The Russian leader’s initial
aim was to overrun Ukraine and depose its government, ending for good its
desire to join the Western defensive alliance Nato. After a month of failures,
he abandoned his bid to capture the capital Kyiv and turned his ambitions to
Ukraine’s east and south.
Launching the invasion on 24
February he told the Russian people his goal was to “demilitarize and
de-Nazify Ukraine”. His declared aim was to protect people subjected to
what he called eight years of bullying and genocide by Ukraine’s government.
Another objective was soon added: ensuring Ukraine’s neutral status.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
spoke of freeing Ukraine from oppression while foreign intelligence chief
Sergei Naryshkin argued “Russia’s future and its future place in the world
are at stake”.
Ukraine’s democratically
elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said “the enemy has designated me
as target number one; my family is target number two”. His adviser said
Russian troops made two attempts to storm the presidential compound.
Russia’s leader refused to
call it an invasion or a war. Moscow continues to coin Europe’s biggest war
since 1945 a “special military operation”.
A month into the invasion,
Russia pulled back from Kyiv and declared its main goal was the
“liberation of Donbas” – broadly referring to Ukraine’s eastern
regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. More than a third of this area was already
seized by Russian proxy forces in a war that began in 2014, and now Russia wanted
to conquer all of it.
The Kremlin claimed it had
“generally accomplished” the aims of the invasion’s first phase,
which it defined as considerably reducing Ukraine’s combat potential. But it
became clear from Russia’s withdrawal that it had scaled back its ambitions.
“Putin needs a
victory,” said Andrei Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs
Council. “At least he needs something he can present to his constituency
at home as a victory.”
Russian officials are focused
on seizing the two big eastern regions and creating a land corridor along the
south coast, east from Crimea to the Russian border. They have claimed control
of the southern region of Kherson and a leading Russian general has said they
have hopes of seizing territory further west along the Black Sea coast towards
Odesa and beyond.
