A week into the biggest military mobilization in Europe since World War II, here’s a guide to how it came about, and what’s at stake for Russia, the U.S. and NATO.
A Ukrainian soldier patrolling the front lines in December. Tensions between Ukraine and Russia have been simmering since 2014.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
By Dan Bilefsky, Richard Pérez-Peña and Eric Nagourney
March 2, 2022
It felt like a scene from the Cold War, a perilous episode from a bygone era. An unpredictable Russian leader was amassing troops and tanks on a neighbor’s border. There was fear of a bloody East-West conflagration.
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Then the cold war turned hot: Vladimir Putin ordered Russian forces to invade Ukraine. The repercussions were immediate, and far-reaching.
In the days ahead of the invasion, even as Russian forces reached an estimated strength of 190,000, and even as the United States warned in increasingly dire tones that a military strike appeared inevitable, Mr. Putin was claiming that he was open to
Now, the largest mobilization of forces Europe has seen since 1945 is underway, with Ukrainian soldiers and civilian resistance fighters battling to fend off a Russian assault on multiple fronts.
On Monday, talks began between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Belarus, a close ally of Moscow’s, but more movement took place on the battlefield than at the negotiating table. A 17-mile-long Russian convoy was reported making its way toward the capital, Kyiv. And in a chilling escalation, a barrage of Russian rockets hit a residential neighborhood in Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, where at least nine civilians were killed and dozens injured.
Outside observers speculated that Mr. Putin, frustrated by the surprisingly slow advance of his forces — which greatly outmatch Ukraine’s but have faced stiff resistance from Ukrainian soldiers and civilians alike — may have grown impatient and decided to intensify the military barrage. That could signal more civilian casualties ahead, they said.
The number of refugees who have fled the country has topped half a million. And Mr. Putin appears intent on capturing the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, toppling Ukraine’s democratically elected government, and subsuming the country into Russia’s orbit.
The invasion threatens to destabilize the already volatile post-Soviet region, with serious consequences for the security structure that has governed Europe since the 1990s.Mr. Putin has long lamented the loss of Ukraine and other republics when the Soviet Union broke apart. Now, diminishing NATO, the military alliance that helped keep the Soviets in check, may be his real mission. Before invading, Russia made a list of far-reaching demands to reshape that structure — positions NATO and the United States rejected.
Here is a look at how the world got here.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO expanded eastward, eventually taking in most of the European nations that had been in the Communist sphere. The Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, once parts of the Soviet Union, joined NATO, as did Poland, Romania and others.
As a result, NATO moved hundreds of miles closer to Moscow, directly bordering Russia. And in 2008, it stated that it planned — some day — to enroll Ukraine, though that is still seen as a far-off prospect.
Mr. Putin has described the Soviet disintegration as a catastrophe that robbed Russia of its rightful place among the world’s great powers and put it at the mercy of a predatory West. He has spent his 22 years in power rebuilding Russia’s military and reasserting its geopolitical clout.
The Russian president calls NATO’s expansion menacing, and the prospect of Ukraine joining it a major threat to his country. As Russia has grown more assertive and stronger militarily, his complaints about NATO have grown more strident. He has repeatedly invoked the specter of American ballistic missiles and combat forces in Ukraine, though U.S., Ukrainian and NATO officials insist there are none.
Mr. Putin has also insisted that Ukraine and Belarus are fundamentally parts of Russia, culturally and historically. He holds considerable sway over Belarus, and talks about some form of reunification with Russia have gone on for years.
But East-West relations worsened drastically in early 2014, when mass protests in Ukraine forced out a president closely allied with Mr. Putin. Russia swiftly invaded and annexed Crimea, part of Ukraine. Moscow also fomented a separatist rebellion that took control of part of the Donbas region of Ukraine, in a war that still grinds on, having killed more than 13,000 people.
Mr. Putin at his annual news conference in Moscow, on Dec. 23. He has increasingly portrayed NATO’s eastward expansion as an unacceptable threat to his country.Credit...Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press
Mr. Putin appears intent on winding back the clock more than 30 years, establishing a broad, Russian-dominated security zone resembling the power Moscow wielded in Soviet days. Now 69 years old and possibly edging toward the twilight of his political career, he clearly wants to draw Ukraine, a nation of 44 million people, back into Russia’s sphere of influence.
Russia presented NATO and the United States in December with a set of written demands that it said were needed to ensure its security. Foremost among them are a guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO, that NATO draw down its forces in the Eastern European countries that have already joined, and that the 2015 cease-fire in Ukraine be implemented — though Moscow and Kyiv disagree sharply on what that would mean.
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