How the Ukraine war started and how it could end

 Vladimir Putin has claimed "victory will be ours" in Ukraine during a marathon and at times bullish end-of-year press conference, the first since the invasion began in February 2022.

"Bolstered by Kyiv's battlefield struggles and war fatigue in the West," France 24 said, the Russian president, who has declared his intention to run for another term as president next year, "looked relaxed as he brushed off nearly two years of international sanctions and reaffirmed his maximalist goals in Ukraine".

In a four-hour televised Q&A session, described by The Guardian as "an annual cocktail of Kremlin pomp and state TV camp", Putin fielded questions from soldiers beamed in from the frontlines, regional journalists vying for the microphone in a studio and one delivered by an AI-generated version of himself. On the war, he said "there will only be peace in Ukraine when we achieve our aims", which he reiterated as the "denazification of Ukraine, its demilitarisation and neutral status".

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

This "hardline stance" effectively demands Ukraine's "unconditional surrender", said The Guardian. As Tatiana Stanovaya, an analyst at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, put it: "Putin just made a peace proposal to the west on the conditions of Ukraine's total capitulation."

It comes as his forces are on the "front foot" in the war in Ukraine, reported The Telegraph, and the Russian leader is "buoyed by squabbling in the West over funding for Kyiv".

With Foreign Policy reporting "increasing behind-the-scenes debate about a possible compromise to end or freeze the war", we look at how both sides got to this point and what could happen next.

 Prelude to conflict

 Putin's invasion of Ukraine has dragged on for nearly two years, upending three decades of post-Cold War orthodoxy and re-shaping the security map of Europe forever.

But the groundwork for the conflict had been laid well before then.

Putin had long made clear his belief that Ukraine is an illegitimate state, claiming in an essay published last year that Russians and Ukrainians, along with Belarusians, are one people, belonging to what was historically known as the “All-Russian Nation”.

In the essay, titled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, Putin explicitly laid out his argument that Ukraine has no right to call itself an independent nation. "The formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia", he argued, is equivalent to the use of weapons of mass destruction against Russians.

Watch On

It was with this logic that Putin justified the 2014 annexation of Crimea, as well as the long-running conflict between Kremlin-backed proxies in the Donbas region. That conflict, fought on Ukrainian soil, claimed 14,000 lives between 2014 and 2022.

Then, in a speech delivered days before February 2022's invasion, Putin attacked the notion of Ukrainian statehood in an "angry" and "dismissive" speech delivered from the Kremlin, said Associated Press editor-at-large John Daniszewski. Putin outlined a "version of Ukraine's history" in which the territory now controlled by Kyiv was always part of Russia – and was stolen from mainland Russia by the Bolsheviks following the formation of the Soviet Union.

But "while that serves his purpose, it is also a fiction" that denies Ukraine's "own 1,000-year history", Daniszewski said. World leaders dismissed Putin's history lesson, but it nonetheless laid the "groundwork for war", he added.

 How the war started 

 On 21 February, Putin signed a decree recognising the Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republics, the two self-proclaimed states controlled by pro-Russian separatist forces in Donbas. No other country recognised their independence at the time. He then deployed Russian troops to the area, arguing that they were "peacekeepers" seeking to avoid a "genocide" of Russians living in the region. Ukraine later took Russia to the International Court of Justice "for having launched an invasion on the pretext of false claims of genocide perpetrated against the country's Russian speakers", The Guardian reported.

What followed was an assault on three fronts, with Russian troops flooding over into Ukrainian territory from annexed Crimea, the separatist-controlled regions in the east and Belarus, which shares a border to the north of Ukraine. Putin justified this attack by arguing that Nato expansion to the east threatened Russian national security, even though Ukraine is not a Nato member and was not likely to join the alliance in the near future. He also claimed to be "demilitarising" and "denazifying" the country, which is led by a democratically elected Jewish president.

He had intended the invasion to be swift, with troops quickly storming into the capital Kyiv and deposing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's government. But his troops were met with stiff resistance from Ukraine's armed forces, laying the groundwork for the ongoing fighting in several major cities.

 How will the war end? 

 Putin's invasion has not gone to plan. The Kremlin initially hoped that the country would fall quickly to Russia's massive military superiority, but stubborn Ukrainian resistance led the war into stalemate.

In the months that followed, Russian forces tried and failed to take Kyiv, but did occupy large swathes of Ukraine and bombard many others. Ukrainian counter-offensives have reclaimed some territory, but have not been universally successful.

Here are four possible outcomes of the conflict:

 1. 'Victory' for Ukraine

 Kyiv has been clear that its objective is to expel Russian troops from every inch of its territory, including Crimea and the self-proclaimed Donbas 'republics' annexed by Russia. Some Ukrainian officials have even discussed forcing Russia to pay reparations and putting its commanders – up to and including Putin – in the dock of an international war crimes tribunal.

Having surprised many by successfully defending against an initial Russian invasion before recapturing swathes of occupied territory at the end of 2022, it had been hoped 2023 would bring a decisive battlefield breakthrough for Ukraine that would effectively end the war militarily.

Yet the much-touted counteroffensive launched in late spring failed to deliver any major territorial gains for Ukrainian forces and victory – as defined by Kyiv – seems further away than at any time in the past year.

The "real problem we in the West face is not fatigue but our lack of strategic patience", wrote Kristine Berzina and Jackson Janes for the German Marshall Fund (GMF). "Full-scale wars launched by a major world power such as Russia, whose leader sees victory as vital to his survival, cannot be resolved on a timeline that meets our increasingly fleeting Western attention spans."

Ukraine may not have recovered all its lost lands, said Owen Matthews in The Spectator, "but it has already won the war in many other ways".

Putin occupies 18% of Ukrainian territory but "strategically the war has been disastrous", Matthews argued. Nato has expanded to include Finland and soon Sweden; Europe has dramatically increased defence spending; Ukraine’s military has become "the most powerful in Europe"; and the EU is about to announce that Ukraine is an official candidate for membership.

It may not succeed in driving Russian forces completely back across its border but total victory on the battlefield may not be needed to secure Ukraine's long-term future.

 2. Stalemate

 As the war approaches its third winter, "there is still no end in sight", said Foreign Policy, with the "drip feed" of Western military aid "enough for Ukraine to keep fighting but insufficient to liberate all its territory".

In a controversial interview with The Economist in November, Ukraine's commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, admitted that the war had more or less reached a standstill and predicted there would "most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough" unless a significant technological change occurred on the battlefield.

Record defence spending for next year announced by Russia – exceeding 6% of GDP for the first time since the end of the Soviet Union – shows that the Kremlin has "no intention of ending its war against Ukraine anytime soon", said the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank.

This might lead to a "de facto freezing of the conflict", said Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times (FT). In this scenario, "Ukraine would move into a mainly defensive posture and hold off further Russian advances. The fighting would never stop completely – but it would dwindle." 

This would, though, suit neither side politically, and the potential for an open-ended conflict with no clear definition of victory would increase pressure on Ukraine from its international allies to "cut a deal with the Kremlin", The Washington Post reported.

 3. A negotiated settlement 

 Stalemate on the battlefield could open the door to some kind of negotiated settlement, with "those keeping a close eye on the war believing compromise rather than an outright winner remains the most likely outcome", said the Daily Express.

The problem is that both Zelenskyy and Putin have talked themselves into a corner, said The Washington Post. Neither is willing to accept the other's territorial ambitions.

"Zelenskyy gets a lot of advice on how he can end the war in his country, and most of it pushes in one direction: swap some sovereignty for peace," the paper said. Yet he has repeatedly rejected the idea of Russian forces remaining on what he deems Ukrainian soil, saying the basis for any negotiation would depend on Moscow pulling back its forces to their pre-invasion positions.

For all the talk of a compromise, any meaningful agreement would be "premature for a number of familiar reasons", argued Foreign Policy. First, and perhaps most importantly, "neither side is ready for serious negotiations".

Putin has effectively tied the outcome of the war to his own political fate and he may hope that waning Western support may eventually force Ukraine to the negotiating table. In December, JD Vance, a leading Republican senator touted as a potential running mate for Donald Trump, suggested Ukraine may need to cede land to Russia in order to end the Russian invasion there. It comes as Congress continues to block billions of dollars in US aid to Ukraine.

"While no mainstream Ukrainian politician is yet openly calling for a deal with the Kremlin," said Matthews in The Spectator, "a backlash against Zelensky’s magical thinking is growing".

All this means a formalised partition along existing battle lines "is looking ever more likely", said Jonathan Cook on Middle East Eye. If that occurred, both sides could still claim success. Putin could declare that he has taken additional territory and Ukraine, having "survived as a free and independent country", could claim that it still intends to recover this territory in the future, said Harvard professor and former US defence official Graham Allison in an interview with Radio Free Europe.

 4. Russian 'victory'

 Without new money, "Ukraine's position on the battlefield could deteriorate fast", warned Rachman in the FT.

With Republicans in the US Congress blocking a further $61 billion of emergency support for Ukraine's war effort and Hungarian prime minister and Putin-ally Viktor Orbán holding up additional assistance from the EU, Ukraine has warned it is already being forced to downsize some military operations because of a drop-off in foreign aid.

Ukraine is "already using ammunition faster than partners can produce it", said the BBC. A report by the Estonian defence ministry estimated that Kyiv needed a minimum of 200,000 artillery shells a month "to retain an edge against Russia".

They know "they must secure Western military aid to carry on", reported Reuters, "and that it will be harder with the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza distracting global attention".

In Moscow, Putin has already begun to crow that Ukraine will collapse without outside support and "the fear now must be that while 2023 was the year of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, 2024 will be the year that Russia goes back on the attack", said Rachman.

With his troops again on the offensive in the east, Reuters said Putin "may feel he can escalate Russia's war effort further once, as expected, he has secured another six-year term in the Kremlin in an election next March".

The "worst-case scenario", said Rachman, is that, if Western aid is cut off, Ukraine could be in "serious trouble by the summer".

The West may still step up although much will depend on the outcome of next year's US presidential election. But "in an eagerness to rid itself of this pesky Ukrainian war," GMF warned, it "should not redefine Ukrainian success as a Russian victory that will only set the stage for further land grabs, and potential attacks on NATO allies, in the years to come".