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In 1997, Russia signed a treaty in which it recognized Ukraine’s territorial integrity and the inviolability of its borders. Twenty-five years later, the same Russia tried to destroy Ukrainian statehood by force.
Between those two points there was not one cause and not one order. Russia’s war against Ukraine was neither a sudden decision made in February 2022 nor the execution of an unchanging plan that had been sitting in the Kremlin since 1991. Both versions are too simple. The first turns history into a fatal straight line. The second pretends that before 24 February 2022 there had not been decades of revisionism, pressure, military preparation, ideological radicalization and Moscow’s gradual refusal to recognize Ukraine as an independent political subject.
The more accurate picture is more complicated: Russia did not move toward a major war in a straight line, but with every new crisis around Ukraine it chose increasingly coercive methods. First came the incomplete acceptance of Ukrainian independence. Then economic coercion. Then fear of color revolutions. Then Crimea as a force operation under unique conditions. Then Donbas as a chaotic proxy project, later turned into an instrument of pressure through Minsk. Then the passportization of the occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the deadlock in negotiations, Putin’s article on “historical unity,” the 2021 military buildup and the ultimatum to the United States and NATO. Finally, after the failed blitzkrieg of 2022, came mobilization, the formal annexation of four regions, the militarization of the budget, attacks on energy infrastructure, the expansion of the army and a shift to a war of attrition.
The central formula of this story is this: the war was not inevitable, but it became increasingly likely as the Russian authorities turned Ukrainian independence from a political reality into a threat to their own model of power.
The Ladder of Escalation
| Period | Moscow’s main instrument | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 1991–1997 | Legal recognition + political revisionism | Ukraine is formally recognized, but part of the Russian elite does not accept the finality of its borders. |
| 2003–2007 | Testing borders + geopolitical securitization | Tuzla shows a willingness to physically test Ukraine’s border even before Yushchenko and NATO-2008. |
| 2005–2013 | Economic coercion | Gas, trade, loans and market access become instruments of pressure instead of direct military force. |
| 2014–2015 | Hybrid force + legal trap | Crimea is annexed, Donbas is turned into a lever of pressure through Minsk. |
| 2019–2021 | Dual-track strategy | The diplomatic Minsk track runs in parallel with passportization in the occupied territories and military deployment. |
| 2022–2026 | War of attrition | The failed blitzkrieg does not change the goal, but changes the method: mobilization, the defense industry, energy exhaustion, army expansion. |
1. Unaccepted Independence: 1991–1997
After the collapse of the USSR, Russia legally recognized Ukraine’s independence. But already in the early years a duality emerged: the executive branch signed treaties, while part of the Russian parliament and political class continued to view Crimea and Sevastopol as territories that had been “mistakenly lost.”
One revealing early episode was the Russian Supreme Soviet’s resolution of 9 July 1993 on the status of Sevastopol. Ukraine brought the matter to the UN Security Council; UN documents recorded that the Supreme Soviet’s resolution diverged from the policy of the Russian president and government. This matters: it was not an internationally recognized legal act, but a political signal. As early as 1993, part of the Russian state was publicly contesting Ukraine’s sovereignty over a Ukrainian city.
In 1994, the Budapest Memorandum was signed in connection with Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. In the UN treaty database, it is recorded as a document concluded in Budapest on 5 December 1994 between Ukraine, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom. In 1997, Russia and Ukraine signed the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership. It was concluded in Kyiv on 31 May 1997 and entered into force on 1 April 1999. In Article 2, the parties confirmed respect for each other’s territorial integrity and the inviolability of existing borders.
On paper, this looked like the closing of the territorial question. Politically, however, the question was not closed. The Russian state legally recognized Ukraine’s borders, but a significant part of the Russian elite treated that recognition not as a final acceptance of the post-Soviet order, but as a temporary compromise from a period of weakness.
Putin did not invent Russian revisionism from scratch. He inherited the post-imperial residue of the 1990s, then fused it with an authoritarian power vertical, oil and gas rent, the security apparatus, military reform and anti-Western ideology.
2. Tuzla: The First Physical Test of the Border
The 2003 crisis around Tuzla Island is often underestimated. It happened before Yushchenko’s presidency, before the 2008 NATO Bucharest summit, before Euromaidan and before the 2014 war. It therefore undermines the convenient claim that Russian pressure on Ukraine’s territorial integrity emerged only as a response to Ukraine’s “Western turn.”
The open phase of the crisis began on 29 September 2003, when Russia, without agreement with Kyiv, began intensive construction of an earthen dam from the Taman Peninsula toward the Ukrainian island of Tuzla in the Kerch Strait. Ukrainian official and analytical sources described this as an attempt to change actual control in the strait.
Tuzla does not prove that Moscow was already planning the annexation of Crimea. Motives may have been mixed: a local initiative by Krasnodar authorities, regional interests, pressure in negotiations over the Azov-Kerch waters, or a test of Kyiv’s reaction. But it shows something else: by 2003, the Russian state was already ready to physically test Ukraine’s border.
Before Tuzla, revisionism was mostly parliamentary and symbolic: resolutions, statements, disputes over Sevastopol. Tuzla became an infrastructural act. Not merely “we consider this ours,” but “we are beginning to change reality on land and water.”
3. The Orange Revolution: A Geopolitical Shock, Not Yet Domestic Panic
It is easy to read the Orange Revolution of 2004 retrospectively through the prism of 2014 and 2022. But that is a mistake. In 2004, the Kremlin was not yet living in post-Bolotnaya paranoia. Putin was popular, the Russian opposition was weak, and civil society in Russia did not look like an existential threat to the authorities.
Moscow’s reaction to the Orange Revolution was above all a geopolitical shock. The Kremlin had invested in Yanukovych, exported the methods of managed democracy into Ukraine and expected that Ukrainian politics could be engineered from above just like Russian politics. Maidan showed the opposite: Ukrainian society was a subject, not a mass that could be governed only through administrative resources, elite bargains and television.
This shock overlapped with a broader international context. On 29 March 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined NATO; on 1 May 2004, ten countries joined the EU, including Poland, the Baltic states, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia.
In Moscow, this reinforced a feeling of strategic compression. Ukraine came to be perceived not as a separate society with its own conflicts, but as the next element of Western movement toward Russian borders. That was the perceptual error: the Kremlin saw a great-power chessboard, but barely saw Ukrainians.
Putin’s Munich speech on 10 February 2007 became the open foreign-policy manifesto of a more confident Russia. It was not the speech of a frightened autocrat, but of the leader of a country that had accumulated resources and decided to publicly challenge the unipolar order, NATO and American dominance.
4. Gas Wars: Economic Coercion Instead of Tanks
After 2004, Russia did not immediately move into a military logic. On the contrary, it tried to regain control over Ukraine through economic methods. The gas conflicts of 2006 and 2009 were not merely commercial disputes. They became a way to show Ukraine the price of an independent course.
This stage can be called the market rationalization of dependence. Russia stopped simply subsidizing loyalty and began turning gas, tariffs, debts, transit and market access into instruments of discipline.
But Russian policy toward Ukraine was not a perfect chess game. Different groups were involved: Gazprom, the government, the security services, the presidential administration and the integrationist camp around the Customs Union. Their interests did not always coincide. The overall result, however, was clear: Ukraine was increasingly perceived not as an equal neighbor, but as an object that could be held by a pipeline, a loan, a market and pressure on elites.
5. Yanukovych: Not a Vassal, but an Oligarchic Player in His Own Right
One of the key points in the whole story is the misreading of Yanukovych’s regime. After his victory in 2010, it seemed that Ukraine had returned to Russia’s orbit. This impression grew especially after the Kharkiv agreements, signed on 21 April 2010, which extended the stay of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea until 2042.
But Yanukovych was not a simple vassal of Moscow. He was more convenient for the Kremlin than Yushchenko, but behind him stood Donetsk oligarchic interests. These elites wanted gas discounts, access to the Russian market and room to maneuver between Moscow and Brussels. But they did not want Russian capital to absorb their Ukrainian economic domain.
An important document confirms this: Ukraine’s Law “On the Principles of Domestic and Foreign Policy” of 1 July 2010, No. 2411-VI. It was adopted already under Yanukovych and fixed European integration as one of the directions of Ukraine’s foreign policy.
That is why Yanukovych’s course toward an Association Agreement with the EU was not accidental. It was not necessarily an idealistic European choice, but it was a rational attempt by Ukrainian elites to protect their market, obtain Western legitimacy and bargain with Moscow at the same time.
In the summer of 2013, Russia responded with pressure. From 14 to 20 August, Russian customs sharply intensified inspections of Ukrainian cargo; OSW described this as a demonstration of how signing the Association Agreement with the EU could damage Ukrainian-Russian relations. Sergey Glazyev publicly threatened consequences if the EU agreement were signed.
But this pressure produced the opposite effect. It showed Ukrainian business and part of society that the Customs Union was not an equal economic space, but a system of political blackmail. What was supposed to force Yanukovych to capitulate helped demonstrate the price of dependence on Russia.
On 21 November 2013, the Ukrainian government suspended preparations for signing the Association Agreement with the EU. The European Commission explicitly recorded this decision as the point after which the mass protests of Euromaidan began.
At that moment, Russian policy ran into something it systematically failed to understand: Ukraine was not merely the sum of elite bargains. It had a society capable of taking to the streets and breaking a deal made at the top.
6. Bolotnaya and Libya: When Protest Became a Threat to the Regime
If the Orange Revolution was primarily a foreign-policy defeat for the Kremlin, the Moscow protests of 2011–2012 were a different kind of shock. Protest returned inside Russia.
Libya overlapped with this. In 2011, Western intervention, the fall of Gaddafi’s regime and his death became, for Russian security thinking, not simply an event in the Middle East. They became a model of threat: first protest, then international legitimation, then external intervention, then regime collapse.
From that moment, in Russia’s worldview, domestic protest, color revolutions, Ukraine’s Maidan, Western NGOs, NATO and regime change began to merge into a single matrix of threats. Not immediately in 2004, but specifically after 2011–2012.
Russia’s new Military Doctrine was approved on 25 December 2014, after the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbas. This chronology matters: the doctrine could not have caused the Crimea operation, but it codified a new logic of threats in which external and internal destabilization were treated as connected elements of pressure on Russia.
In other words, by 2014 the Russian regime already viewed the Ukrainian revolution not as Ukraine’s own internal process, but as part of the West’s war against Russia.
7. February 2014: The Collapse of “Plan A”
On 21 February 2014, Yanukovych signed an agreement with the opposition with the participation of European mediators. The document provided for a return to the 2004 Constitution, the formation of a government of national unity and early presidential elections.
But political reality had already slipped out of Yanukovych’s control. On 22 February, the Verkhovna Rada adopted a resolution stating that the president had withdrawn from performing his constitutional powers and set early elections.
For Moscow, this meant the collapse of the main scenario. Until then, judging by its actions, the Kremlin had tried to keep Ukraine through Yanukovych: loans, pressure, consultations, political coercion. But Yanukovych lost control over Kyiv and the security apparatus.
Here it is important to separate two levels: the political decision and the military opportunity.
The political decision may have been made in the moment of crisis. But the opportunity to carry out an operation in Crimea had been created in advance: the Black Sea Fleet, basing agreements, local networks of influence, reformed mobile units, Special Operations Forces, experience from the war in Georgia, the close logistics of southern Russia and the military concentration around the Sochi Olympics.
Crimea was therefore not “pure improvisation.” But neither was it proven execution of a single plan that had existed since 1991. More precisely: it was the political activation of a previously accumulated capability.
8. Crimea: A Unique Operation That Could Not Simply Be Repeated
Crimea was convenient for a Russian operation for several reasons. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet was stationed there. Russia had a legal basing infrastructure. The peninsula had an isolated geography. Local elites and parts of the security structures were more susceptible to Russian influence. Ukraine, at the moment of Yanukovych’s flight, was experiencing a governance shock.
On 1 March 2014, Russia’s Federation Council adopted Resolution No. 48-SF, authorizing the use of Russian armed forces on Ukrainian territory. Later, the Kremlin itself referred to this resolution when Putin proposed its cancellation.
On 18 March 2014, a treaty was signed on the admission of the Republic of Crimea into the Russian Federation and the formation of new federal subjects. From the point of view of international law, this did not legalize the annexation, but within the Russian system it became the legal framework for incorporation.
There is a disputed marker: the date 20.02.14–18.03.14 on the Russian Ministry of Defense medal “For the Return of Crimea.” It cannot be used as the sole proof of a pre-approved annexation plan: the date may reflect the beginning of heightened readiness, the bureaucratic accounting period of the operation, retrospective legitimation or a technical dispute around the award. But as a marker of the early launch of a coercive mode in Crimea, it matters.
The main conclusion about Crimea is different: it was possible because Russia had a unique military and political foothold there. In that sense, Crimea cannot be mechanically projected onto Donbas, Kharkiv, Odesa or the whole of Ukraine’s South-East.
9. Why Donbas Did Not Become Crimea-2
Donbas is often described as a continuation of the Crimea operation. That is a mistake.
In Crimea, Russia had a fleet, bases, peninsula geography, prepared channels of influence and the ability to quickly isolate Ukrainian units. Donbas had none of those conditions. It had large industrial cities, competing local elites, Ukrainian oligarchs, mixed public moods and no legal Russian foothold comparable to the Black Sea Fleet.
It appears that Moscow initially counted not on a direct military seizure of the entire South-East, but on a political scenario: the Kharkiv congress, local elites, “people’s” protests, federalization and pressure on Kyiv. When that scenario failed, a chaotic proxy franchising began: different local, Russian and quasi-security-service groups were granted informal permission to act in the name of the “Russian Spring.”
Recordings of Sergey Glazyev’s conversations, published by the Ukrainian side and analyzed by researchers, show hands-on coordination and financing of pro-Russian actions in Ukraine’s South and East in late February and March 2014. This does not prove that no military plans existed, but it clearly shows that the Donbas and South-East scenario was far more chaotic and politically improvised than the Crimean one.
On 12 April 2014, Igor Girkin’s detachment entered Sloviansk. This episode marked the transition from political crisis and seizures of administrative buildings to hot war. Girkin himself later publicly claimed personal responsibility for starting the war in eastern Ukraine.
Donbas became not Crimea-2, but a different mechanism: not rapid annexation, but an instrument of pressure on Ukrainian statehood.
10. Minsk: Not Peace, but a Mechanism of Managed Paralysis
After Ilovaisk and Debaltseve, Russia did not recognize the DNR and LNR and did not incorporate them into its territory. Instead, the Minsk process appeared. This is an important fact: if Moscow’s goal in 2014–2015 had been the immediate annexation of Donbas according to the Crimean model, it would have acted differently.
The Minsk Protocol was signed on 5 September 2014. On 12 February 2015, the Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements was agreed, and on 17 February 2015 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2202, endorsing that package.
The Package of Measures provided for the restoration of Ukraine’s control over the border only after political steps: elections, a special order of local self-government and constitutional reform. The main conflict was embedded precisely in that sequence. Ukraine saw control over the border as a condition of real security. Russia sought the political legalization of the occupied territories inside Ukraine before Ukrainian control was restored.
Minsk was therefore not simply a peace process. For Kyiv, it was a way to stop the heavy phase of the war and gain time. For Europe, it was a way to freeze the conflict. For Moscow, it was a way to embed a veto lever inside Ukraine against its foreign-policy course.
The point was not for Donbas to become Russia immediately. The point was for Donbas to remain inside Ukraine, but as a mechanism for blocking Ukrainian sovereignty.
11. 2019–2021: From the Minsk Deadlock to a Major War
After Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected in 2019, Moscow had a chance to test whether the political track could be restarted. But already in spring 2019, a step was taken that undermined the very logic of Minsk.
On 24 April 2019, Putin signed Decree No. 183 simplifying the acquisition of Russian citizenship for residents of certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Formally, it was presented as a humanitarian measure. Politically, it created a future language of “protecting Russian citizens” inside territory that, under Minsk, was supposed to return to Ukrainian control.
On 9 December 2019, the Normandy Four summit took place in Paris. The summit did not remove the main conflict: Ukraine was not ready to accept the Russian sequence of “first political legalization of the occupied territories, then the border,” while Russia was not ready to return control over the border before political concessions. In February 2021, Kyiv struck at Russia’s political resource inside Ukraine. On 2 February, Zelenskyy enacted the National Security and Defense Council decision imposing sanctions on Taras Kozak and related legal entities, which in practice affected the TV channels 112, NewsOne and ZIK. On 19 February, the NSDC imposed sanctions on Viktor Medvedchuk and Oksana Marchenko.
This was not the cause of the war by itself. But it showed Moscow that a cheap political takeover of Ukraine through media, parties and pro-Russian networks was becoming less reliable.
On 12 July 2021, Putin’s article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” was published on the Kremlin website. Its significance was not that it was in itself an order for war. Its significance lay elsewhere: the Ukrainian question was moved from the plane of international law into the plane of historical-civilizational denial. In this logic, Ukraine appeared not as a neighboring state, but as an artificially severed part of “historical Russia,” turned by the West into “anti-Russia.”
In autumn 2021, a material layer was added to the ideological one. CSIS recorded the continued buildup of Russian forces near Ukraine, including elements of the 41st Combined Arms Army. On 2–3 November, CIA Director William Burns made a rare visit to Moscow; Reuters reported that he led a delegation of senior U.S. officials on Biden’s instructions. On 17 December 2021, Russia’s Foreign Ministry published draft documents on security guarantees with the United States and NATO. The demands included a ban on further NATO enlargement and strict limits on NATO military activity in Eastern Europe and Ukraine.
From that point on, the issue was no longer simply Donbas. Moscow framed the question more broadly: Ukraine’s right to an independent foreign-policy choice and the revision of the European security order.
12. 24 February 2022: From Coercion to Dismantling
On 24 February 2022, Putin announced the start of a “special military operation.” In the Kremlin’s official English text, the goals were formulated as to “demilitarise and denazify Ukraine.”
These words should not be treated as a random propaganda formula. “Demilitarization” meant depriving Ukraine of an independent defense capability. “Denazification” in Russian discourse meant delegitimizing the Ukrainian government, identity and political project. And the thesis of “anti-Russia” turned the very fact of Ukrainian independence into a threat.
The initial calculation, judging by the course of the first weeks of the war, was for a rapid defeat: Kyiv, a change of government, paralysis of the army and collapse of the state. That calculation failed because of Ukrainian resistance, Russian intelligence failures, poor logistics, overestimation of pro-Russian sentiment and underestimation of Ukrainian identity.
But the failure of the blitzkrieg did not mean abandoning the goals. It meant changing the method.
13. Autumn 2022: Mobilization and Annexation as Burning Bridges
After Ukrainian counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson regions, Russia could have narrowed its goals to holding the land corridor to Crimea and parts of Donbas. The Kremlin did the opposite.
On 21 September 2022, Putin signed a decree on partial mobilization. In late September, Russia announced the annexation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and in early October the Russian parliament adopted the corresponding laws. Russia wrote into its legal system even territories it did not fully control.
This was a legal burning of bridges. From that point, for Moscow, the war ceased to be merely an operation with potential bargaining room. It became a process of “liberating” territories that the Russian Constitution had already declared Russian.
On 21 October 2022, a Coordination Council was created under the Russian government to meet the needs of the armed forces and other formations. This was an institutional step toward restructuring the state for a long war.
It is from autumn 2022 that the war definitively changes form: from a failed blitzkrieg to a war of attrition.
14. 2024–2026: War of Attrition as a New Form of the Old Goal
In May 2024, an important managerial reshuffle took place. Andrey Belousov, an economist-technocrat, became Russia’s defense minister. CSIS emphasized that Belousov was the first Russian defense minister without military experience, and that his appointment revealed the defense-industrial logic of Russia’s wartime restructuring.
Russian military spending confirms this shift. Reuters wrote that in 2025 Russia’s national defense spending was set to rise to 13.5 trillion rubles, about 6.3% of GDP and roughly one third of federal budget expenditures. In 2026, SIPRI estimated total federal funding for the war and other military spending in 2025 at roughly 16 trillion rubles, or 7.5% of GDP. On 14 June 2024, Putin, at a meeting with the leadership of the Russian Foreign Ministry, formulated ceasefire conditions: Ukrainian troops had to be fully withdrawn from Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, and Ukraine had to renounce NATO membership. This was not a proposal to freeze the war along the front line. It was a demand that Ukraine itself withdraw from territories, some of which Russia did not control at the time. By 2026, military institutionalization continued. On 4 March 2026, Decree No. 139 set the authorized strength of the Russian Armed Forces at 2,391,770 positions, including 1,502,640 service members. This does not automatically prove preparation for a new offensive, but it creates potential for a long war and new offensive cycles. At the same time, Russia systematically attacks Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights recorded nine waves of large coordinated attacks on Ukraine’s electricity system between 22 March and 31 August 2024. The International Energy Agency wrote that since 2022, 18 large combined heat and power plants and more than 800 boiler houses had been damaged or destroyed. In January 2026, according to the UN in Ukraine, Russian forces carried out near-daily attacks on energy infrastructure, including five major attacks that damaged elements of the energy system in at least 17 regions and Kyiv.
This is no longer blitzkrieg. It is a strategy of exhaustion. If a dependent government cannot be installed quickly in Kyiv, Ukraine can be made, over the long term, less functional: energetically, demographically, economically, psychologically and politically.
The war also became a foreign-policy node of a new anti-Western cooperation. Russia and North Korea signed a Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in Pyongyang in June 2024; on 9 November 2024 the Kremlin reported the signing of the law ratifying it. Reuters wrote in 2025 that, according to assessments by Ukraine, the United States and South Korea, North Korea had sent thousands of troops to support Russian forces.
The Iranian layer of the war appeared above all through Shahed/Geran drones. CSIS described Russia’s Shahed campaign as a way to saturate Ukrainian air defenses with cheap strike drones, originally of Iranian origin, now mass-produced in Russia using foreign components.
This does not mean that China, Iran and North Korea play the same role. China is the economic and technological rear, North Korea provides ammunition, missiles and then a military-political link, and Iran provides drones and military cooperation. But the overall meaning is clear: the war against Ukraine became for Moscow not only a regional war, but part of a broader confrontation with the West.
15. How This Model Differs from Simple Explanations
This war cannot be explained by one cause. Simple explanations are convenient, but they are too thin.
It Is Not Only NATO
NATO was an important element in Moscow’s perception of threat, especially after the 2004 enlargement and the 2008 Bucharest summit. But Russian pressure on Ukraine’s borders began earlier: the Sevastopol resolution was in 1993, the Tuzla crisis in 2003. The problem therefore cannot be reduced to a reaction to NATO. NATO was part of Russia’s threat optics, but not the only and not the original source of revisionism.
It Is Not Only Putin
Putin radicalized, institutionalized and militarized Russian revisionism. But the rejection of Ukrainian subjecthood existed in Russian politics before him. His role lies elsewhere: he turned a post-imperial residue into a state strategy backed by the security apparatus, propaganda, the budget and the army.
It Is Not One Plan Since 1991
History moved through forks, mistakes and escalations. Russia could have acted differently after Tuzla, after the Orange Revolution, after 2010, after Minsk, after the failed blitzkrieg. The war was not inevitable. But it became more likely because every crisis was handled by the Russian system not through recognition of Ukrainian subjecthood, but through increased pressure.
It Is Not a Civil War
Internal Ukrainian contradictions existed, especially in 2014. But the transition to armed war was enabled by Russian intervention, proxy structures, logistics, handlers, armed groups and then the regular army. Donbas was not simply an internal uprising; it became a field of Russian external coercion.
It Is Not a Story of Passive Ukraine
Ukraine in this model is not an object, but a subject. The Orange Revolution broke Russia’s export of managed democracy. Euromaidan destroyed the elite bargain. Ukrainian society and the army prevented the Crimean scenario from being repeated in the South-East. Zelenskyy did not accept Russia’s interpretation of Minsk. Sanctions against Medvedchuk’s network narrowed the space for Russian political influence. The resistance of 2022 destroyed the blitzkrieg.
16. The Main Mechanism: Tool Failure, Stake Raising
There is a recurring pattern in this story.
Ukrainian subjecthood
↓
Failure of a Russian control instrument
↓
The Kremlin raises the stakes
↓
A new, harsher instrument of pressure
In 2004, Russian political technologies failed to hold Ukraine, so Moscow moved to economic pressure.
In 2013, economic pressure and the deal with Yanukovych failed to hold Ukraine, so Moscow moved to a force scenario in Crimea and a hybrid operation in Donbas.
The Crimean scenario could not be scaled to the entire South-East, so Donbas was turned into a proxy lever and a Minsk trap.
Minsk did not give Moscow control over Ukraine’s course, so the Kremlin moved to passportization of the occupied territories, military deployment and an ultimatum to NATO.
The 2022 blitzkrieg failed, so Russia moved to mobilization, legal annexation, a war economy and infrastructure exhaustion.
That is why the war was not inevitable as a prewritten scenario. But it became increasingly likely as the result of a recurring reaction by the Russian system: not to accept Ukrainian subjecthood, but to try to break it with a new instrument.
17. What Matters Most in This Story
There was no single cause in this war. It cannot be explained only by NATO, only by Putin, only by imperial history, only by Donbas, only by Maidan or only by the internal logic of the Russian regime. All these factors worked together, but not at the same time and not in the same way.
First, Russia legally recognized Ukraine, but internally did not accept the finality of its borders. Then the Russian state grew stronger and began to perceive the post-Soviet space as a zone of special rights. The Orange Revolution showed that Ukraine could not be governed by Russian political technologies. The gas wars became an attempt to hold Kyiv through dependence. Yanukovych turned out not to be a vassal, but a bargaining oligarchic player. The pressure of 2013 helped trigger Euromaidan. Yanukovych’s flight destroyed “Plan A.” Crimea became the activation of a previously accumulated military capability. Donbas became a chaotic proxy project, later turned into a Minsk lever. Minsk did not give Moscow the control over Ukraine it wanted. The passportization of the occupied territories, the dismantling of Medvedchuk’s media network, Putin’s 2021 article, the military buildup and the NATO ultimatum formed the bridge to a major war. The failed blitzkrieg did not cancel the goal; it moved it into a mode of attrition.
The final formula is this:
Russia started the war not because Ukraine had become a direct military threat to Russian territory. Russia started the war because an independent Ukraine became a threat to the Russian model of power, Russian imperial memory and Russia’s understanding of the post-Soviet space as a zone of limited sovereignty.
In this sense, 24 February 2022 was not the beginning of the story, but the moment when several lines converged: the unprocessed collapse of empire, revisionism from the 1990s, fear of color revolutions, economic coercion, the failure to control Ukrainian elites, military readiness, ideological denial of Ukrainian subjecthood and the Kremlin’s conviction that force could be used faster than Ukraine and the West could respond.
But it was precisely here that Russia’s calculation proved fundamentally wrong. Ukraine once again did what Moscow failed to account for: it acted not as an object, but as a subject.
Source Appendix
Key legal documents: the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the 1997 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation, Ukraine’s Law No. 2411-VI of 1 July 2010, the 2014 Minsk Protocol, the Package of Measures and UN Security Council Resolution 2202, Putin’s Decree No. 183 on passportization in the occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the decree on partial mobilization, Russian acts on the annexation of four regions, and the 2026 decree on the authorized strength of the Russian Armed Forces.
Key speeches and doctrinal texts: Putin’s 2007 Munich speech, Russia’s 2014 Military Doctrine, Putin’s 2021 article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” the address of 24 February 2022, and Putin’s speech at the Foreign Ministry on 14 June 2024.
Key analytical and news sources: OSW on Russian pressure on Ukraine in 2013, CSIS on Russia’s 2021 military buildup and the Shahed/Geran campaign, Reuters on Burns’s visit, Russia’s defense budget and the North Korean factor, SIPRI on Russian military spending, and OHCHR/IEA/UN Ukraine on attacks against energy infrastructure.
