It wasn't just a sudden explosion on a Tuesday. Honestly, if you look back at the early hours of February 24, 2022, the world watched in this weird, paralyzed state of shock, even though the satellite images had been screaming warnings for months. Missiles began thudding into Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa. People woke up to the sound of windows rattling. The Russia Ukraine war started not as a localized skirmish, but as the largest conventional military attack on a European state since the dark days of 1945.
But why?
People love simple answers. They want to point at one map or one speech and say, "There, that's the reason." It’s never that clean. Vladimir Putin sat in front of a camera and gave a rambling, hour-long lecture on history before the tanks crossed the border. He claimed Ukraine wasn't a real country. He talked about "de-nazification," a term that historians and world leaders like Volodymyr Zelenskyy—who is Jewish and lost family in the Holocaust—rightly called absurd.
The NATO obsession and the buffer state myth
You've probably heard the argument that this is all about NATO. Russia has spent decades grumbling about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization moving eastward. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, countries like Poland, Estonia, and Latvia joined the alliance. To the Kremlin, this felt like an enclosure. They view Ukraine as a "red line."
If you ask a realist scholar like John Mearsheimer, he’ll tell you that the West’s attempt to turn Ukraine into a Western bulwark on Russia’s border is what provoked the bear. It's a controversial take. Many others argue that this ignores the "agency" of Ukrainians themselves. Why shouldn't a sovereign nation get to choose its own friends?
The tension didn't start in 2022. It didn't even start in 2021. You have to go back to 2014. That’s the real pivot point. The Maidan Revolution—or the Revolution of Dignity—saw protesters braving sniper fire in Kyiv to oust a pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. He fled to Russia. In response, Putin seized Crimea. He also backed separatists in the Donbas region. For eight years, a "low-intensity" war simmered there. People died every week. The world mostly stopped paying attention until the full-scale invasion turned the simmer into a wildfire.
What the history books get wrong about the "Beginning"
When we talk about how the Russia Ukraine war started, we usually ignore the cultural erasure aspect. This isn't just about borders or missiles. It is deeply personal for Putin. He wrote a 5,000-word essay in 2021 titled "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians." In it, he basically argues that Ukrainians and Russians are "one people."
Imagine someone telling you that your house actually belongs to them because your great-grandparents were cousins. It’s a messy, colonial mindset.
Ukrainians see it differently. For them, the war started as a fight for survival and identity. The 1930s Holodomor—a man-made famine under Stalin that killed millions of Ukrainians—is etched into their collective memory. They aren't just fighting for a flag; they're fighting to not be erased again. This psychological gap is huge. It’s why the Russian military expected to be greeted with flowers and instead met Javelin missiles and Molotov cocktails.
The energy game and the money trail
Money. It always comes back to money, doesn't it?
Ukraine sits on massive deposits of natural gas, especially in the Black Sea shelf and the Donbas. Before the 2022 invasion, Europe was effectively addicted to Russian gas. Nord Stream 2, a massive pipeline project, was supposed to bypass Ukraine entirely, stripping Kyiv of billions in transit fees.
But there's a flip side. If Ukraine became a stable, Western-aligned democracy, it could have eventually competed with Russia as an energy supplier to Europe. That’s a direct threat to the Kremlin’s "gas station" economy.
When the Russia Ukraine war started, the global economy took a massive hit. Bread prices in Egypt spiked because Ukraine is the "breadbasket of Europe." Gas prices in California went through the roof. It’s a reminder that a trench in Bakhmut is connected to your local grocery store shelf by a thousand invisible threads.
Miscalculations and the "Three-Day War" that wasn't
Russian intelligence—the FSB—reportedly told Putin that the Ukrainian government would collapse in 72 hours. They were wrong. Spectators expected the Russian Air Force to dominate the skies within hours. They didn't.
Instead, we saw the "Ghost of Kyiv" legends and the sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet. These stories, some real and some slightly mythologized for morale, changed the narrative. The West, which initially offered Zelenskyy an evacuation (his famous "I need ammunition, not a ride" response), suddenly realized Ukraine could actually win—or at least, not lose immediately.
This changed everything. High-tech weaponry started flowing in. HIMARS, Leopards, Abrams tanks. What started as a "Special Military Operation" morphed into a grinding war of attrition.
What to watch for now
The situation is incredibly fluid. We’ve seen the front lines freeze, then shatter, then freeze again. There is no simple exit ramp. Russia has formally "annexed" four regions—Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia—even though they don't fully control all of them. Ukraine refuses to cede an inch of land.
It's a stalemate of blood and iron.
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Actionable Insights for Following the Conflict:
- Diversify your news intake: Avoid relying solely on social media clips. Follow outlets with on-the-ground reporters like The Kyiv Independent, Reuters, or The Associated Press. Use tools like Liveuamap to see real-time shifts in territory, but take every claim with a grain of salt until verified.
- Watch the "Global South": The war isn't just a NATO vs. Russia thing. Pay attention to how India, China, and Brazil navigate their relationships with Moscow. Their economic support (or lack thereof) is what keeps the Russian war machine running.
- Understand the "War of Attrition": We are past the era of lightning-fast maneuvers. This is now about industrial capacity. Who can build more shells? Who can recruit more soldiers? Monitoring the defense production stats of the EU and the US versus Russia’s domestic production and North Korean shipments is the best way to predict the next two years.
- Prepare for long-term shifts: Even if the shooting stops tomorrow, the geopolitical map has changed forever. Finland and Sweden are in NATO. Europe is decoupling from Russian energy. Ukraine is rebuilding its entire society on a Western model. There is no going back to February 23, 2022.
The day the Russia Ukraine war started was the day the post-Cold War era finally died. We are in a new, much more volatile world now. Staying informed isn't just about knowing who took which village; it's about understanding the seismic shifts in power that will define the rest of the 21st century.