The Russia–Ukraine War

2022–: the largest war in Europe since 1945. The post-Cold-War experiment ended.

The brief

On February 24, 2022, Russian armoured columns crossed Ukrainian borders from three directions — Belarus toward Kyiv, the Donbas, and Crimea — with the apparent intention of taking the capital within days and replacing the Ukrainian government. The column that stalled north of Kyiv became the war's first image. They did not take Kyiv. By 2026, four years later, the war was still grinding on; Russia has formally annexed and partially occupies four Ukrainian provinces — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson — on top of Crimea; well over a million people are dead or wounded on both sides; a country of forty million before the war has become a mobilized frontline society with one of Europe's largest armies; and the post-Cold-War security architecture of the continent has effectively ceased to exist.

The war's deeper causes go back to 1991 and the unsettled question of where Russia ends. Putin portrayed NATO's eastward expansion, and Ukraine's drift westward after the 2014 Maidan revolution, as strategic encirclement; Western governments saw that claim as cover for denying Ukraine the right to choose its alignment. The fear of encirclement was politically real in Moscow; the choice to answer it by invasion, and to make Ukrainian sovereignty conditional, was Moscow's. The 2014 annexation of Crimea and the proxy war in the Donbas were the dress rehearsal; the West's response — limited sanctions, the half-honoured Minsk agreements — imposed costs but did not deter a larger assault. The Kremlin underestimated both the scale of Western sanctions and arms transfers and Ukraine itself: its army and society broke the thrust at Kyiv and turned what appears to have been a rapid regime-change operation into a grinding war of attrition along a front of entrenchments hundreds of kilometres long. It is the largest land war in Europe since 1945, and its shocks ran outward through global energy and food markets — the loss of cheap Russian gas hit Germany's energy-intensive industries hard, and the blockade of Ukrainian grain tightened markets and deepened food insecurity in import-dependent states. The war has remilitarized Europe and triggered Germany's Zeitenwende, accelerated Finland and Sweden into NATO — the opposite of Putin's aim — and demonstrated to every authoritarian state that the West is willing to fund a long war but unwilling to fight one.

Why nowHow this war ends — by negotiated freeze, by Ukrainian victory, by Russian collapse, by exhausted stalemate — will set the terms of European security for the next half-century. Along the entrenched front neither side has the mass to break through cleanly, and drone warfare has rewritten the tactical manual; conscription has been returning and defence budgets climbing from Warsaw to Berlin ever since. The energy and food shocks that rippled out in 2022 reshaped budgets and politics far beyond the battlefield. And the outcome will be read carefully in Beijing, in Tehran, and in Pyongyang as a case study of the costs and benefits of revisionist war — most pointedly over Taiwan.