Why did Putin's Russia invade Ukraine?
On February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered up to 200,000 troops into Ukraine with the intention of capturing the country's capital, Kyiv, within days, toppling its pro-Western government, and regaining Ukraine's influence.
Despite Putin's failure, Russia now controls 5% of Ukraine.
President Donald Trump of the United States has been advocating for a peace agreement. However, despite multiple rounds of negotiations with Ukrainian and Russian negotiating teams and a meeting with Putin in Alaska in August of last year, no significant progress has been made.
Moscow still insists that Ukraine cede its sovereign territory, which Kyiv finds intolerable.
Why did Putin invade Ukraine?
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.
Putin has acknowledged the independence of the breakaway republics. He then claimed that the inhabitants there, many of whom spoke Russian, required protection from the Kyiv "government" as the assault got underway.
Putin urged the Ukrainian military to "take power into your own hands" and go after the "gangs of drug addicts and neo-Nazis" in charge of the administration a day later.
He went on to include maintaining Ukraine's neutrality as an additional goal. He charged that NATO, the Western defense alliance, was attempting to establish a presence in Ukraine in order to move its forces closer to Russia's borders.
Asserting that "modern Ukraine was totally built by Russia" following the communist revolution in 1917, the Russian leader has long questioned Ukraine's legitimacy.
He even proposed that "Russians and Ukrainians were one people" as early as the late ninth century in a lengthy essay from 2021. He claimed that Ukraine was a "manufactured state" to US TV talk show presenter Tucker Carlson in 2024.
Many people think that the invasion was intended to destroy the state of Ukraine because of their remarks.
"Denazification is necessarily also de-Ukrainization," according to Russia's state-run Ria news agency, which seemed to link the invasion's declared objective to the idea of erasing Ukraine.
In actuality, Ukrainian identity and culture have existed for centuries apart from Russia.
