What started Russia-Ukraine war, why did Russia attack Ukraine?

How it all started

While there had been tensions between Russia and Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, for a long time, the situation began getting out of control in early 2021. In January last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged US President Joe Biden to let Ukraine join NATO.

After Russia spent several weeks building up a sizable military force along its border with Ukraine and in neighboring Belarus, Russian leader Vladimir Putin launched what Ukrainian officials described as a “full-scale invasion” of the country. It marked start of a new, grim chapter on top of an eight-year-long war in the east that has already claimed thousands of lives.

“Peace on our continent has been shattered,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the morning following the invasion. “We now have war in Europe on a scale and of a type we thought belonged to history.”

A brief summary of a long history
Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union for most of the 20th century, and much of its territory had been part of the Russian Empire before that.

Ukraine declared its independence after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. At the time, a substantial portion of the Soviet nuclear arsenal was housed within Ukraine’s borders, and it agreed to transfer those weapons to Russia.

In recent years, Ukraine’s democratically elected government has grown closer to Western Europe, even as cultural ties to Russia persist, especially in the nation’s east.

Now, as Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.N. told CBS News’ Pamela Falk, Putin’s ambition to “restore the Russian Empire” has moved beyond the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, which his forces seized in 2014.

Russia has invaded Ukraine before
Russian forces invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014, and Putin claimed the assault was merely a defense of ethnic Russians who live in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, who’ve never supported the country’s relatively new, pro-Western government.

But Putin used the invasion to very literally claim part of Ukraine for Russia, unilaterally annexing the Crimean Peninsula. The annexation is not recognized by the international community, but Russia has indisputably controlled the territory since 2014.

Is Ukraine a NATO member?
No. Ukraine has made the quest for NATO membership a cornerstone of its national security policy, and it has refused to back down from that ambition, though even before the current conflict there was no discussion of Ukraine being admitted to the alliance anytime soon.

While many Ukrainians, especially in the country’s east, are pro-Russian, Ukrainians ousted their last pro-Russia president in 2014 and have consistently elected pro-Western politicians since.

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