Ukraine’s resistance has not been in vain

Three years ago today, Russian president Vladimir Putin began his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In a pre-recorded segment broadcast to the world on 24 February 2022, Putin gave a rambling speech, before delivering the dread words, ‘I have decided to conduct a special military operation’, deploying for the first time the Kremlin’s Newspeak term for its neo-imperial act of aggression against Ukraine.

Everyone knew what Putin really meant, even before seeing the footage of Russian military convoys rolling across Ukraine’s eastern borders. Moscow was launching a war of invasion against its western neighbour. It was an act of aggression on a scale Europe had not witnessed for over 80 years.

Today, too many are trying to downplay – perhaps even forget – how this all started. US president Donald Trump suggested last week that Ukraine had actually started the war, before backtracking over the weekend. Trump’s absurd falsehood was only the most egregious example of the historical revisionism that’s increasingly common among Western politicos and commentators, on the right and the left. There’s now a growing sentiment that Ukraine, aided and abetted by its Western backers, brought this war on itself and has since needlessly prolonged it, at great human cost.

That’s why it is more important than ever to remember what really happened three years ago.

Tensions between Russia and Western powers over Ukraine had been building for several years. The eastward expansion of NATO and the EU after the disintegration of the Soviet Union had intensified the insecurity of a weak Russian state. After watching former Warsaw Pact and Baltic nations join NATO, with Western leaders promising that Ukraine would also become a member soon, Putin gave a now famous speech in Munich in 2007, in which he said: ‘We have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?’

As countless American diplomats warned, Ukraine’s NATO membership was a ‘red line’ for Russia. Yet successive US presidents and EU leaders seemed wilfully oblivious to such warnings. Then came the Maidan Revolution of 2014, which led to the fall of the Moscow-backed president, Viktor Yanukovych, and prompted Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in the Donbas.

The complacent and often geopolitically illiterate actions of Western political elites undoubtedly helped to create the conditions in which the war in Ukraine became all too possible. If nothing else, they handed Putin a pretext to invade. But it is Moscow that bears responsibility for starting the war on that fateful day. Putin and his military leaders weren’t forced to act. They weren’t put in an impossible situation. If anything, by the beginning of the 2020s, an economically stagnant and politically fractured Western alliance was far less of a threat to Russia than at any point in the past three decades. Even NATO’s promises to make Ukraine a member rang increasingly hollow.

But then the Kremlin wasn’t responding to Western strength. It was taking advantage of what it perceived as its weakness – especially after America’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. From March 2021 onwards, Russia built up its military forces against Ukraine, adding large numbers of troops along its borders. This served mainly as a warning to Ukraine and its would-be Western suitors, while simultaneously preparing the ground for an invasion, should Putin decide to strike.

Looking back at the months preceding the announcement of the ‘special military operation’, it seems clear in retrospect that a war was coming. At the time, few inside and outside Ukraine actually thought Putin would do something quite so reckless and destructive. In late January 2022, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky gave a press conference attacking ‘Western alarmism’ over Russia’s military build-up. But then, a few weeks later, on 24 February 2022, Putin launched his full-scale invasion.

This wasn’t ‘a minor incursion’ into Ukraine, something that then US president Joe Biden said in January 2022 he would tolerate (a reminder that America was hardly a full-throated backer of Ukrainian sovereignty). This was an attempt to conquer and subjugate an entire nation.

Three years ago, as Russia’s long military columns slowly made their way westwards, an airborne assault team quickly moved on Kyiv. Its objective was to secure the Antonov Airport on Kyiv’s outskirts so as to allow more troops to land and take the capital. At the same time, Russian special-forces units were tasked with ‘liquidating’ Zelensky and other higher-ups.

Moscow expected the invasion to be over quickly – officers were told to pack their dress uniforms and medals in anticipation of military parades in the soon-to-be conquered Kyiv. It assumed the Ukrainian government would be removed within days, hours even, and that large swathes of Ukraine would soon be under the Russian army’s control. It also anticipated that the sheer speed of the operation, like that conducted during the annexation of Crimea in 2014, would be such that resistant elements of the population wouldn’t have time to put up a fight. The Kremlin believed that the rest of Ukraine would then simply acquiesce out of apathy. Pro-Russian factions from within the Ukrainian parliament could then assume control of the executive, while regional and local authorities would be easily coerced – largely by cutting off electricity and water supplies to restive areas.

That was Russia’s plan. That was what it intended to do to Ukraine. It wanted to destroy it as a nation. It wanted to subject its 40million inhabitants to de facto Kremlin rule. And it thought it could do so easily.

To suggest, as some in the West do today, that Ukraine’s war against Russia has been a pointless, bloody struggle – perhaps puppeteered by Washington – is to completely ignore Moscow’s and Ukraine’s agency. From the moment Russia launched its brutal, full-scale assault, Ukrainians have been fighting for their nation’s very existence.

Few in Moscow, or indeed in the West, expected Ukraine to put up much resistance. US military chief Mark Milley thought Kyiv would fall within 72 hours. America allegedly even offered Zelensky a chance to evacuate a couple of days after the invasion.

But both Moscow and Washington had made a major misjudgement – not just of Zelensky himself, but of the vast majority of his fellow citizens, too. They had assumed that Ukraine was too weak, corrupt and divided to withstand the might of the Russian army. They had assumed that Zelensky, whose domestic popularity had slumped during 2021, would rather fly than fight. Above all, they assumed that, in the words of Putin from 2022, ‘there was no Ukraine’. That Ukrainians had no real sense of nationhood. Apparently, they would therefore be willing to accept a life lived under Moscow’s thumb, or at least wouldn’t have the stomach to fight for their national independence.

For Russia, this was to prove a fatal misjudgement. What was meant to be a rapid, days-long conquest turned out to be nothing of the sort. As Putin reportedly admitted to Israel’s then prime minister, Naftali Bennett, shortly after the invasion, Ukrainians were tougher ‘than I was told’, adding ‘this will probably be much more difficult than we thought’.

Indeed, after fierce Ukrainian resistance throughout February and March, Russian forces were forced to retreat from Kyiv at the beginning of April. A month later, Russian troops were pushed out of the second-largest city, Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine. In the autumn of 2022, the Ukrainian military made spectacular gains, retaking some 6,000 square kilometres in a matter of days. Later, they retook Kherson, the only regional capital Russia still held.

Ukrainians’ achievement here should not be erased, dismissed or downplayed. In the immediate aftermath of its invasion, Russia occupied nearly 30 per cent of Ukraine, including territory it had taken in 2014. By the end of 2022, Russia held less than 20 per cent, just 10 per cent more than it had held since 2014. Since that point, little has changed. Despite Russia’s much larger military resources, it has made only marginal territorial gains.

There is no doubting the sheer devastation Russia’s invasion has caused. Hundreds of thousands have lost their lives on both sides, and many cities, towns and villages in Ukraine’s east have been reduced to ruins. But to suggest, as Trump and others have done, that Ukraine should have ‘struck a deal’ and put a stop to this ‘moronic war’, as one commentator calls it, misses the point. Moscow set out to subordinate a nation to its will. To destroy an entire people’s way of life. Surrender, acquiescence, even ‘striking a deal’ was not an option. That is why Ukrainians had to fight and resist. It wasn’t a war for nothing – it was a war, then as now, for national survival.

As one senior Ukrainian official recalled recently, Putin ‘didn’t think Ukraine would fight’. He didn’t think that Ukraine really existed as something its citizens would want to fight for. Three years on, the Ukrainians have proven him very wrong.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.