Why did Putin’s Russia invade Ukraine?published at 09:44 British Summer Time
Paul Kirby
Europe digital editor
When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered up to 200,000 soldiers into Ukraine, his aim was to sweep into the capital, Kyiv, in days, overthrow its pro-Western government and return Ukraine to Russia’s sphere of influence.
Putin failed but, more than three years on, a fifth of Ukrainian territory is in Russian hands.
Image source, ReutersPresident Putin speaking at a security council meeting in February
Launching the biggest European invasion since the end of World War Two, Putin gave a fiery speech on TV declaring his goal was to “demilitarise and denazify” Ukraine.
Russia has repeatedly painted modern Ukraine as a Nazi state, in a crass distortion of history.
Putin had already seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula eight years earlier, after a revolution that ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian president and replaced him with a more pro-Western government.
Putin then triggered a lower-level war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, with pro-Russian proxy forces occupying territory and setting up rebel states supported by Moscow.
But the 2022 invasion was on a different scale.
Image source, MARCUS YAM/LOS ANGELES TIMESUkrainians sought shelter in underground shelters as Russian forces attacked on 24 February 2022
Putin has for years complained about Nato’s eastward expansion as a security threat, and sees any possibility of Ukraine joining the alliance as a major red line.
It is part of Ukraine’s constitution to join the European Union and Nato, but there was no real prospect of this when the full-scale war began.
Putin’s grievance against Nato dates back to 1990, when he claims the West promised not to expand “an inch to the East”.
However that was before the Soviet Union collapsed and it was based on a limited commitment made to then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
