Mykhaylo’s Diary

The war in Ukraine, which has now run through the country for more than a decade, did not begin on February 24, 2022, although that morning fundamentally changed its scale and the way the world perceived it. To understand what has happened, it is necessary to go back eight years, to 2014, when Russia occupied Crimea and began its intervention in the Donbas. What for a long time was viewed from outside as a regional crisis, a territorial dispute or a war entrenched on the eastern margins of Europe was, in reality, the beginning of something far deeper. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine ordered by Vladimir Putin in February 2022 would demonstrate that Crimea had not been the end of a territorial claim, but the first chapter of a project intended to restore Russian political control over Ukraine and to limit, if not ultimately deny, its ability to exist as a fully sovereign and independent state.

The immediate origins of that first invasion lie in the turbulent months Ukraine experienced between late 2013 and early 2014. President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to abandon the signing of an association agreement with the European Union triggered the Maidan protests, a movement that grew throughout the winter and eventually led to the collapse of his government in February 2014. For the Kremlin, this represented far more than a political change in a neighbouring country. Russia had spent years attempting to keep Ukraine within its sphere of influence and had gradually discovered that the economic and political instruments it used to condition Kyiv’s decisions were proving insufficient. The possibility that Ukraine might independently choose to move politically and economically closer to Europe represented, for Putin, the loss of a country he regarded as essential to Russia’s historical and strategic space.

The response was immediate. At the end of February 2014, Russian forces began occupying strategic sites and installations across Crimea. Armed men without insignia seized government buildings and, under military control, the authorities installed on the peninsula organised a referendum that Russia subsequently used to justify its annexation. By March, Crimea had been incorporated de facto into the Russian Federation. The operation had changed Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders by force and had done so with a speed that severely limited the ability of both the Ukrainian government and its Western allies to respond.

Crimea, however, was not an isolated event. During the spring of 2014, Russia also began intervening in eastern Ukraine, providing political, material and military support to separatist movements in Donetsk and Luhansk. The war in the Donbas created a frontline that would remain active for the following eight years. The Minsk agreements succeeded at times in reducing the intensity of the fighting, but they never resolved the conflict. Russia retained Crimea, maintained decisive influence over the separatist-held territories and used the Donbas as a permanent instrument of pressure on Ukrainian politics.

For much of Europe, this eventually became an uncomfortable form of normality. The war was still there, but it had ceased to occupy the centre of international attention. Ukrainian soldiers continued to die, occupied territories remained under Russian control and the line of contact continued to divide communities, families and cities, yet the possibility that the conflict could develop into an invasion of the entire country seemed remote. For years, Europe learned to live with the idea that the annexation of Crimea was a fait accompli and that the Donbas could remain indefinitely within a kind of frozen war.

Yet during those same years, something far more important was taking place. Ukraine reorganised armed forces that had shown serious deficiencies in 2014, accumulated combat experience and progressively strengthened its defensive capabilities. At the same time, Russian pressure itself contributed to consolidating a Ukrainian political identity that Moscow seemed unable to understand. Putin continued to interpret Ukraine’s desire to distance itself from Russia as the result of Western manipulation rather than as the decision of a growing part of Ukrainian society itself. In doing so, the Kremlin consistently underestimated both Ukrainian independence and the willingness of Ukrainians to defend it.

That misunderstanding lay at the heart of the vision the Russian president developed publicly in the years preceding the invasion. In July 2021, Putin published a lengthy essay on the supposed historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians in which he explicitly questioned the political separation of the two peoples. The importance of that text lay less in its interpretation of the past than in the political consequences that could be drawn from it. If Russians and Ukrainians were essentially one people, if Ukraine was the artificial result of historical mistakes and if its orientation towards Europe was the consequence of foreign interference, then Ukrainian sovereignty ceased, within that logic, to be an unquestionable right.

The conflict therefore assumed a dimension far greater than a dispute over Crimea or certain areas of the Donbas. The fundamental question became who had the right to determine Ukraine’s future. Moscow increasingly constructed an interpretation in which Russia possessed historical and strategic rights over its neighbour; Kyiv asserted precisely the opposite: that an independent nation, sovereign since 1991, had the right to choose its own alliances, its political system and its relationship with Europe.

Throughout 2021, Russia began massing forces around Ukraine. Troops, armour, artillery and logistical systems were deployed along different sections of the border, in Crimea and later in Belarus. Their geographical disposition made it possible to attack simultaneously from the north, east and south. For months, there was debate over whether the deployment represented an extreme form of diplomatic pressure or genuine preparation for an invasion. To many, the latter still seemed too irrational. Attacking Ukraine meant beginning a war against a country of tens of millions of people, potentially occupying major cities and accepting enormous economic and military consequences. The magnitude of the decision meant that even when the evidence had become increasingly difficult to ignore, part of the world continued to believe that an invasion would not happen.

On February 21, 2022, Putin formally recognised the self-proclaimed separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Three days later, in the early hours of February 24, he announced the beginning of a military operation that he described as necessary to “demilitarise” and “denazify” Ukraine. Missile strikes against military installations and targets across the country began almost immediately, while Russian troops crossed Ukraine’s borders from several directions.

The scale of the operation removed any doubt about its objectives. Russia was not conducting a limited intervention to consolidate its position in the Donbas. From Belarus, Russian columns moved south towards Kyiv; from the northeast they advanced towards Chernihiv, Sumy and Kharkiv; from Crimea they drove rapidly towards Kherson and the southern coastline; and in the east they attempted to break through Ukrainian defensive positions that had been developed along the Donbas front over the previous eight years. Kyiv was one of the principal objectives because taking the capital offered something far more important than a military victory: the possibility of decapitating the state, replacing its government and creating the conditions to impose a new political reality on Ukraine.

The plan depended upon speed and upon an assumption that would prove profoundly mistaken. Moscow appeared convinced that the Ukrainian state would collapse quickly, that resistance from the Armed Forces of Ukraine would be limited and that a significant part of the population would receive Russian soldiers with indifference or even as liberators. The airborne operation against Hostomel Airport, on the outskirts of Kyiv, followed that logic: establish a bridgehead quickly enough to introduce forces close to the capital before Ukraine could organise an effective defence.

Nothing happened as planned. The government remained in Kyiv, the Armed Forces retained command and control, and Ukrainian resistance was far stronger than Russia had anticipated. Units advancing towards the capital began to encounter logistical problems, poor coordination, ambushes and increasing difficulty keeping supply lines open. Russia also failed to eliminate Ukrainian aircraft and air defences during the opening hours of the invasion. The enormous convoy stalled north of Kyiv became the image of an army that had designed a rapid operation and instead found itself trapped in a war for which it appeared inadequately prepared.

The initial failure also had a political dimension. An invasion intended in part to demonstrate that Ukraine was an artificial and fragile state produced precisely the opposite effect. A diverse society, marked by internal differences and a complex history, found itself facing a threat that left little room for ambiguity: a foreign army was advancing on its capital. Ukrainian resistance consequently came to mean far more than the defence of a particular government or a debate over international alliances. The question had become the survival of an independent Ukrainian state.

By the end of March, Russia understood that it could not capture Kyiv with the forces it had deployed. Units that had attempted to surround the capital began withdrawing from northern Ukraine and were subsequently reorganised for fighting in the east. The first major phase of the invasion had ended in a Russian strategic failure. The Ukrainian government remained in the capital, the state continued to function and Moscow had failed to impose the rapid capitulation it appeared to have expected.

The Russian withdrawal also revealed what had happened during the weeks of occupation. Bucha became a symbol of executions and abuses against civilians, but what emerged there belonged to a broader reality that would become visible in other liberated territories. The war in Ukraine could no longer be understood solely as a confrontation between two armies. Wherever Russia established an occupation, another dimension of the conflict emerged: what happened to the civilian population left under Russian control and what it actually meant to absorb a Ukrainian town or city into Russian political space.

While Russia was withdrawing from Kyiv, Mariupol was experiencing an entirely different reality. Situated on the Sea of Azov, the city had immense strategic importance because its capture would allow Russia to connect the occupied territories of the Donbas with Crimea by land. From the first weeks of the invasion it was progressively encircled and subjected to overwhelming military pressure. Artillery and air strikes destroyed neighbourhoods, infrastructure and defensive positions while tens of thousands of civilians remained trapped in a city steadily losing electricity, water, communications and any resemblance of normal life.

Mariupol became one of the earliest demonstrations of what would emerge as a recurring feature of the Russian invasion of Ukraine: the destruction of a city as a means of making its conquest possible. Ukrainian forces gradually withdrew until their resistance was concentrated inside the vast Azovstal industrial complex. When the final defenders ceased fighting in May 2022, Russia had secured the land corridor it wanted to Crimea, but it had conquered a devastated city. Entire neighbourhoods had been destroyed and a huge proportion of its population had fled. On a military map, Mariupol had simply changed colour; on the ground, a city of hundreds of thousands of people had been subjected to a process of destruction that would alter its history permanently.

After abandoning the effort against Kyiv, Russia concentrated on the Donbas. During the spring and summer of 2022 it advanced across Luhansk and eventually captured Severodonetsk and Lysychansk after prolonged fighting. The rapid war was over and a much slower conflict had begun, one based increasingly on concentrations of artillery and superior firepower. Russia could systematically destroy Ukrainian positions before attempting to occupy them, but every advance required time, ammunition and men.

Ukraine, meanwhile, began receiving Western systems capable of striking ammunition depots, command posts and logistical routes behind the frontline. That ability helped create the conditions for one of the greatest surprises of the war. In September 2022, Ukrainian forces launched an offensive in the Kharkiv region and encountered Russian defences that were insufficiently manned. In only six days, Ukraine recovered more than 12,000 square kilometres. The Russian army was forced to abandon extensive areas of the northeast and left behind equipment and positions that for months had appeared firmly under its control.

The significance of the operation extended far beyond the amount of territory liberated. It demonstrated that Russian occupation could be reversed and that an army that appeared to possess almost limitless resources could be forced into retreat. Two months later, Ukraine achieved another major victory. Throughout the summer it had systematically targeted the bridges and supply routes sustaining Russian forces on the western bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson. Holding those positions became increasingly difficult and, in November, Moscow decided to withdraw. Ukrainian troops entered Kherson, the only regional capital Russia had managed to occupy since February.

The end of 2022 therefore presented a reality very different from the one Putin had envisaged nine months earlier. Kyiv remained Ukrainian, Kharkiv had not fallen, Kherson had been liberated and the state continued to function. Russia nevertheless retained Crimea, almost all of the Luhansk region, large parts of Donetsk and a strip of territory across southern Ukraine connecting Russia to the peninsula. The war was far from over, and Moscow began preparing for something it had not initially expected: a prolonged conflict.

The partial mobilisation announced in Russia in September 2022 enabled Moscow to bring hundreds of thousands of additional personnel into the war. At the same time, extensive defensive systems began to appear across the occupied territories: trenches, minefields, anti-tank obstacles and successive fortified lines. The front hardened and the possibility of rapid territorial movement diminished.

Bakhmut became the symbol of that transformation. For months, throughout 2022 and 2023, Russia launched repeated assaults on the city, making particularly intensive use of Wagner Group forces. The battle consumed enormous quantities of men and ammunition and acquired a political importance that eventually exceeded the city’s initial strategic value. Ukraine chose to maintain its defence for months in order to wear down the attacking forces, a decision that also meant accepting substantial Ukrainian losses. When Russia finally captured Bakhmut in May 2023, it did so after an extraordinarily costly battle and over a city that had been almost entirely destroyed.

It is impossible to understand these years by looking only at territory gained or lost. Behind Bakhmut are thousands of stories that will never appear on a military map: soldiers who died defending positions that had to be abandoned weeks later, wounded men evacuated under fire, and servicemen who survived months of artillery and drone warfare only to return with injuries that would shape the rest of their lives. The defence of a city can delay an enemy and exhaust its forces, but that time is purchased with human bodies. It is one of the most uncomfortable realities of a war of attrition and one of the clearest expressions of the human cost of Ukrainian resistance.

In the summer of 2023, Ukraine attempted once again to regain the initiative through a major counteroffensive in the south and east. New brigades had been trained for months and Western armoured vehicles had arrived. The most ambitious objective was to penetrate Russian defences, move towards the Sea of Azov and threaten the land corridor linking Russia to Crimea. Ukrainian forces, however, encountered a defensive system far deeper than expected, consisting of extensive minefields, successive trench networks, artillery, helicopters and a growing ability to observe the battlefield continuously through drones.

The breakthrough never came. Ukraine liberated some settlements and penetrated certain defensive positions but could not transform those gains into an operation capable of changing the strategic situation. The failure of the counteroffensive marked another turning point. From the autumn onwards, Russia gradually regained the initiative and once again imposed the logic of a war of attrition in which even small settlements could require months of fighting.

Avdiivka became the next major example. Located beside the city of Donetsk, it had been part of the frontline almost continuously since 2014. Russia intensified its attacks in the autumn of 2023 and eventually captured it in February 2024. By then, Russian forces had begun using at scale a weapon that would transform the way they attacked Ukrainian cities: glide bombs. Launched from aircraft operating tens of kilometres away from the frontline, these weapons could carry large explosive payloads and destroy buildings, fortifications and defensive positions without requiring Russian aircraft to penetrate deeply into Ukrainian air-defence coverage.

The logic was brutally effective. If a city functioned as a fortress, it could cease to function as one by being destroyed. Before infantry entered, glide bombs reduced buildings and positions to rubble, eliminated sites used by drone operators and forced defenders to relocate continuously. By the time Ukraine finally withdrew from Avdiivka, much of the city had been devastated.

The same pattern would later appear in Vuhledar, Kurakhove and Toretsk and, in 2026, around Kostyantynivka and the fortified belt of cities in the Donbas. Russia has increasingly used glide bombs to turn urban areas into ruins before inserting small infantry units among the destroyed buildings. This is not simply a matter of cities sustaining collateral damage as an unavoidable consequence of battle. Physical destruction of the urban environment has become integrated into the method of advance: destroy what makes a city defensible in order to make its occupation possible.

For that reason, describing cities as having been almost erased from the map is not merely rhetorical. Mariupol, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Vuhledar and other Ukrainian towns have endured levels of destruction that have eliminated entire neighbourhoods and fundamentally transformed their landscape. Photographs taken before and after the battles appear to show different places. Buildings that housed families for decades have become concrete skeletons; schools, hospitals, factories and businesses have disappeared; recognisable streets have ceased to exist, and thousands of people have lost not only their homes but the physical environment around which their memories were constructed.

Every destroyed city therefore creates another form of loss that cannot be measured solely through military casualties. It means communities dispersed across Ukraine and Europe, people who may never return because the place to which they would return no longer exists, family businesses built over generations disappearing within hours, and children whose final memory of their hometown may be an image of ruins. Reconstructing a building can take years. Reconstructing a community is far more difficult.

As the conflict continued, the price Ukraine was paying among those fighting it also increased. Precise military casualty figures are among the most difficult statistics to establish in any war, and Ukraine has withheld much of this information for understandable security reasons. The last broadly detailed official figure available at the beginning of 2025 acknowledged at least 46,000 Ukrainian servicemen killed since February 2022 and more than 390,000 cases of soldiers wounded in combat. The latter figure does not necessarily represent 390,000 separate individuals, because the same serviceman may have been wounded more than once and a significant number returned to duty after recovering, but it provides some sense of the physical scale of the war. To those figures must be added the missing, prisoners of war and subsequent losses that have necessarily continued to rise as the fighting has gone on.

Behind those numbers lies a profound transformation of Ukrainian society. The dead leave parents, children, partners and friends. The wounded return to cities that have had to learn to live with prosthetic limbs, wheelchairs and lengthy rehabilitation. There are amputees, soldiers with neurological injuries and traumatic brain damage, people who have lost their sight or hearing, and men and women living with burns and internal injuries that will shape the rest of their lives. Some will return to work and construct a different existence; others will require assistance for decades. When the war finally ends, part of its cost will remain visible on the bodies of those who survived it.

There are also wounds that no statistic can adequately represent. Combatants who have spent months or years under artillery and drone attack return temporarily to their families and discover that civilian life has continued while they themselves are no longer exactly the people they were before. Prolonged exposure to fear, the deaths of comrades, uncertainty and violence will leave psychological consequences for generations. The same is true for civilians. Children who were six or seven years old when the full-scale invasion began are now entering adolescence having learned to recognise air-raid sirens, explosions and shelters as ordinary features of everyday life.

This human dimension also makes it necessary to resist any romantic representation of Ukrainian resistance. Ukraine is defending itself because it was invaded and because the alternative to resistance could have meant the loss of its independence, but that necessity does not make war beautiful. Defending a country means asking part of its population to risk their lives so that the rest can preserve theirs. It means deciding how long a position can be held before losses become unbearable, when a city must be abandoned, and how many soldiers can be risked in order to impose a greater cost on the attacking force.

Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Toretsk and the current battles around the fortified belt of Donetsk contain this dilemma constantly. Holding a city may exhaust the Russian army and delay its advance for months, but every additional day has a cost. Withdrawing too late can mean losing entire units; doing so too early can surrender essential defensive positions and expose the next city. A war of attrition transforms territory and human life into variables in an equation no commander should ever have to solve and yet must solve every day.

As the front became slower and increasingly destructive, the technological war evolved at extraordinary speed. Drones, present from the beginning of the invasion, eventually transformed the battlefield completely. Small aircraft capable of observing a road or defensive position for hours could direct artillery or become weapons themselves. Relatively inexpensive FPV drones began hunting vehicles and even individual soldiers. Both armies developed electronic warfare systems, changed frequencies and continuously adapted their tactics in a technological competition that could shift in a matter of weeks.

The result was an increasingly transparent and dangerous battlefield. Concentrating large numbers of vehicles or soldiers became extremely difficult because almost any movement could be detected and attacked. The danger zone extended many kilometres behind the frontline, and warfare increasingly fragmented into small infantry groups attempting to infiltrate between opposing positions. This transformation partly explains why territorial advances have become so slow and why the capture of only a few kilometres can cost thousands of casualties.

Ukraine responded by gradually extending its own strikes far beyond the frontline. Long-range drones began hitting depots, airfields, energy infrastructure and military targets inside Russia and across the occupied territories. During 2025 and especially 2026, that capability evolved into an increasingly intensive campaign against Russian logistics. Roads and routes that had once been used with relative safety came within reach of Ukrainian drones tens, and in some cases more than a hundred, kilometres behind the front.

The war in Ukraine in 2026 is therefore very different from the conflict that began in February 2022. The great armoured convoys that advanced towards Kyiv almost belong to another military era. Today the battlefield is dominated by drones, electronic warfare, small infantry teams, long-range strikes and a constant struggle to obtain a technological advantage for a few weeks or even days before the opponent finds a way to neutralise it.

Yet technological evolution has done nothing to remove civilian suffering. Throughout the war, Russia has maintained a campaign of long-range strikes against Ukrainian cities, and in 2026 the scale of those attacks has continued to grow. Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Dnipro and many other cities may lie hundreds of kilometres from the trenches and still remain exposed to waves of drones and missiles. In May 2026, Russia launched more than 1,600 drones and missiles during only two days of almost continuous attacks, many of them directed against Kyiv. In June, war-related violence produced the highest monthly number of civilian casualties recorded since April 2022: at least 293 civilians were killed and 1,990 wounded. During the first six months of 2026, long-range attacks alone had killed close to 1,400 civilians and wounded almost 8,000.

These figures illustrate the extent to which the frontline no longer determines where the war exists. Someone may live hundreds of kilometres away from the ground fighting and still wake in the night to hours of drone attacks. Parents may take their children to school in the morning after spending part of the night in a shelter. People go to work while alerts on their phones warn of a ballistic missile threat. Cities continue to function, restaurants remain open, universities teach classes and people attempt to construct a form of normality that can disappear within seconds.

Maintaining that normality has itself become a form of resilience and resistance. A society does not survive only because soldiers hold a trench. It survives because hospitals continue to operate, electricity networks are repaired after repeated attacks, schools continue teaching, companies continue working and millions of people continue imagining a future within an independent Ukraine that another state has attempted to subordinate.

But another war exists alongside the one fought in the trenches, less visible yet perhaps equally important for understanding the nature of the conflict. It is the war Russia is conducting within the occupied territories.

Since Crimea in 2014, and on a far greater scale since 2022, Moscow has progressively incorporated territories under Russian occupation into its administrative, political, economic and cultural systems. The introduction of the rouble, forced Russian passportisation, the replacement of local authorities, alterations to school curricula, control over media and the appropriation of property all form part of a strategy intended to transform military occupation into a political reality that can eventually be presented as irreversible.

Education occupies a fundamental place in this process because it offers direct access to the next generation. In the occupied territories, school programmes have been altered to replace Ukrainian interpretations of history with Russian ones, while programmes of patriotic education and militarisation have been developed for children and teenagers. This is accompanied by the transfer of minors from occupied Ukrainian territories to Russia and other Russian-controlled areas, where they are placed in environments designed to distance them gradually from their Ukrainian identity.

The implications are profound. A war can conquer territory for a number of years; transforming the children who live on it is an attempt to conquer that territory for generations. If a child born in a Ukrainian city is taught that the city has always been Russian, uses Russian documents, studies under a Russian curriculum and grows up within youth organisations connected to the Russian state, occupation ceases to be only military and begins to act upon memory itself.

That is one reason the war cannot be reduced to a negotiation over square kilometres. Ceding territory also means determining what happens to the people who live there, what laws govern them, what citizenship they possess, what their children are taught and whether they retain the ability to identify as Ukrainian. For Ukraine, territorial loss therefore contains political and cultural dimensions inseparable from the military one. Ukrainian sovereignty and Ukrainian independence are not abstract concepts in this context; they determine who has the right to shape everyday life and the future of the people living on that land.

This reality helps explain the continuity between Crimea, the Donbas and the 2022 invasion. If Russia’s objective had been simply to secure possession of Crimea, the war could have ended in 2014. If it had been solely to protect particular areas of the Donbas, Russian troops would not have advanced on Kyiv eight years later. The sequence demonstrates that territorial claims were part of a much broader problem: the Kremlin’s refusal to fully accept an independent and sovereign Ukraine capable of determining its political orientation without Moscow’s approval.

It is at this point that the conflict assumes a wider European historical dimension that is impossible to ignore. Comparisons between different historical periods require caution, and contemporary Russia cannot simply be equated with Hitler’s Germany. But neither can Europe ignore the fundamental lesson left by German expansionism in the twentieth century: the danger of treating successive acts of aggression as isolated episodes when they arise from the same revisionist conception of power.

Nazi Germany used historical grievances, populations supposedly separated from their homeland and territorial claims to justify an expansion that always discovered another frontier beyond the previous one. Each concession could be presented as the final one required to preserve peace. The failure lay not only in being unable to predict exactly what Hitler would do next, but in failing to recognise early enough that the central problem was a conception of the European order in which force granted the right to redraw borders and determine the fate of other peoples.

The threat represented by Putin’s Russia contains a similar warning. Not because history repeats itself literally, but because it once again raises a question Europe believed it had settled after 1945: whether a powerful state can decide that internationally recognised borders are provisional whenever they conflict with its interpretation of history.

Crimea should have forced Europe to confront that question in 2014. For eight years, part of the world preferred to believe that its annexation could remain contained. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 demonstrated the danger of that assumption.

Since then, time itself has become one of Russia’s principal weapons. Moscow does not need to achieve tomorrow what it failed to achieve during the opening weeks of the invasion if it believes it can obtain the same outcome after years of attrition. Russia has a larger population, a substantial defence industry and a capacity to accept extraordinary human losses. Its strategy rests in significant part on the belief that it can continue advancing slowly while waiting for Ukraine to become exhausted and for its allies eventually to tire of sustaining Ukrainian resistance.

That calculation explains much of the war since 2024. Russian advances have generally been slow and extraordinarily costly, but Moscow has continued accepting that price. In July 2026, Russian forces suffered, according to Ukrainian figures assessed in campaign reporting, more than 42,000 casualties in a single month without significantly increasing their rate of advance. By August, that rate was continuing to fall. Russia was paying an enormous human cost for very limited territorial gains, yet the Kremlin continued to present each advance as evidence that time would eventually work in its favour.

In reality, during the spring and summer of 2026 Ukrainian forces managed to slow the Russian offensive substantially and regain the initiative in some sectors. Russia continued to occupy extensive areas of Ukraine and retained enormous destructive capacity, but more than four years after the beginning of the full-scale invasion it had still failed to achieve the fundamental objectives with which it had entered the war. Kyiv had not fallen, the Ukrainian government had not been replaced, the state had not disintegrated and the Armed Forces of Ukraine continued to fight.

Most significantly, the Kremlin’s political objectives had not disappeared either. In June 2026, Putin continued to condition any agreement on demands that would profoundly restrict Ukrainian sovereignty: renunciation of certain alliances, limitations on the Ukrainian armed forces, recognition of territorial annexations and conditions that would diminish Ukraine’s future ability to defend itself. Four years after the failure of the offensive against Kyiv, the fundamental question remained essentially unchanged.

It is therefore misleading to believe that the war in Ukraine can be explained simply by asking which side controls a particular city today. Territory matters, but behind territory lies sovereignty, and behind sovereignty lies a society’s ability to determine its own future.

This is also why the human cost paid by Ukraine cannot be separated from the political meaning of the war. Tens of thousands of soldiers have died defending a state that, under Russia’s original assumptions, was supposed to have been brought under control within days. Hundreds of thousands have been wounded. Thousands will live with amputations and permanent disabilities. Entire families will have to rebuild their lives around an absence. Cities that for generations formed the centre of their inhabitants’ lives have been reduced to ruins. Millions of people have been forced from their homes, and a generation of children is growing up in a war that now occupies a substantial part of their childhood.

None of this allows Ukrainian resistance to be romanticised. On the contrary, it makes its reality more terrible.

Ukraine is not defending itself because war offers an opportunity to construct a heroic narrative. It is defending itself because the alternative presented in February 2022 was to allow a foreign army to determine its future. The price of that decision has been enormous and will continue to be paid long after the final battle ends.

Buildings can be rebuilt. Roads will reopen and bridges can rise again. Some of the destroyed cities will recover part of their population, while others may never become what they once were. But the dead will not return. Amputees will continue to live with the consequences of the war. Children deported or educated for years under Russian occupation will have to reconstruct bonds that Russia has deliberately attempted to break. Families separated by war will have to discover whether there is still a common life to which they can return.

Peace, whenever it comes, will erase none of this.

Russia has not achieved what it set out to achieve when its columns advanced towards Kyiv in February 2022. Ukraine continues to exist as a sovereign and independent state.