Why Russia-Ukraine War is Still Going On? | The Why Show?
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Has Putin's war failed and what does Russia want from Ukraine?
Published
24 February
Russia-Ukraine war
Watch: Ukraine's recapture of Kherson City was one of Russia's biggest setbacks
By Paul Kirby
BBC News
When Vladimir Putin sent up to 200,000 soldiers into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, he wrongly assumed he could sweep into the capital, Kyiv, in a matter of days and depose the government.
After a series of humiliating retreats, his initial invasion plan has clearly failed, but Russia's war is far from over.
Why did Putin invade?
Even now, Russia's leader describes the biggest European invasion since the end of World War Two as a "special military operation". Not the full-scale war that has bombed civilians across Ukraine and left more than 13 million either as refugees abroad or displaced inside their own country.
His declared goal on 24 February 2022 was to "demilitarise and denazify" Ukraine and not occupy it by force, days after backing independence for eastern Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian proxy forces since 2014.
He vowed to protect people from eight years of Ukrainian bullying and genocide - a Russian propaganda claim with no foundation in reality. He spoke of preventing Nato from gaining a foothold in Ukraine, then added another objective of ensuring Ukraine's neutral status.
President Putin never said it out loud, but high on the agenda was toppling the government of Ukraine's elected president. "The enemy has designated me as target number one; my family is target number two," said Volodymyr Zelensky. Russian troops made two attempts to storm the presidential compound, according to his adviser.
Russian claims of Ukrainian Nazis committing genocide never added up, but Russian state-run news agency Ria Novosti explained that "denazification is inevitably also de-Ukrainisation" - in effect, erasing the modern state of Ukraine.
For years, the Russian president has denied Ukraine its own statehood, writing in a lengthy 2021 essay that "Russians and Ukrainians were one people" dating back to the late 9th Century.
In Kherson: Joy, tears and talk of justice
How Putin changed his war aims
A month into the invasion and his campaign goals were dramatically scaled back after a retreat from Kyiv and Chernihiv. The main goal became the "liberation of Donbas" - broadly referring to Ukraine's two industrial regions in the east of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Forced into further retreats from Kharkiv in the north-east and Kherson in the south, that aim remains unchanged, but it has shown little success in achieving it.
Those reverses on the battlefield rushed Russia's leader into annexing four Ukrainian provinces last September, without having full control of any of them: neither Luhansk or Donetsk in the east, nor Kherson or Zaporizhzhia to the south.
IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES
Image caption,
Vladimir Putin celebrated annexing Ukrainian territory: "Together forever" is written at the top of the screen
To bolster his depleted forces President Putin announced Russia's first mobilisation since World War Two, although it was partial and limited to some 300,000 reservists.
A war of attrition is now taking place along an active front line of 850km (530 miles) and Russian victories are small and rare. What was meant to be a quick operation is now a protracted war that Western leaders are determined Ukraine should win. Any realistic prospect of neutrality for Ukraine is long gone.
Russia must be defeated but not crushed - Macron
President Putin warned in December that the war "could be a lengthy process", but then added later that Russia's goal was "not to spin the flywheel of military conflict", but to end it. There is little hope of that on the horizon.
A year into the war, he talks of Russia fighting to defend its "historical frontiers" and "rebuilding peaceful life in Donbas and Novorossiya", spelling out that Ukraine's southern territories are part of his project, just as much as the east.
What gains has Russia made?
The biggest success President Putin can lay claim to is establishing a land bridge from Russia's border to Crimea, annexed illegally in 2014, so it is no longer reliant on its bridge over the Kerch Strait.
He has spoken of the capture of this territory, which includes the cities of Mariupol and Melitopol, as a "significant result for Russia". The Sea of Azov, inside the Kerch Strait, "has become Russia's internal sea", he declared, pointing out that even Russian Tsar Peter the Great did not manage that.
Tracking the war in maps
Is Russia losing the war?
Beyond seizing a territorial corridor to Crimea, Russia's bloody, unprovoked war has been a disaster for itself and the country it was unleashed on. So far, it has achieved little more than exposing the brutality and inadequacy of the Russian military.
While cities such as Mariupol were flattened, details of war crimes have emerged against civilians in Bucha, near Kyiv, and have led to