The Russian-Ukrainian war broke out on February 24, 2022, following a massive Russian military build-up in northern, eastern, and southern Ukraine, after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the launch of what he called a "special military operation in Ukraine."
This war caused global economic and political crises, and human losses amounted to 240,000 civilians and military personnel on both sides, in addition to material losses amounting to 70% of Russia’s stock of missiles suitable for land targets, 60% of its combat tanks, and 20% of its artillery.
On the other hand, Ukraine lost more than 400 tanks and more than 1,500 combat vehicles, according to a report published in early 2023 by the Oryx website, which specializes in defense affairs.
Reasons and historical roots
The roots of the Russian-Ukrainian crisis go back to the period that followed the fall of the Soviet Union and Kiev's attempt to gain independence from Moscow led by the leader of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Leonid Kravchuk, who was elected president of the country following presidential elections in which Ukrainians voted to approve independence on August 24, 1991.
However, Kravchuk lost the presidential elections after 3 years to former communist leader Leonid Kuchma, who ruled the country until the end of 2004.
The presidential elections took place again in November 2004, and it was announced that the pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych had won the presidency of Ukraine, but allegations of vote rigging sparked protests known as the "Orange Revolution", so the vote was repeated, and a run-off was held in February 2005, and the victory was announced The candidate close to the West, Viktor Yushchenko, promised to remove Kiev from the Kremlin's orbit towards NATO and the European Union.
On June 16, 2008 NATO Heads of State and Government welcomed Ukraine's Euro-Atlantic aspirations to join NATO, and agreed that Ukraine would become a member of the alliance.
In December 2008, the Ukrainian authorities conducted an opinion poll in which 44.7% of the Ukrainian population voted in favor of joining the European Union, while 35.2% of those surveyed opposed it.
The results of the poll remained on the shelves after the presidential elections that took place on February 25, 2010, and were won by Viktor Yanukovych, who is close to Russia. During his reign, Russia and Ukraine concluded a gas pricing deal in return for extending the Russian navy’s lease in a Ukrainian port on the Black Sea.
On November 13 of the same year, Yanukovych announced the cessation of trade and cooperation talks with the European Union, and chose to revive economic relations with Moscow, which led to the outbreak of protests by the "Euromaiden" movement rejecting this decision, which was sparked in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.
Protests continued across Ukraine, and in parallel, the Ukrainian parliament voted to impeach President Yanukovych, at a time when the interim government issued an arrest warrant for the ousted president, but Yanukovych fled to Russia in February 2014, describing his dismissal as a "coup."
The Russian response came by seizing the Ukrainian Crimea peninsula in March 2014, as well as controlling government buildings and the regional parliament, which held a referendum on the status of Crimea just two weeks after the start of the Russian military occupation, in which more than 95% voted in favor of joining the union. Then Moscow signed a treaty with the Crimean leaders to formally annex the peninsula.
In April 2014, pro-Russian separatists took control of the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine.
In the midst of this tense atmosphere between the two countries, presidential elections were held in May 2014, in which the Ukrainian businessman Petro Poroshenko, who is close to the West, won. He said he would seek closer relations with the European Union and restore peace in the troubled eastern regions of Ukraine.
On July 17, 2014, a passenger plane on Flight MH17 was shot down on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all 298 passengers.
The investigators said that the weapon used to shoot it down was a Russian weapon, which Moscow denied and said it had nothing to do with the accident, despite the consensus of the investigators that the missile was fired from an area controlled by the pro-Moscow rebels in eastern Ukraine.
With the escalation of tensions between the two neighbors, the West began to move to support Ukraine. In October 2014, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced sanctions against Russian and Ukrainian companies and individuals involved in the annexation of Crimea and the armed separatist movement in Donbass, and then the Free Trade Agreement was signed between Canada and Ukraine in July 2016 and entered into force in August 2017.
An association agreement was signed between Ukraine and the European Union in September 2017, opening markets for free trade, exchange of goods and services, and travel, while exempting Ukrainians from entry visas to EU countries.
The Ukrainian-Russian divergence affected the religious issue as well. In January 2019, the new Ukrainian church, independent of Russian religious tutelage, whose establishment was officially recognized, held its first religious ceremony in Kiev in the presence of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, which angered Moscow.
In July 2019, Ukrainian actor Volodymyr Zelensky won the country's presidency with an overwhelming vote in his favor, and after 6 months of taking office, US President Joe Biden appealed for support for Kiev's accession to NATO.
Zelensky's appeal was followed by moves against the Russian-backed opposition in February 2021, when his government imposed sanctions on Viktor Medvedchuk, the opposition leader and Kremlin's most prominent ally in Ukraine.
So Moscow moved on the ground in March 2021, mobilized near the borders of Ukraine, then withdrew its mobilization and said that what it had done was just training.
In October 2021, Kiev used a Turkish "Bayraktar B2" drone for the first time in eastern Ukraine, which angered Russia.
In November 2021, satellite images showed a build-up of Russian forces on the border with Ukraine, which raised fears of a possible invasion, and Zelensky announced that Russia had mobilized 100,000 soldiers in the border area with his country and moved significant numbers of tanks and heavy equipment.
These serious moves from the Russian side on the Ukrainian border precipitated the meeting of US President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin via a video call that brought them together in December 2021, during which Putin called on NATO to end expansion to the east, while Biden threatened to impose harsh economic sanctions. If Russia invaded Ukraine.
In a call with Zelensky in January 2022, Biden promised that the United States and its allies would act decisively if Russia ventured into Ukraine.
On the other hand, on January 17, 2022, Moscow moved its forces towards northern Ukraine under the pretext of carrying out joint maneuvers with Belarus.
hot feb
In February 2022, the United States announced the deployment of two thousand soldiers in Poland and Germany, and an additional thousand soldiers in Romania, and NATO put its forces on alert, and strengthened its military presence in Eastern Europe by paying more ships and combat aircraft, at a time when it called for several States of its citizens to leave the Ukrainian territory, and a number of these countries withdrew their diplomatic teams from Kiev after reports of the approaching Russian invasion.
On the tenth of February 2022, Moscow rejected the American statements talking about a Russian invasion of Ukraine, accusing the West of misleading, but the United States of America decided the next day to send 3,000 additional soldiers to Poland to join the 1,700 soldiers there, while the Kiev Municipal Council approved the plan. To evacuate the population in the event of an attack.
Biden continued his warnings to Putin of the heavy and immediate losses that Russia would incur if it invaded Ukraine.
But Putin made his escalating decision regarding the American and Western moves and statements on February 21, 2022 by recognizing the "republic" of Donetsk and Lugansk, which prompted Biden and some Western countries to impose a number of sanctions on Russia.
Russian war on Ukraine
On February 24, 2022, Putin gave the signal to start a military operation in Ukraine, calling on Ukrainian soldiers to immediately lay down their arms and go home.
Since the beginning of the invasion, Russian forces have taken control of vast areas of the southern province of Kherson, and then began on February 26, 2022, to expand the scope of their attacks to include all regions.
At the beginning of March 2022, despite US-Western pressure, Moscow continued its incursion into Ukrainian territory, as it came close to controlling Kharkiv, one of the largest cities in northeastern Ukraine.
April 2022 also witnessed an escalation in military confrontations between the Russians and the Ukrainians, who announced the restoration of their control over the city of Kiev after the Russian forces withdrew from it in late March 2022.
Then the Ukrainian leadership announced the sinking of the Russian warship "Moscova" after it launched a missile strike while it was stationed in the Black Sea on April 8, 2022, after that Putin announced relative control over the city of Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine on the 21st of the same month.
Then, field developments accelerated, which made Kiev recognize the advance of Russian forces east and their control of many cities in the Donbass region on April 27, 2022.
In May 2022, Moscow announced its complete control of the city of Mariupol, which has economic and military importance, and in the same month, pro-Moscow forces managed to take control of the city of Liman, which is a center of railway activity in the Donetsk region.
In early June 2022, Ukrainian President Zelensky announced that Russian forces had taken control of 20% of Ukrainian territory.
Russian forces intensified artillery shelling on the Donbass region and then on the strategic Severodonetsk, which fell into the hands of the Russians on June 21, 2022, followed by tightening their grip on the Lugansk region the following month.
In front of this accelerated Russian progress, the Ukrainian Minister of Defense announced on July 11, 2022 that his country was seeking to form a two million army to recover the south of the country from the Russian forces, and on the 24th of the same month, Zelensky announced that his forces would head towards Kherson, which is under Russian control.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued one of his most famous warnings of the year, when he said that "the world is one uncalculated step away from nuclear annihilation," as battles raged in Ukraine.
This came at a time when Moscow and Kiev exchanged accusations regarding the bombing of the Zaporizhia nuclear plant in southern Ukraine on August 5, 2022, amid warnings of a "potential nuclear catastrophe."
A series of explosions rocked the Saki base, located in western Crimea, on August 11, 2022, followed by a drone attack targeting the Russian Black Sea Fleet on the peninsula on August 20, 2022. After that, Ukraine was able to make progress in some areas it controls. Russia, which prompted Moscow to strengthen its position on the ground through orders issued by the Russian President to increase the number of Russian forces by 10%.
The most prominent developments in the field events took place in September 2022, as the Ukrainian forces managed to achieve progress on more than one front. On September 11, 2022, Kiev announced major military gains after a rapid attack on Russian forces in the east of the country, which led to a Russian withdrawal from the towns key.
The Ukrainian army also announced that it had discovered "hundreds of corpses in a mass grave" in the city of Izyum, which was controlled by Russian forces.
With the Ukrainian advance, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced, on September 21, 2022, the partial military mobilization, amid Western condemnation of the decision.
Ukrainian forces advanced south in October 2022, following the withdrawal of Russian forces from the city of Liman. On October 13, 2022, Moscow began evacuating civilians from Kherson, a process that Russia completed on October 28, 2022, in preparation for the Battle of Kherson.
Then, on November 5, 2022, Russia announced the recall of reservists and those convicted of serious crimes who had left prisons, with the aim of mobilizing and increasing military capabilities.
On December 7, 2022, Putin said that the danger of nuclear war was escalating, but indicated that his country would not take the initiative to use its nuclear weapons.
At the beginning of the same month, the Ukrainian army accused Russia of using nuclear-capable missiles with non-explosive warheads in order to deplete the capabilities of Ukrainian air defenses.
Despite the optimism among the Ukrainian forces, the government in Kiev warned on December 16, 2022 of a possible large-scale ground attack by Russian forces in early 2023.
With the advent of the year 2023, the Ukrainian president promised his people to achieve victory, at a time when the Kremlin was talking about “war” instead of a “special military operation” in Ukraine, as it continued to rotate amid an intensification of Russian attacks, while the Ukrainian General Staff announced that it had confronted dozens of drones launched by it. the Russian army.
After about 11 months of battles between Russia and Ukraine, the number of tanks used by the Ukrainian army in its battles decreased due to the loss of a number of them, and some of them went out of service due to the lack of necessary spare parts, because all Ukraine’s weapons are remnants of the Soviet stage, and Russia is the only source of spare parts. spare.
In February 2023 Russia, according to NATO, began its major offensive.
Russia's private Wagner Group has captured the outskirts of Bakhmut, and NATO is also coming under increasing pressure as arms deliveries to Ukraine, whose ammunition stocks are running low, have slowed.
Decision battle
The Russian-Ukrainian war coincided with a series of decisions on the political level:
On February 26, 2022, the European Union announced the imposition of an escalating package of sanctions against Moscow, in addition to financing the purchase of weapons for the Ukrainian army.
On February 28, 2022, the first round of Russian-Ukrainian negotiations was announced, but it did not produce facts that would be translated into the battlefield due to the fundamental differences in the conditions and priorities of the two parties.
On March 8, 2022, the US implementation of the sanctions schedule against Moscow began, and it announced an embargo on Russian gas and oil.
On March 10, 2022, member states rejected Ukraine's request to join the European Union, but agreed to continue providing support to Kiev, and NATO also approved, on the 24th of the same month, to arm Ukrainian forces to develop their capabilities to counter chemical and nuclear attacks.
May 2022 witnessed a continuation of Western support efforts for Ukraine, as the Group of Seven pledged $19.8 billion.
On May 19, 2022, the US Congress approved $40 billion to support the war effort in Ukraine.
On May 30, 2022, the European Union announced that it would cut its imports of Russian oil by 90% by the end of the year.
In August 2022, the United States approved a new $775 million aid package for Kiev, and Biden pledged about $3 billion in military aid to Kiev.
At the end of August 2022, Putin announced the cessation of gas supplies to Europe through the "Gazprom 1" pipeline, due to maintenance, which led to a record rise in gas prices in Europe.
On September 29, 2022, Russia succeeded in a popular referendum to annex 4 Ukrainian regions to it.
In late January 2023, the war entered a new turn when Western countries announced that they would send tanks to Ukraine, led by the United States, which announced its intention to send dozens of the famous "Abrams" tanks, in addition to Germany's agreement to send "Leopard" tanks, all the way to Britain, which was The first in announcing the dispatch of its modern "Challenger" tanks.
The Russian Foreign Ministry condemned the decision of Berlin and the United States to deliver tanks to Kiev, saying, "It is a very dangerous decision that would raise the conflict to a new level of confrontation," accusing the West of following the logic of "permanent escalation."
After the West decided to provide Ukraine with heavy combat tanks, Kiev began to demand offensive weapons such as combat aircraft and submarines.
losses
Russia entered the war with about 3 thousand modern tanks, and lost hundreds of them at the beginning of the war thanks to the anti-tank weapons provided by Western countries to Ukraine, so the Russian forces incurred heavy material losses amounting to 70% of its stock of missiles suitable for land targets, 60% of its combat tanks, and 20 % of its artillery.
On the other hand, Ukraine lost more than 400 tanks and more than 1,500 combat vehicles, according to a report published in early 2023 by the Oryx website, which specializes in defense affairs.
As for human losses, the latest outcome of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff revealed that the number of victims of the Russia and Ukraine war since the outbreak of the war in February 2022 and until December 2022 exceeded 240,000, distributed as follows:
100 thousand Russian soldiers dead and wounded.
100 thousand dead Ukrainian military forces.
40 thousand dead among Ukrainian civilians.
In addition to the displacement of between 15 million and 30 million Ukrainians to neighboring countries.
The official Russian and Ukrainian figures differ from what was announced by the US military, as the Russian forces announced the killing of 5,937 of its soldiers since the start of its war on Ukraine, while the Ukrainians said that their losses amounted to 9 thousand soldiers who were killed in the war, and the number of injured was not disclosed. .