It has been two years since Ukrainians were able to go to sleep at night safe in the knowledge that a Russian cruise missile would not come crashing through their roofs. Two years since Vladimir Putin, ruled by his own dark obsessions, launched a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, created millions of refugees and plunged the West into its biggest security crisis since the defeat of Nazi Germany.
And there is no end in sight.
As Ukraine marks the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion in 2022 today, the Kremlin’s forces are on the offensive across much of the 620-mile front line. Last week, Putin’s army took control of Avdiivka, an industrial town in the eastern Donetsk region that was a symbol of Ukrainian resistance.
Its fall, which could open the way for Russia to seize further territory within the coming weeks, came after political rows in Europe and the United States over additional aid for Ukraine that left Kyiv’s forces with dwindling ammunition supplies. Russia is thought to have at least five times as many shells as Ukraine across the front line.
“The situation is extremely difficult in several parts of the front — exactly where the Russian troops have concentrated the maximum reserves. They are taking advantage of delays in assistance to Ukraine,” President Zelensky said this week in an address to the nation.
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Ukraine’s need for weapons
Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s national security and defence council, had no hesitation when asked if he still believed that Kyiv’s forces could drive out Russia’s invading army. “There are three components that Ukraine requires — weapons, weapons, and more weapons,” he told The Times during an interview in Kyiv.
In some of the angriest comments made by a senior Ukrainian official about the failure of its allies to provide Kyiv with sufficient firepower to defeat Putin’s forces, Danilov suggested that not everyone in the West wanted Ukraine to win the war.
“If they did, they would supply us with modern weapons in a timely manner,” he said. His comments came shortly before the German parliament voted down a proposal to send powerful Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine.
“I lost my nephew in this war. My godson had part of his leg torn off,” he said. “But it’s not just me. There has been such grief. So many people have lost their children, their parents, or their wives or husbands. And the West closes its eyes to this, it does not want to respond adequately to this. They are not killing you, after all.”
The fall of Avdiivka could have been prevented had Ukraine received the F-16 fighter jets that it had long sought before Washington finally approved their deployment to Kyiv last August, Danilov said. It is still unclear exactly when they will arrive in Ukraine.
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As Russia was poised to seize Avdiivka, its warplanes pounded Ukrainian troops with waves of powerful KAB guided aerial bombs, causing massive destruction. “If we had had the F-16s, they couldn’t have done this,” he said. “We could have chased them out of our territory.”
For Ukrainians, the war against Russia began not two years ago but in 2014, when the Kremlin annexed Crimea and sent troops into their eastern Donbas region. In Kyiv, former and current officials believe that the West’s muted reaction to Putin’s aggression led directly to his decision to launch a full-scale invasion in 2022.
“If, back then, the West had taken more decisive steps, then it’s likely that we would not have today’s conflict,” said General Viktor Muzhenko, who was the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces from 2014 to 2019. “We were offered words of support and sanctions were imposed against Russia. But we understand now that sanctions do not work. Russia is today getting by and it is building up its military industrial complex.”
Muzhenko also warned that if Russia managed to defeat Ukraine, then the Kremlin would likely exploit the country’s resources, including its population, to push on further into Europe. “It will use Ukraine to increase its capabilities,” he said.
A number of western officials have warned that Russia could attack a Nato state, if it emerges victorious in Ukraine. Yet Danilov said that the West was still too wary of provoking Russia to ensure that this does not happen.
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“If you are afraid of a dog, it will definitely bite you,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. Russia’s aims don’t only concern our country. If the West has no desire to fight Russia on the territory of the European Union, on Nato territory, then it has to resolve this issue here together with us.”
What does a Ukrainian victory over Russia look like?
Across Ukraine, the word Peremoga — Victory — is emblazoned on billboards, car bumper stickers and television screens, and uttered thousands of times a day by politicians, military leaders and ordinary people. According to a recent poll, 85 per cent of Ukrainians still believe that victory is possible. But it is increasingly unclear what it would look like.
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Would victory mean expelling Russian troops from all of the territories that have been under the Kremlin’s control since 2014, including Crimea? Or regaining control over all the towns and cities that were seized by Putin’s forces since 2022? Or, perhaps, withstanding Putin’s onslaught until instability or political change in Russia itself brings an end to its invasion?
“Whether or not I believe in victory is a tough question. Because I haven’t yet defined for myself what victory would be for me,” said Ivan Skuratovskiy, a 33-year-old Ukrainian army captain who has been fighting Russian forces since 2014. “But when everything is over, after many more people have died, I will not be ashamed. I gave all my youth to the trenches, and I will keep going until the end.”
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Although it is now on the back foot in the war, Ukraine has already pulled off a series of spectacular victories, from driving Russia out of the city of Kherson and the Kharkiv region to the destruction of a significant chunk of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
“Victory is such a vast concept right now,” said Muzhenko. “But the destruction of Russian military groups on the territory of Ukraine with a gradual move towards our [internationally recognised] borders is entirely possible. But for that, the quality of our weapons has to surpass those of our enemy’s. Our foreign minister has said that we will fight with shovels, if it comes to it. But you can’t beat away 1,500kg guided aerial bombs with shovels.”
Russia’s nuclear threat
Since day one of the war, Putin and other Russian officials have threatened to use nuclear weapons against western countries over their support for Ukraine. Last week, Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s national security council, said that Moscow would unleash its entire nuclear arsenal on Berlin, Kyiv, London and Washington, if Russia was facing defeat.
Medvedev’s comments came before Russian state television broadcast footage of Putin flying on board a modernised Tu-160M nuclear-capable strategic bomber. The flight coincided with reports that the United States had warned the Kremlin not to launch a nuclear-armed anti-satellite weapon into space.
Yet even if the war in Ukraine ends without the use of nuclear missiles, a Russian victory would make their use inevitable in the future, warned Oleksandr Danylyuk, an analyst at The Royal United Services Institute think-tank in London.
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After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine controlled the world’s third biggest nuclear arsenal, with 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads — four times the number of nuclear weapons that China is currently thought to possess.
As part of non-proliferation efforts, Kyiv agreed to surrender all its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees from Britain, Russia and the United States under a deal called the Budapest Memorandum. “But it turned out that the signature of the president of the United States wasn’t worth anything,” Danilov said.
Ukraine’s defeat by Russia would prove to non-nuclear countries that such agreements are worthless and that the only way to protect themselves against nuclear-armed neighbours was to acquire their own arsenals, Danylyuk wrote.
“Given the increasing number of countries possessing nuclear arsenals, their practical use in a conflict [would be] only a matter of time. Breaking the taboo on the use of nuclear weapons would create a new reality.”
Ukraine’s drone attacks
Although it is outnumbered and outgunned, Ukraine has utilised combat drones to take the fight to Russia. Last year, two drones exploded over the Kremlin, sending a signal to Putin that Ukraine has the ability to strike at the very heart of Moscow.
Although that attack was largely symbolic, Ukrainian drones have hit military facilities up to 300 miles inside Russia. It has also carried out a spate of drone attacks on energy facilities in recent weeks. The attacks are aimed at hurting Moscow’s ability to send fuel to frontline troops. Since the start of the year alone, Ukrainian strikes are estimated to have damaged six oil refineries, causing a significant slump in the amount of crude oil that Russia has been able to process.
Kyiv is also planning to produce thousands of long-range drones that can reach as far as Moscow and St Petersburg, Russia’s two biggest cities, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s digital minister, told Reuters. “The category of long-range kamikaze drones is growing, with a range of 300, 500, 700, and 1,000 kilometres,” he said.
Zelensky has also set Ukraine the task of producing one million shorter range drones, which could help Kyiv’s forces compensate to some extent for its shortage of artillery shells. “Technology can really save us,” Fedorov said.
Putin means war
If the Kremlin’s bombs have twisted Ukraine’s landscapes into grotesque, barely recognisable shapes, then Putin’s ruthless war on dissent at home has also transformed Russia, enfolding it in a darkness that has not been witnessed since Joseph Stalin’s bloody reign.
The death — or more likely murder — of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, in an Arctic prison last week extinguished any lingering hopes that democratic change could be possible in Moscow.
“As long as Putin is in power, the war will not stop. There may be a decrease in the fighting, there may even be truces. But Russia will not abandon its intention to put an end to Ukraine in its current form,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian political analyst who focuses on the Kremlin.
“Putin expects that Kyiv will capitulate. But if he dies tomorrow, then for a significant part of the Russian elite it will simply be enough to get a chunk of [Ukrainian] land. They don’t have the same ambitions and they are not under the illusion that Kyiv will surrender.”
Its people may be suffering, but after the atrocities that the Russian army has committed in Putin’s name, the vast majority of Ukrainians will not countenance the idea of admitting defeat to Moscow.
“We are fighting a monster, a huge monster,” said Serhii Piven, a Ukrainian lieutenant-colonel who has been decorated for bravery. “David will eventually defeat Goliath. But this year will be very, very hard.”
