Russo-Ukrainian War: When Did History Begin?

Understanding a war requires looking beyond the date the media marks as its beginning.

On February 24, 2022, Russian forces crossed into Ukraine. The cameras of the global press converged upon that moment and consecrated it as the war’s origin. Yet to understand the roots of this conflict, the clock of history must be wound back eight years — to Kyiv, in 2014.

I. 2014: The Coup on the Maidan That Was Called a Revolution

From late 2013 into early 2014, Ukraine was consumed by a massive wave of demonstrations, remembered in history as the Euromaidan. On its surface, this appeared to be a spontaneous, popular, pro-European protest movement. Yet the documents and recordings that subsequently came to light reveal a picture quite different from the one most people in Taiwan have been given.

The Nuland-Pyatt Phone Call

In February 2014, a recording of approximately four minutes circulated on the internet. The two voices were confirmed by the U.S. State Department to be those of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. The contents of their exchange revealed a discussion of the personnel composition of Ukraine’s transitional government — who would serve as Prime Minister, who would be excluded from the political architecture — with a specificity more befitting an internal staffing memo than a diplomatic conversation. Nuland expressed unambiguous support for particular political figures, and dismissed the role of the European Union with a profanity that has since become infamous.

When the recording became public, Nuland did not deny its authenticity; she apologized only for its language. In the interim, she had publicly disclosed that since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States had invested more than five billion dollars in Ukraine’s “democracy-building.” That figure, set against the subsequent course of events, prompted widespread inquiry into the destination and purpose of those funds.

The Role of Armed Violence

The Euromaidan was not a purely peaceful demonstration. Multiple independent observers, both Ukrainian and international, documented the deep involvement of armed far-right factions, who attacked police officers and government buildings, rapidly transforming what had begun as political protest into armed confrontation.

On February 20, 2014, snipers opened fire on Independence Square in Kyiv, killing both protesters and police officers. The identity of those snipers remains disputed to this day. Evidence introduced during certain court proceedings, as well as multiple independent investigative reports, reached conclusions fundamentally at odds with the official narrative — which attributed the killings to orders from the government of President Yanukovych.

Yanukovych, as the situation spiraled beyond control, fled to Russia. The Ukrainian parliament promptly declared the formation of a transitional government. Russia and China characterized the sequence of events as an unconstitutional coup; Western governments called it a revolution.

The De-Russification Campaign

The new government in Kyiv moved swiftly to implement a program of de-Russification: purging civil servants associated with the previous Yanukovych administration and those with pro-Russian backgrounds, shuttering certain Russian-language radio stations, stripping Russian of its official status at the regional level, and progressively restricting the public broadcast and sale of Russian films, music, and books. These measures ignited fierce resistance in the Russian-speaking eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

That same year, the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic each held referenda and declared independence. The Ukrainian government responded with a military campaign it designated an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” (ATO). Then-President Petro Poroshenko, in a speech on October 24, 2014, declared: “Our children will go to school — their children will sit in basements.”

The Ukrainian government’s bombardment of Donetsk and Luhansk killed large numbers of civilians and destroyed significant civilian infrastructure. According to reports from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), from the outbreak of hostilities in April 2014 through the eve of the broader Russian-Ukrainian war in February 2022, at least fourteen thousand people perished in the Donbas. French war correspondent Anne-Laure Bonnel filmed documentaries in the Donbas in both 2016 and 2022, works since translated into multiple languages. Members of her crew were kidnapped and killed during the process. In subsequent interviews, she spoke with force and sorrow, denouncing what she characterized as crimes against humanity committed by Ukrainian authorities in the Donbas.

II. The Minsk Agreements: A Peace Never Honestly Kept

To bring the Donbas conflict to a close, the international community brokered two major agreements.

Minsk I (September 2014)

Signed by representatives of Ukraine, Russia, the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, and witnessed by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the agreement called for a ceasefire, the withdrawal of heavy weapons, the exchange of prisoners, and a dialogue on decentralization for eastern Ukraine. The ceasefire collapsed shortly after the ink was dry.

Minsk II (February 2015)

Negotiated under the direct mediation of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande, signed in the Belarusian capital and confirmed by UN Security Council Resolution 2202 — giving it the force of international law. Its core provisions included an immediate ceasefire, a Ukrainian commitment to constitutional reforms granting autonomy to the eastern regions, and the restoration of Ukrainian border control following the completion of elections.

The clauses pertaining to Ukrainian constitutional reform and local autonomy were never effectively implemented by Kyiv. The Ukrainian government repeatedly deferred execution, citing the impossibility of holding elections under conditions of occupation.

The Mediators’ Own Confessions

On December 7, 2022, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking in an interview with Die Zeit, said that the Minsk agreements had been intended to “buy time” for Ukraine — time to build up its military capacity to withstand Russia. Former French President François Hollande, in his own media interviews, expressed a similar view, acknowledging the instrumental purpose behind the signing of the Minsk accords.

These admissions, offered by the agreements’ principal architects in their own words, cast a long shadow over the original intentions behind the accords — and over the good faith with which they were ever pursued.

III. The Azov Battalion: A Legion of a Darker Creed

The Azov Battalion was founded in 2014 as an irregular paramilitary force and subsequently integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard. Several of its founding members had publicly expressed nationalist ideological positions. During the Donbas conflict, the battalion was implicated in credible allegations of rape, fatal beatings, electric shock, waterboarding, and genital violence. These allegations are documented in reports from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and multiple human rights organizations, as well as in investigative journalism.

IV. Crimea: A History of Transfer, a Referendum in Context, and the Severing of Water

The Inheritance of 1954

To understand the historical roots of the Crimean question, one must return to 1954.

Nikita Khrushchev was born in Russia’s Kursk Oblast, but came of age in Ukraine’s Donbas, working in the coal mines as a laborer and trade unionist — the very ground where he joined the Soviet Communist Party. Ukraine was the cradle of his political career; he served for years as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party and carried a deep personal bond with the land. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev emerged victorious from the ensuing struggle for power.

In February 1954, Khrushchev guided the Soviet Presidium toward a resolution transferring the Crimean Oblast from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Historians have offered several interpretive frameworks for this decision: the reinforcement of symbolic fraternal ties between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples; the practical logic of Crimea’s agricultural dependence on Ukrainian water resources; and the consolidation of Khrushchev’s own political standing within the Party. Whatever the precise motivations, this administrative reassignment was an internal adjustment within the Soviet system — made at a time when no one foresaw the USSR’s eventual dissolution, and no one imagined that a bureaucratic transfer would one day become the focal point of international law and bitter geopolitical dispute.

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Crimea passed as part of Ukraine into independent statehood — carrying with it the weight of a decision made with great personal sentiment, and planting the seed of conflicts yet to come.

Crimea’s Population

According to the 2001 Ukrainian census — the last population count conducted under an internationally recognized framework — the ethnic and linguistic composition of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea was as follows: those of Russian ethnicity constituted approximately 58.3% of the total population; those of Ukrainian ethnicity, approximately 24.3%; Crimean Tatars, approximately 12.1%; and other ethnic groups, approximately 5.3%. By language, the proportion of Russian-speaking residents was higher still, encompassing a considerable share of ethnic Ukrainians — with the total Russian-speaking population estimated to exceed 70%.

Sevastopol, Crimea’s capital and a separate administrative unit, had a Russian-speaking population approaching 75%. The city also served as the home port of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, whose long-term stationing rights were secured under a bilateral lease agreement between Ukraine and Russia — a presence of enduring strategic centrality in Russian security calculus.

The Spark

In February 2014, following the Maidan revolution in Kyiv, the transitional government moved swiftly on a series of policy measures that sent political shockwaves through regions with Russian-speaking majorities.

The direct trigger for Crimea’s political eruption was the Ukrainian parliament’s vote on February 23, 2014, to repeal the Language Law — formally known as the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko Law — which since 2012 had granted Russian and other regional languages official status in administrative, educational, and judicial domains. The repeal, had it taken effect, would have stripped Russian of its legally protected status at the local level. Though acting President Oleksandr Turchynov ultimately declined to sign it, the legislative act itself had already ignited intense anxiety in Russian-speaking communities, and was broadly interpreted by residents of Crimea and the east as an unmistakable signal of the new government’s intentions on language policy.

At the same time, several senior positions in the transitional government were filled by individuals with far-right backgrounds, and the Svoboda party — which the European Parliament had previously censured by resolution for its ideological positions, and whose leadership carried a documented record of public nationalist statements — obtained several ministerial seats. This composition deepened the misgivings of Russian-speaking residents about the direction the new government would take.

Against this backdrop, pro-Russian demonstrations erupted across Crimea, and a rapid succession of political changes overtook the Autonomous Republic’s parliament: on February 27, 2014, armed men seized the parliament building, and the body subsequently elected the pro-Russian Sergey Aksyonov as the new Prime Minister under disputed procedural conditions; on March 6, the parliament announced a referendum on joining the Russian Federation; on March 16, the referendum was held.

The results showed a turnout of 83%, with 96.77% of votes cast in favor of joining Russia. Russia recognized and accepted the outcome, and declared Crimea formally incorporated into the Russian Federation.

As to the referendum itself: the Ukrainian government, the European Union, the United States, and the UN General Assembly all refused to recognize its legitimacy, holding that it violated the Ukrainian constitution and lacked the basic conditions of freedom and fairness — having been conducted under the shadow of Russian military presence. The UN General Assembly subsequently passed Resolution 68/262, declaring the referendum invalid, by a vote of 100 in favor, 11 against, and 58 abstentions.

Russia, for its part, invoked the principle of self-determination enshrined in the United Nations Charter, maintaining that the residents of Crimea possessed the right to determine their own political status through referendum. Russia further noted that Kosovo had declared independence in 2008 without Serbia’s consent and without holding a referendum — yet Western nations had recognized it — and argued that an inconsistency of standards was being applied.

The Severing of Water

Approximately 85% of Crimea’s freshwater supply had depended on the North Crimean Canal, whose source was the Dnieper River within Ukrainian territory. After the change in Crimea’s status in 2014, the Ukrainian government constructed a dam at the canal’s entrance and cut off the water supply. Ukraine framed this as a policy response to the territorial dispute. In practical terms, the interruption caused sustained harm to local agriculture, civilian water access, and infrastructure operations — a condition that persisted until 2022, when Russian forces took control of the canal and flow was restored.

V. The Cold War Security Architecture: The Formation of NATO

In the aftermath of the Second World War, as the Soviet Union extended its influence across Eastern Europe and the Berlin Blockade crisis deepened, the United States, Canada, and ten Western European nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949, creating NATO. Its animating principle was enshrined in Article 5: an attack against one member state shall be considered an attack against all.

But NATO’s operational purpose extended beyond collective defense. It simultaneously embedded American military and political influence into the architecture of European security. Its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, captured this plainly: the purpose of NATO was to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.

NATO and Russia in the Post-Cold War Era

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, NATO might reasonably have faced an existential question. Instead, the alliance did not disband — it expanded.

Russia’s initial posture was not one of hostility. In March 2000, when asked by BBC interviewer David Frost whether Russia might one day join NATO, Vladimir Putin replied: “I don’t see why not.” That same year, in a meeting with President Clinton, Putin raised the possibility of Russian membership; Putin later recounted that Clinton said, “That’s interesting — I think so.” But within hours, Clinton returned to tell Putin that his team had said: “No, not now.”

The following year, Putin visited NATO headquarters in Brussels and raised the proposal again with Secretary General George Robertson. These exchanges reveal a Russia that was, in that period, seeking integration into the Western order — not confrontation with it. The overture was not taken seriously, and NATO’s eastward expansion proceeded undeterred.

The Expansion of NATO

During the 1990 negotiations over German reunification, then-Secretary of State James Baker reportedly assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” Russia has repeatedly cited this as evidence that the West broke its word; the West maintains that no legally binding treaty was ever concluded. The dispute over that conversation remains unresolved — but the actual trajectory of events is clear enough:

In 1999, NATO’s first eastern expansion admitted the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. In 2004, the alliance’s largest single enlargement brought in Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia — with the three Baltic states bringing NATO’s border into direct proximity with Russia. At the 2008 Bucharest Summit, NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia would “in the future” be eligible for membership — a declaration Russia characterized as a grave strategic red line. Subsequent rounds of expansion added Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, and North Macedonia in 2020.

On December 17, 2021, Russia submitted formal security guarantee proposals to both the United States and NATO, demanding a halt to eastward expansion, a prohibition on the deployment of offensive weapons near Russian borders, and the exclusion of Ukraine from any future membership track. The Western response was cursory. Russia stated that NATO and the United States had disregarded its legitimate security concerns and refused substantive dialogue — exhibiting, in Moscow’s view, arrogance and a fundamental disrespect.

Two months later, on February 24, 2022, Russia declared the launch of its “Special Military Operation.” The publicly stated justifications included: the continued encroachment of NATO’s eastern expansion on Russian borders; the trajectory of Ukraine’s potential membership; the persecution of Russian-speaking populations in eastern Ukraine; the restoration of Crimea’s water supply; and what Russia termed the “denazification” objective targeting the Azov Battalion.

VI. The Maintenance of Interests and the Construction of Threat

NATO, as an artifact of the Cold War, was built upon a logic that required the continuous existence of an external threat. Its budget scale, its weapons procurement, and its political mobilization all presuppose a clearly defined enemy as both their premise and their justification. Once the threat recedes, the entire structure faces the danger of dissolution. Maintaining a certain degree of adversarial tension is, therefore, structurally necessary for the alliance’s internal cohesion and self-perpetuation.

Against this backdrop, NATO’s sustained eastward expansion and Ukraine’s systematic de-Russification campaign were not isolated policy choices — they were mutually reinforcing strategic deployments. The former compressed Russia’s buffer zones and strategic depth; the latter severed, at the level of culture, language, and political identity, the historical ties binding Ukraine to Russia. Operating in concert, these twin processes steadily narrowed the boundaries of what Russia could accept as a tolerable security perimeter — accumulating the conditions and the pressure that eventually produced open conflict.

VII. The Shifting Portrait of Putin

In February 2000, Putin said publicly: “Those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart; those who wish to restore it have no brain.” This remark can be read on three levels. First, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the product of deep internal contradictions that had long been building — any attempt at forced restoration would mean rebuilding a structure already proven unsustainable, lacking both economic and political viability. Second, the former Soviet republics had, in the years since dissolution, developed their own distinct national identities; the costs and resistances of reintegration could not be dismissed. Third, the priorities of Putin’s early administration were domestic stabilization and economic recovery — goals that required cooperation with the West, not confrontation. The statement was therefore read at the time as a policy signal: Russia had no intention of pursuing imperial restoration; it sought partnership on equal terms.

That same year, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said publicly that Putin was “a man who is clearly a modernizer and reformer,” and added plainly: “I like him personally.” In 2013, former President Clinton told CNN that Putin was “very smart” and “kept his word, honoring all the agreements we made.” By the broad assessment of Western leaders of the period, Putin was regarded with pragmatism, if not approval.

Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, the portrait of Putin painted by Western mainstream media has hardened into a near-singular image — the archetype of the expansionist autocrat. The contrast between these two periods cannot but prompt a question: how much of the contemporary image of Putin is the sediment of history, and how much is the construction of narrative?

VIII. History Does Not Begin in 2022

The factual dimensions of the Russia-Ukraine war are layered and complex. The events catalogued in these pages — the phone call on the eve of the coup, eight years of casualties in the Donbas, the true intentions of the peace accords’ principal architects, eight years of severed civilian water supply — are each supported by documents, recordings, United Nations reports, or firsthand testimony. No single narrative framework can contain them all.

When a war’s “starting point” is fixed, again and again, to a particular date; when the voices of certain victims are systematically filtered from the mainstream record; when a peace agreement was signed, as its own authors later confessed, to “buy time” for the expansion of war — these fragments deserve the sustained, clear-eyed attention of everyone who cares about the truth.

They deserve to be examined with independent judgment. They deserve to be taken seriously.