Why did Putin's Russia invade Ukraine?

BBC Europe · Feb 24, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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1 day agoPaul KirbyEurope digital editorReutersWhen Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered up to 200,000 soldiers into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, his aim was to sweep into the capital, Kyiv, in days, overthrow its pro-Western government and return Ukraine to Russia's sphere of influence.Putin failed but a fifth of Ukrainian territory is in Russian hands.US President Donald Trump has been pushing for a peace deal. But a meeting with Putin in Alaska in August last year and several rounds of talks with Ukrainian and Russian negotiating teams have failed to yield any meaningful progress. Moscow continues to demand that Ukraine hand over sovereign territory - an unacceptable outcome for Kyiv.Why did Putin invade Ukraine?MARCUS YAM/LOS ANGELES TIMESUkrainians sought shelter in underground shelters as Russian forces attacked on 24 February 2022Launching the biggest European invasion since the end of World War Two, Putin gave a fiery speech on TV declaring his goal was to "demilitarise and denazify" Ukraine.Russia has repeatedly painted modern Ukraine as a Nazi state, in a crass distortion of history.Putin had already seized Ukraine's Crimean peninsula eight years earlier, after a revolution that ousted Ukraine's pro-Russian president and replaced him with a more pro-Western government.Putin then triggered a lower-level war in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region, with pro-Russian proxy forces occupying territory and setting up rebel states supported by Moscow.But the 2022 invasion was on a different scale.A day later, Putin called on Ukraine's military to "take power into your own hands" and target the "gangs of drug addicts and neo-Nazis" running the government.He then added another objective - to ensure Ukraine stayed neutral. He accused the Western defensive alliance, Nato, of trying to gain a foothold in Ukraine to bring its troops closer to Russia's borders.The Russian leader has long questioned Ukraine's right to exist, claiming that "modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia" after the communist revolution in 1917.In a long-winded 2021 essay he even suggested "Russians and Ukrainians were one people" dating back to the late 9th Century. In 2024 he told US TV talk show host Tucker Carlson that Ukraine was an "artificial state".Those comments have led many to believe that the goal of the invasion was in effect to erase the state of Ukraine. Russia's state-run Ria news agency explained that "denazification is inevitably also de-Ukrainisation" - seemingly tying the idea of erasing Ukraine to the stated goal of the invasion. Ukrainian culture and identity have in fact existed for centuries independently of Russia.Does Putin want to get rid of Zelensky?Getty ImagesVolodymyr Zelensky was elected president in Ukraine in 2019Putin has long sought to get rid of Ukraine's elected pro-Western president, and Zelensky was apparently a target from the very start of the war. Russian troops are said to have made two attempts to storm the presidential compound soon after the invasion, and Ukraine's elected leader said they wanted him dead."The enemy has designated me as target number one; my family is target number two.Zelensky said later that Putin had initially tried to replace him with the wealthy head of a pro-Russian party, Viktor Medvedchuk, who was accused of treason in Ukraine and is now in Russia.Even now, Putin has not agreed to peace talks with Zelensky and his officials call him a "loser" and a "clown". He has spoken of the Ukrainian leader's "illegitimacy" - a false narrative that has also been repeated by Trump.As evidence Putin cites the postponement of Ukraine's March 2024 presidential election, although it is because of Russia's war that Ukraine is under martial law and elections are barred under the constitution.Putin's own re-election in 2024 is highly questionable, as Russia's opposition leaders are either in exile or dead.Was Nato expansion to blame for the war?Putin has for years complained about Nato's eastward expansion as a security threat, and sees any possibility of Ukraine joining the alliance as a major red line.Before Russia's 2022 invasion he demanded that Nato remove multinational deployments from the Central and Eastern European states that joined the Western alliance after 1997.But it was Russia that launched military action in Eastern Europe, when it invaded Georgia in 2008 and then Crimea in 2014.After the Crimea invasion, Nato established a continuous presence on its eastern flank - closest to Russia.Nato has always stressed the whole purpose of the alliance is to defend territories "with no aggressive intentions". Sweden and Finland joined Nato after the Ukraine invasion precisely because of the perceived Russian threat.It is part of Ukraine's constitution to join the European Union and Nato, but there was no real prospect of this when the full-scale war began.Zelensky has said he would resign in exchange for Nato membership, but Trump has told Kyiv to "forget about" joining the Western alliance.Putin has accused Nato of participating in the war, because its member states have increasingly sent Ukraine military hardware, including tanks and fighter jets, air defence systems, missile systems, artillery and drones.Nato has provided security assistance and training to Ukraine, but it insists that does not make it a party to the war.Putin's grievance against Nato dates back to 1990, when he claims the West promised not to expand "an inch to the East".However that was before the Soviet Union collapsed and it was based on a limited commitment made to then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.Gorbachev said "the topic of Nato expansion was never discussed" at the time.How could the war end?The most likely route is through direct talks, and negotiations mediated by the US have been held - even though no progress on a ceasefire has been made. The breakthrough came in August 2025, when Putin was invited to Alaska for a summit with the US president. The meeting did not yield any clear progress towards a peace deal, and the war continued to rage on. Further US-brokered talks with Russian and Ukrainian delegations - including two rounds of trilateral talks in early 2026 - also failed to bridge the difference between Moscow's demands and the compromises Kyiv is willing to make.The Kremlin has also batted off Trump's continued push for a Putin-Zelensky meeting, arguing that the right conditions were not in place.Russia wants direct talks to address the "root causes of the conflict", a phrase that harks back to Putin's "maximalist" demands at the start of the war in March 2022.These included Ukraine becoming a neutral state, dramatically reducing its military and abandoning its Nato aspirations. Russia also wants international recognition of its territorial gains in Ukraine reflected in any future deal, including annexation of Crimea and four eastern regions. He also wants immediate scheduling of presidential and parliamentary elections.Kyiv will never recognise its sovereign territory as part of Russia, even if it might accept it has been lost temporarily. It has been negotiating security guarantees with Western countries - primarily the US - to ensure Russia never invades its territory again.Was Zelensky to blame for the war?Before his return to the White House and in the first months of his presidency, Trump suggested Ukraine's president was responsible for the war with Russia."[Zelensky] should never have let the war start, that war's a loser," he said in October 2024. In reality, the war began in 2014, when Putin seized Crimea and Russian proxies grabbed part of eastern Ukraine. Zelensky had not even entered politics by then. Putin then ordered Russia's full-scale invasion eight years later, after months of meticulous co-ordination and denials of any such plan.However, the US president's messaging has not been altogether consistent. At times, his position appears to have hardened against Russia. "We thought we had [the war] settled numerous times, and then President Putin goes out and starts launching rockets into some city like Kyiv and kills a lot of people," he said last month.Trump announced secondary tariffs on any country still trading with Russia but eventually only imposed a 25% secondary tariff on India's exports to the US as punishment for buying Russian oil, which were later dropped as part of a trade deal.Later in 2025, he imposed direct sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, two major Russian oil companies, after the stalemate over peace talks continued.Do Putin's claims on Nazis and genocide stack up?ReutersVladimir Putin has made repeated false allegations of genocide and Nazi taunts against Ukraine At the start of the 2022 invasion, Putin vowed to protect people in occupied areas of eastern Ukraine from eight years of Ukrainian "bullying and genocide, during the war in the east.More than 14,000 people died on both sides of the front line between 2014-2022, but Russian claims of Ukrainian Nazis committing genocide in the occupied regions never added up, and no international body has spoken of genocide. Germany's chancellor called the allegation "ridiculous".The Russian taunts of Nazis in charge in Kyiv are also not correct.Modern Ukraine has no far-right parties in parliament - they failed to get enough votes in the 2019 elections. On top of that, Zelensky is Jewish and many of his relatives were murdered by the Nazis in World War Two.Putin condemns him as a "disgrace to the Jewish people", but the US Holocaust Memorial Museum rejects his claims outright, saying he "misrepresented and misappropriated Holocaust history".Putin himself was accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court in 2024, although that has been rejected by the Kremlin.When did Russia invade Ukraine?Russia's attempt to stop Ukraine leaving its sphere of influence goes back years, and its initial invasion began in 2014 when pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted after months of mass demonstrations.Ya