The war, from the run-up in 2020 to today

Russia attacked its neighbour without provocation, and has kept at it for years. These are the turning points, in order. For today’s news, see the front page.

The war did not start in 2022. In February–March 2014 Russian soldiers without insignia seized Crimea and Russia annexed it after a sham referendum. That spring Russia started a war in the Donbas through proxies, Russian officers and Russian weapons. On 17 July 2014 a Russian Buk missile shot down MH17 over eastern Ukraine: 298 people killed, 196 of them Dutch. Read MH17: what the investigation proved.

2020–2021: the run-up

  • August 2020: Lukashenko claims victory in a rigged election in Belarus and crushes the protests with Moscow’s backing. Belarus becomes the staging ground for the attack on Kyiv 18 months later. The same month Russia’s opposition leader Alexei Navalny is poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok.
  • March–April 2021: Russia masses more than 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders and in occupied Crimea, the biggest build-up since 2014. Moscow calls it an exercise; most of the equipment stays.
  • 12 July 2021: Putin publishes his essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”: Ukraine, he writes, is not a real nation.
  • Autumn 2021: the build-up resumes. Western intelligence warns of an invasion; Moscow calls that “hysteria”. By February up to 190,000 Russian troops surround Ukraine on three sides.
  • 17 December 2021: Russia publishes draft treaties demanding that NATO pull its forces back from every country that joined after 1997 and promise never to admit Ukraine. Read Russia’s excuses for the war.
  • January 2022: talks in Geneva, Brussels and Vienna go nowhere. Russia asked for what it knew would be refused.
  • 10–20 February 2022: about 30,000 Russian troops hold the “Allied Resolve” exercise in Belarus, close to Kyiv. When it ends, they stay.

2022: the invasion

  • 21 February: Putin recognises the Russian-run “people’s republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states and tells the world Ukraine is not a real country.
  • 24 February: Russia invades from the north (also through Belarus), the east and the south. Missiles hit cities all over Ukraine. The plan is to take Kyiv in days and replace the elected government. Zelensky refuses to leave Kyiv; he reportedly tells the US “I need ammunition, not a ride.”
  • 2 March: Kherson falls, the only regional capital Russia takes in the whole invasion.
  • 4 March: Russian troops shell and seize the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe. They still hold it.
  • 16 March: Russia bombs the Mariupol drama theatre, where hundreds of civilians shelter under the word “CHILDREN” painted in huge letters on the ground outside.
  • End of March: the attack on Kyiv has failed. Russia pulls out of the north.
  • Early April: the liberated suburbs show what occupation means. In Bucha hundreds of civilians were murdered, many with their hands tied. On 8 April a missile kills more than 60 people waiting for evacuation trains at Kramatorsk station.
  • 14 April: Ukraine sinks the Moskva, flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
  • 20 May: the last defenders of the Azovstal steelworks surrender. Mariupol, a city of 430,000, is destroyed; the dead number in the thousands.
  • 23 June: the EU makes Ukraine a candidate member.
  • 22 July: the Black Sea Grain Initiative lets Ukrainian grain ships sail again.
  • September: a lightning Ukrainian counter-offensive frees almost the whole Kharkiv region. In Izium investigators exhume hundreds of bodies. On 21 September Putin orders mobilisation; hundreds of thousands of Russian men flee abroad.
  • 30 September: after staged “referendums” Russia claims to annex four Ukrainian regions (Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson), none of which it fully controls.
  • 10 October: the start of a winter of missile and drone strikes on Ukraine’s power stations and grid, meant to freeze civilians.
  • 8 October: a truck bomb damages the Kerch bridge that Russia built to occupied Crimea.
  • 11 November: Ukraine liberates Kherson city.

2023: the long front

  • 14 January: a Russian Kh-22 missile hits an apartment block in Dnipro: 46 dead, six of them children.
  • January: Germany, the US and the UK agree to send main battle tanks.
  • 17 March: the International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. Read War crimes: the evidence.
  • 20 May: after ten months of slaughter, Wagner mercenaries take the ruins of Bakhmut.
  • 6 June: the Kakhovka dam, held by Russia, is blown up. Towns down the Dnipro flood.
  • June–autumn: Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the south runs into deep minefields and gains little ground.
  • 23–24 June: Wagner boss Prigozhin mutinies and marches on Moscow, then stops. Two months later he dies when his plane falls out of the sky.
  • 17 July: Russia quits the grain deal. Ukraine opens its own sea corridor anyway, and drives the Black Sea Fleet out of the western Black Sea with missiles and sea drones.
  • August: the Netherlands and Denmark lead the coalition that will give Ukraine F-16 fighter jets.
  • 5 October: a Russian missile hits a wake in the village of Hroza, near Kharkiv: more than 50 dead.
  • 14 December: the EU opens accession talks with Ukraine.

2024: Russia grinds forward

  • 16 February: Alexei Navalny, Putin’s best-known opponent, dies in an Arctic prison camp. The next day Russia takes Avdiivka.
  • February–April: US aid is blocked in Congress for months. Ukraine rations shells while Russia fires several times as many. On 24 April the aid finally passes.
  • May: Russia opens a new front north of Kharkiv. On 25 May guided bombs hit the Epicentr DIY store in Kharkiv on a Saturday afternoon: at least 18 dead.
  • 8 July: a Russian missile hits Okhmatdyt, Ukraine’s biggest children’s hospital, in Kyiv.
  • 6 August: Ukraine invades Russia’s Kursk region, the first foreign occupation of Russian territory since 1945.
  • Summer: the first F-16s fly for Ukraine.
  • October–November: North Korean troops arrive to fight for Russia in Kursk. On 21 November Russia fires a new intermediate-range missile, “Oreshnik”, at Dnipro.

2025: talks while the bombs fall

  • 1 January: Russian gas stops flowing to Europe through Ukraine.
  • 28 February: Zelensky is berated by Trump and Vance in the Oval Office. The US briefly cuts weapons and intelligence. On 11 March Ukraine accepts a US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire; Russia does not.
  • March–April: Ukraine is pushed out of most of the Kursk region.
  • 13 April: a Russian ballistic missile strike on the centre of Sumy on Palm Sunday kills 35 people.
  • 16 May: the first direct Russian–Ukrainian talks since 2022, in Istanbul, produce a prisoner exchange and no ceasefire.
  • 1 June: Operation Spiderweb: Ukrainian drones hidden in trucks deep inside Russia hit strategic bombers at airbases thousands of kilometres from the front.
  • 24–25 June: at the NATO summit in The Hague, allies promise to spend 5% of GDP on defence, with Russia named as the long-term threat.
  • 15 August: Trump meets Putin in Alaska. Red carpet, no ceasefire.
  • 10 September: Russian drones cross into Poland; NATO jets shoot them down. Russian drones and fighter jets violate the airspace of Romania and Estonia; unidentified drones shut airports in Denmark.
  • 22 October: the US puts sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s two biggest oil companies.
  • November: a US 28-point peace plan leaks. It would make Ukraine hand over the parts of Donetsk it still holds, land Russia has failed to conquer in more than three years. Europe and Ukraine write counter-proposals; talks follow in Geneva. On 1 December Russia claims it has taken Pokrovsk; Ukraine says it still holds the north of the city.
  • 18–19 December: EU leaders agree a €90 billion loan to keep Ukraine going in 2026–2027. Russia’s €210 billion of central bank assets in the EU stay frozen until Moscow pays for the damage.
  • Winter: between December and February Russia carries out 15 large-scale strikes on Ukraine’s power system, more than three times as many as in earlier winters. On 14 January Zelensky declares an emergency in the energy sector.

2026: talks, bombs and a war elsewhere

  • 8–9 January: Russia fires its new Oreshnik missile for the second time, this time at the Lviv region near the Polish border.
  • 23–24 January and 4–5 February: the first direct talks between the US, Ukraine and Russia, in Abu Dhabi. No agreement; territory in the east is the sticking point. Russian strikes on the power grid go on during the talks.
  • February: after more than a year and a half of fighting, Russia holds the ruins of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad, and takes Huliaipole.
  • 28 February: the US and Israel go to war with Iran. The war swallows American attention and Patriot air-defence missiles, the interceptors Ukraine needs against Russian ballistic missiles.
  • April: Hungary drops its veto and the EU approves the €90 billion loan and its 20th sanctions package (23 April). Ukrainian drones hit refineries and oil terminals across Russia.
  • 14 May: in Russia’s biggest air attack of the war, a cruise missile hits a nine-storey block of flats in Kyiv: 24 dead, among them three children.
  • 30 June: Ukraine signs for 16 Swedish Gripen E fighter jets.
  • 2 July: a Russian attack on Kyiv kills 31 people; four days later Ukraine cannot shoot down a single one of 23 ballistic missiles because it has run out of Patriot interceptors.
  • 21 July: after a week of street protests over the sacking of defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov, Zelensky dismisses commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi and appoints Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi.
  • 18 September: Trump signs the Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act: sanctions on Putin himself, Russian banks and the shadow fleet, and tariffs of up to 100% on the biggest buyers of Russian oil and gas.
  • 8 October: a Russian glide bomb hits two city buses in Kramatorsk: 33 dead.
  • October: US envoys Witkoff and Kushner meet Zelensky in Oslo (20 October) and Putin in St. Petersburg (21 October). Russia frees an American prisoner; new talks are expected in November.

Now

Talks start and stop, the front moves slowly, and the bombing of Ukrainian cities has not stopped. Follow it day by day on the front page and in the archive.

The cost

  • Civilians: by the end of 2025 the UN had verified nearly 14,000 civilians killed in Ukraine since February 2022, and says the real number is considerably higher. The dead of Mariupol are not fully counted.
  • Soldiers: hundreds of thousands killed and wounded on both sides. Russia throws its men at the front in “meat assaults” on a scale not seen in Europe since 1945.
  • Children: Ukraine has identified more than 19,500 children deported to Russia or deeper into occupied territory. By late 2024 only about 1,000 had been brought back.
  • Refugees: millions of Ukrainians fled abroad, many of them to the EU, including the Netherlands.

Sources