Ukraine: From Soviet Independence to a War of Attrition

**Independence and the Budapest Memorandum.** Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union on 24 August 1991, following the failed August coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. A December 1991 referendum confirmed the decision with over 92 % support across every region — including a majority in Crimea. The Soviet Union dissolved formally at the end of that month. Newly independent Ukraine inherited the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal: roughly 1,900 strategic warheads on Soviet-built missiles and bombers stationed on Ukrainian soil.

In December 1994 in Budapest, Ukraine signed a memorandum with the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Russian Federation under which it agreed to transfer the warheads to Russia and accede to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear state, in exchange for security assurances respecting its territorial integrity within its existing borders. The legal weight of those assurances has been intensely debated since 2014; the political weight is now well understood.

**The Kuchma and Yushchenko years.** Through the 1990s and into the 2000s Ukraine moved between governments that variously emphasised closer ties with Russia or with the West, without ever resolving the question fully. The Orange Revolution of late 2004 — mass protests over a fraudulent presidential election — resulted in a court-ordered re-run that brought Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency. Yushchenko pursued NATO and EU integration; he lost the 2010 election to Viktor Yanukovych, who tilted Ukraine back toward Russia and away from the Association Agreement with the EU that had been under negotiation.

**Maidan and Crimea.** In November 2013, Yanukovych suspended preparations for signing the EU Association Agreement under Russian pressure. Protests began in Kyiv's Maidan Nezalezhnosti — Independence Square — and grew through the winter into the months-long *Euromaidan* movement. Government forces shot dead approximately one hundred protesters in February 2014. Yanukovych fled to Russia on 22 February 2014; the Ukrainian parliament voted him out of office the same day.

Within days, Russian forces without insignia began occupying key sites in Crimea. A referendum on annexation was held under occupation on 16 March 2014, with terms widely judged illegitimate by international observers; Russia formally annexed Crimea on 18 March 2014. The annexation was not recognised by the UN General Assembly. In April 2014, armed pro-Russian groups seized buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, and a war began in the Donbas that would continue at low intensity until 2022.

**Minsk I and Minsk II.** Two ceasefire agreements negotiated in the Belarusian capital — Minsk I in September 2014 and Minsk II in February 2015 — produced fragile reductions in fighting without resolving the underlying political questions. Both sides accused the other of violations. The Minsk process remained the formal diplomatic framework until 2022 without delivering a settlement.

**The 2021 build-up.** Through 2021 Russia massed an unprecedented concentration of forces along the Ukrainian border and in Belarus. By December 2021 US intelligence assessments — shared publicly with allies and with the public — concluded that a full-scale invasion was being prepared. Diplomatic engagement intensified through January 2022 without preventing the outcome.

**24 February 2022: the full-scale invasion.** Russian forces invaded Ukraine on multiple axes early on the morning of 24 February 2022. The northern axis aimed for Kyiv and the rapid replacement of the Ukrainian government; the eastern axis aimed to envelop Ukrainian forces in the Donbas; the southern axis aimed at Mariupol and the land bridge to Crimea. The assault on Kyiv was repelled within weeks: Ukrainian resistance combined with logistic failures forced Russian withdrawal from the Kyiv axis by early April 2022. The discovery of mass civilian killings at Bucha and other Kyiv-region towns after Russian withdrawal triggered the first wave of war-crimes investigations.

**The 2022 counter-offensives.** Ukraine recaptured most of Kharkiv oblast in September 2022 in a rapid offensive that exploited a thinned Russian line. Russian forces withdrew from the west bank of Kherson in November 2022 under pressure from Ukrainian operations against their supply lines. By the end of 2022 the front had stabilised along approximately the lines that have held — with local movement — into 2025.

**Annexation announcements and mobilisation.** In September 2022 Russia announced the annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts (Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson), none of which it fully controlled. The UN General Assembly rejected the annexations 143–5 with 35 abstentions. The same period saw Russia announce a "partial mobilisation" of reservists; estimates of the numbers eventually called up vary but are in the hundreds of thousands.

**Bakhmut, the 2023 counter-offensive, and the static phase.** The first half of 2023 saw an extended Russian offensive against the small Donbas city of Bakhmut, which Russian forces declared captured in May 2023 after months of fighting and very high casualties on both sides. The Ukrainian summer 2023 counter-offensive, launched in early June 2023 with Western-supplied armour, produced limited territorial gains against well-prepared Russian defences. The front line entered a static-but-grinding phase that has broadly characterised 2024.

**Deep strikes and air power.** Ukraine has progressively expanded its capacity for long-range strikes on Russian infrastructure — military bases, oil refineries, air-defence sites — using both Western-supplied missiles and a rapidly maturing domestic drone industry. The arrival of F-16 fighter aircraft from Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway in 2024 added a new dimension to Ukrainian air operations. In August 2024 Ukrainian forces conducted a cross-border incursion into Kursk oblast in Russia — operationally significant for Russian planning and politically symbolic.

**Russian strikes on the energy grid.** Through 2023 and especially 2024–2025 Russia has conducted sustained missile and drone campaigns against Ukrainian electricity generation and transmission infrastructure, producing major rolling blackouts and severe degradation of the grid going into winter. International assistance for grid restoration has been a sustained European and US programme.

**Western support and its current trajectory.** The Kiel Institute's Ukraine Support Tracker is the standard public reference for Western military and financial aid. Through end-2024 the United States had been the single largest source of military assistance, with European institutions and member states collectively comparable on the financial side. The political consensus underpinning that support shifted with the change of US administration in January 2025: the second Trump administration has explicitly pushed for negotiation and reduced certain categories of military assistance. European responses — including from Belgium — have moved to fill resulting gaps through joint procurement, accelerated defence-spending increases, and an active "coalition of the willing" discussion of post-war security guarantees led by the United Kingdom and France.

**Casualties and displacement.** Estimates of military casualties on both sides are contested and almost certainly run into the high hundreds of thousands killed and wounded combined. Civilian casualty figures from independent UN sources are conservative because verification in active war zones is difficult. UN refugee figures show roughly 6.5 million Ukrainian refugees abroad, with the largest single populations in Germany and Poland; approximately 100,000 are in Belgium under temporary protection. Internal displacement within Ukraine has affected several million more.

**Distinguishing what is settled from what is moving.** The historical record — the Budapest Memorandum, the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the 24 February 2022 invasion, the broad arc of the war — is well documented. Real-time movement on the front line, day-by-day casualty figures, and the precise terms of any current negotiation are not in the same epistemic category and should be read accordingly. The *Current situation* section above carries the live state.

**A note for Belgian readers.** Belgium's exposure is concrete: F-16 contributions; a substantial Ukrainian refugee population; energy supply restructuring after the cut-off of Russian gas; and the politically sensitive Euroclear holdings of immobilised Russian sovereign assets. The Belgian government has been an active participant in European-level decisions on all four. The *Belgium / EU angle* section above expands on each.