Invasion of Ukraine

The Russian invasion of Ukraine began on Thursday morning with the shelling of several cities, including the capital, Kyiv.

Within hours, Russian troops and tanks had entered the country. By the end of the first day, Ukraine said at least 137 of its soldiers and civilians had been killed. The invasion, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin, is “to defend people who for eight years are suffering persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime”, a reference to two breakaway regions of Ukraine. Kyiv and all Western governments say the separatist movements in these regions are directly supported by Russia, though Moscow denies the accusation. Before the invasion began, Russia granted full recognition to the two regions as independent states. Putin also called Ukraine’s leadership a “Nazi” regime, even though President Volodymyr Zelensky is a Jew who has proudly referenced his grandfather’s military service for the Soviet Union against Hitler’s regime.

Russia’s actions towards Ukraine have been anything but peaceful since 2014 when it began supporting the separatists by sending what Moscow called “peacekeepers”. Soon after, Russian troops annexed Crimea, which Putin has long claimed was “wrongly” given to Ukraine by Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev, who was ethnically Ukrainian. Since then, it has regularly held massive military exercises along the border, culminating in the deployment of almost 200,000 troops at the border earlier this year.

However, the rhetoric turned genuinely threatening when Putin denied Ukrainian statehood in a speech earlier this week. “Ukraine actually never had stable traditions of real statehood,” he said, a denial of the rich history of the people and the region, which actually predates Tsarist Russia by several hundred years before the area was conquered and re-conquered by several parties, including the Ottomans and Russia. However, Putin has reportedly had it in for Ukraine since at least 2010, when a Ukrainian court declared former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin — who Putin has publically praised — guilty of genocide over his role in the Holodomor famine of the 1930s, which killed millions of Ukrainians.

Some reports also suggest that Putin’s closest advisers were not on board with the invasion, concerned that new sanctions could cause Russia’s economy to collapse. But despite this, the invasion is now a reality, and if an all-out attack follows, the consequences for Europe will be the worst humanitarian crisis on the continent since World War II.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 26^th, 2022.

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