southern Ukraine and attempted approaching the capital city of Kyiv, supporting pro-Russia groups with ground forces and aerial attacks. According to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), they have taken control of several regions adjacent to Crimea and the Russian border. Because of their proximity to Russia, many of these areas include local rebel groups that support unification with Russia. Cristian Vlas, the Assistant Research Manager at ACLED’s Eastern Europe desk, explained one reason the war has not reached an end: Ukraine has persistently pushed back on all of Russia’s advances and requests, amounting to a situation of capitulation.
“Russia and its misinformed intelligence services thought that Ukraine would turn against its own government, seeing how Zelenskyy’s government was unpopular before and during the pandemic, disappointing with its economic and anti-corruption reforms,” Vlas said. “This banking was wrong. We actually saw a different kind of response from the Ukrainian army, from civil society, from civilians.”
Devastating attacks on both sides have taken thousands of soldier and civilian lives. The death toll is currently at around 14,500 people and is still growing. Co-founder of the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation, Robert McConnell, described how the memory of the Soviet Union, under which they lived from 1922 to 1991, pushed Ukrainians to resist Russia in this way.
“The people of Ukraine either lived under the Soviet suppression, or are the children of those who did, meaning they remember having to whisper at the dinner table because they didn’t know who was spying on them,” McConnell said. “They remember the food shortages, they remember people vanishing and ending up in the Gulag, they remember what it was like not to be free. They know what they are fighting for, and they know there would be no freedom under Putin.”
McConnell stated the conflict has been inevitable since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The conflict has been brewing ever since the collapse, and tensions seemed to only be getting higher. Ukraine’s 2013 refusal to join the Eurasian Economic Union signaled that the nations were moving apart, leading Russia to react.
“In August 1991, the Ukrainian parliament passed a Declaration of Independence that conditioned actual independence on a referendum set for December 1, 1991,” McConnell said. “The referendum passed with a 93 percent approval and Ukraine became independent peacefully. That did not sit well with Putin, who has said over and over that the greatest tragedy of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union. So, in 2014, Putin and the Russian Federation started a war, forcing Ukraine to fight its war of independence.”
Ashley Moran is a lecturer and research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in Eastern European conflicts. She explained how the last decade of strife has worsened a feeling of fear.
“The war in Ukraine has had devastating humanitarian impacts on the Ukrainian population, with over 10 million people displaced, some one million forcibly relocated from Ukraine to Russia, including thousands of children, and an estimated 42,000 civilians wounded or killed,” Moran said. “This spring, the World Bank estimated that Ukraine will need $524 billion in recovery costs to rebuild its infrastructure and economy. These impacts only continue to rise as the war continues.”
Although both countries have floated the possibility of peace talks between leaders, Zelenskyy and Putin have not met since 2019. In August, American President Donald Trump stepped in to attempt a peace deal, but it quickly fell through.
“There will not be a negotiated peace between Ukraine and Russia any time soon, as Russia is demanding concessions that Ukraine has long rejected,” Moran said. “Russia has illegally annexed or occupied large swaths of Ukrainian land, Crimea in 2014, and Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia in 2022. It now demands Ukraine’s withdrawal from these territories as part of any peace deal. Ukraine is fighting to retain these territories and to protect its citizens still living in these territories, and has thus forcefully rejected the concession of land to Russia. These are fundamentally incompatible positions that make a peace deal improbable for now.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested that Ukrainian identity is not separate from Russia, and publicly claimed that Russian speakers living in eastern Ukraine were being unjustly oppressed as justification for their invasion. The lack of progress towards peace is often attributed to Putin, who has turned down non-violent resolutions with Ukraine.
“I could list a number of meetings billed as efforts to reach some type of agreement, but that would play into the hands of those who, for their own reasons, want to think there is a chance of a peaceful agreement,” McConnell said. “This would be a denial of the fundamental reality that Putin has any interest in peace. He has made it clear since at least 2008 that his intention and goal is the elimination of an independent Ukraine and the eradication of any idea that there is/was a Ukraine and a Ukrainian people. All the so-called peace meetings are, from the Russian perspective, delaying tactics allowing the United States and the West to think something is possible.”
The conflict has only escalated after three years since the invasion of Donbas, and the toll it has taken on both sides is still growing. Unless peace can be reached between the countries, fighting between the countries will continue until one backs down.
“Back at the time the Soviet Union was coming apart, what would happen in Ukraine was a major western concern,” McConnell said. “Washington, our government, worried, and the media like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, all wrote that if Ukraine tries for independence, there will be bloodshed and nuclear chaos.”