January 14, 2025: The tragedy began eleven years ago on February 27th when Ukrainians demonstrated in the capital Kyiv. This became known as the Euromaidan protests, which ousted pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych because he refused to sign a trade agreement with the European Union or EU. With Yanukovych gone, Ukraine returned to its 2004 Constitution, which was amended in 2019 to include seeking to join the EU and NATO. The Russian response was to invade Ukraine in February 2014 and seize Crimea while Russian soldiers in civilian clothes and pro-Russian locals seized most of the eastern Ukraine Donbas region, This area contained most of two provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk, which local Russians renamed Donetsk People's Republic or DPR and the Luhansk People's Republic or LPR. Russia recognized the two as independent states and began sending in more Russian soldiers dressed as civilians along with more weapons and munitions.

Ukraine quickly mobilized soldiers and volunteer militias to stop the two new republics from expanding. Meanwhile Russia annexed Crimea and made it part of Russia. Thousands of Russians lived in Crimea, where Ukraine had leased the Russian Navy the port of Sebastopol as a base for the Black Sea Fleet. The Russians in the port included members of the Spetsnaz, the Russian special operation force. The Spetsnaz operatives managed the fake referendum that justified Russia annexing Crimea.

Crimea and the Donbas had ethnic Russian minorities that comprised about half the population in these areas. That made it easier for Russia to organize local militias to fight for Russia. Ukrainian Russians who refused were sent to Russia and persuaded to become pro-Russian.

The Russian government and its leader Vladimir Putin has warned the West to not get involved in Ukraine as otherwise Russia would consider using its nuclear weapons to protect Russian interests. This was a frightening development because Russia had, since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 cooperated in dismantling most of its nuclear weapons. The West provided billions in aid and technical assistance to help with this effort. Ukraine also agreed to give up the Soviet nukes it inherited in return for cash and a promise from Russia that Russia would never take advantage of the surrendered Ukrainian nukes to try and regain control of Ukraine.

Russia ignored all the evidence, from inside Russia and Ukraine, that its officials were lying about successful Russian efforts to grab Crimea and Donbas. The rest of the world feared this might lead to a nuclear war. At the very least it has become clear that the Russians felt they had the right to grab territory from neighbors and were willing to see themselves destroyed in a nuclear exchange if the rest of the world did not give in. Eventually this was revealed to be a Russian bluff, even though Putin would regularly threaten to go nuclear if he didn’t get his way.

The low level fighting in Donbas continued from 2014 to 2022 and left about 11,000 dead, 59 percent of them pro-Russian. Over 300,000 Ukrainians were driven from their homes, many of them ending up in refugee camps. The Ukrainian military tried to get organized. Since Ukraine became independent in 1991 the military had been crippled by small budgets, corruption and a general attitude that military effectiveness was not important. Until the 2014 Russian invasion it was believed that the 1994 treaty with Russia and guaranteed by the United States and Britain would be honored and Russia would not invade. When it became obvious that Russia was reneging on that deal it was too late to quickly undo two decades of military mismanagement. There are too few officers who were honest and competent enough to get things done, like buying ammunition, recruiting and training troops and leading them into combat effectively. Despite that, between 2014 and 2022 Ukraine trained troops for combat, organized special counter-terror and urban combat units as quickly as it could and sent them off to Donbas. The United States and NATO provided help unofficially since there was not yet a formal military alliance with Ukraine.

The main problem was that by 2021 Russia had about ten times as many troops as Ukraine and for over a decade has been concentrating on getting theirs trained, equipped and in shape for combat. Ukraine had been at it for less than ten years. Thus when Russia sends in troops, which it did regularly between 2014 and 2022, the less competent Ukrainian forces had a hard time dealing with that. Russia was still reluctant to send in a larger force or one or two combat brigades and still pretended that the Donbas rebels were locals. Most of them were Russians, and most of those were Russian Federal Republic soldiers, including a number of the Spetsnaz operatives that keep rebels organized and functioning. That had been difficult with the Ukrainian August 2014 offensive which caused many of the local separatists to desert. This apparently caused Russia to send in troops rather than risk seeing the pro-Russian rebels crushed.

Russia was feeling a lot more internal opposition as families of Russian soldiers killed or captured inside Ukraine demanded information and explanations from the government. The state-controlled media kept this out of their news coverage but Russians published cell phone videos of the anguished families, and even Russian soldiers, contradicting the official government line that there were no Russian troops in Ukraine. This happened despite the families of dead or missing soldiers being warned to keep quiet, especially when foreign media was involved, about their loss or what they have learned. Some of the few remaining independent TV and radio stations also went public with what was really happening in eastern Ukraine. Hundreds of Russian troops had been killed, wounded or captured in eastern Ukraine and efforts to keep the troops and their families quiet were not working. Among Russians there was a lot of unhappiness with what their government was doing. Even some of the major Russian businessmen urged their government to reconsider. The businessmen, along with government and non-government economists, warned that the sanctions and loss of trust from the rest of the world would do enormous damage to the Russian economy. Senior government officials insisted that the West would back down and leave Ukraine with no choice but to let go of whatever territory Russia wanted. Most Russians were also appalled at their government's threat to use nuclear weapons. Nevertheless the idea of rebuilding the Russian Empire is popular with most Russians, especially older ones.

The 28 nations of the EU were divided on how far to go with EU wide economic sanctions. Some of the smaller nations do not want to suffer the economic pain the trade sanctions would cause them. The major trading nations especially the U.S. and Germany imposed their own sanctions and those hurt Russia the most. Moreover America, Britain and Germany, the major banking countries also made it more difficult for Russian banks to get desperately needed credit. Russia increasingly turned to China for help. But this made many Russian leaders nervous as China could make demands as payback for such aid and do it sooner rather than later. China has long-held territorial claims and much of the Russian Far East and wants more access to Russian markets and technology. Chinese help could cost more than Russia can afford in the long run.

August 23rd 2014 was the 75th anniversary of the secret, for a while Nazi-Soviet treaty in which the two dictatorships agreed to divide up East Europe. Thus when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, so did the Russians and each side knew where to stop and who would have what. Russia then seized the Baltic States and tried to take Finland, which defeated that invasion. This treaty ended in 1941 when Germany reneged and invaded Russia. Europeans don’t like to dwell on the fact that they tried to negotiate with the Nazis and that allowed Germany to take a lot of territory without any interference from the major powers France and Britain. What happened in the late 1930s was happening again in 2014 Ukraine. Not the exact same situation.

In 2014 Germany was one of the pro-Ukraine powers and Russia is not as powerful, relatively, as the Soviet Union was back then. But the fundamentals are the same with a dictatorship pretending to be a democracy using all manner of subterfuge and deceit to justify aggression against a neighbor. In 2014 it was Ukraine but in 2008 Russia went after tiny Georgia and forced them to do what Russia wanted rather than what Georgians wanted. Then as now European nations are reluctant to confront the aggressor. The Russian threat to use their nukes is real, if remote. The fear of economic damage at home, even if it hurts Russia more from the use of sanctions against Russia, is a more immediate excuse to do nothing. Some EU members wanted to do as little as possible for Ukraine to avoid Russian economic retaliation.

Russia is a major trading partner with Western Europe and imposing sanctions caused lost business and unemployment in Europe. For European politicians the memory of what happened in the Great Depression of the 1930s is not as important as getting reelected. Moreover, many European leaders believed their Russian counterparts were desperate and not willing to take the public backlash in Russia if they backed off on Russia’s aggression and allowed Ukraine to keep its territory intact. Russian leader Vladimir Putin has never hidden his contempt for Western leaders and his belief that in a test of wills Russia will win and the West will back off, just as they did in 1939.

The growing list of sanctions against Russia hit the Russian arms industry particularly hard because new Russian weapons depend on Western suppliers for some of the high tech components needed. China took advantage of this by pointing out that China has become a major producer of high-end electronic and mechanical components and could probably replace Western suppliers now unavailable because of the sanctions. While Russia does not buy a lot of foreign weapons it does buy a lot of electronic components from the West. A lot of these items are dual use items that China and other East Asian countries also manufacture a lot of. China initially backed Russian efforts to annex parts of Ukraine. China believes they can replace enough Western suppliers to Russia to create about a billion dollars a year in additional business for Chinese firms.

By September 2014 the Ukrainian army had sent more troops to Donbas to keep defensive operations going. Ukraine also carried out a prisoner swap with Russia, sending back nine Russian paratroopers in return for 63 captured Ukrainian soldiers. Russian leaders were using a new term, New Russia to describe what they were doing in Ukraine and, without saying so, planned to do elsewhere. The objective was to restore the old Russian Empire. It was built by the czars over several centuries, taken over by the communists in the 1920s and then lost by the communists in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. This caused half the Soviet population to leave for newly formed nations. Current Russian leaders, especially Vladimir Putin, are quite explicit in describing this loss of empire as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. Many Russians agree, although most of the people in the 14 new nations created from the wreckage of that empire do not agree. Putin initially called for Ukraine to negotiate autonomy and eventually statehood for Donbas. That would be followed by Donbas asking to join the New Russia.

Ukraine responded by reviving conscription. It was only in 2013 that the always unpopular conscription was eliminated and the military went over to an all-volunteer force. Then came the Russian invasion. Before the end of 2014 over 100,000 young men were to be conscripted. It takes time to train new recruits and Ukraine asked NATO to supply trainers because many of the Ukrainian soldiers who would normally handle that were off fighting the Russians. Ukrainians were also discussing joining NATO, something many Ukrainians opposed in the past because there was fear it would make Russia very angry. That anger is no longer an issue but a reality and belonging to NATO seems one way, although a risky one, to keep the Russians out.

The fighting in Donbas was still going on in 2022 when Russia invaded northern Ukraine, hoping to quickly capture the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. That did not work out and Russia lost most of their modern tanks in that failed offensive. The surviving Russian troops were moved to Donbas, which has been a major front in the continuing Ukraine War.

It’s unclear how this will end. Putin says he will fight a forever war until NATO countries tire of supporting Ukraine and ignore Russia conquering Ukraine. The Ukrainians insist they will keep fighting no matter what. To Ukrainians, the only thing worse than fighting Russians is being ruled by them.