Russia’s war in Ukraine: What we know so far
Vladimir Putin said that Russia invaded Ukraine to protect the breakaway regions in the east of the country but Thursday’s military assault also came from the north and the south.
Ukraine’s leaders have said that the invasion amounts to a “full-scale war” and that Putin’s intention is to destroy Ukraine as a state. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared martial law and urged citizens to stay at home.
Putin has warned the international community that any attempt to intervene will be met with “consequences that the world has never seen before”.
Earlier this week, Putin appeared to lay the ideological groundwork for such a move, claiming that Ukraine had been “invented” by the Soviet Union, a claim that has been derided as historical revisionism at best and, at worst, complete fiction.
The US and European leaders - as well as Ukraine - have been warning for weeks that Putin was preparing to invade Ukraine, something that was repeatedly denied by Moscow. At one point, the Kremlin even published a video showing Russian units withdrawing from the border.
But even then, Russia had more than 150,000 units massed on the border with Ukraine -- according to Western officials -- and had been increasingly aggressive in his rhetoric against Kyiv.
Putin invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014 and Russia has backed the breakaway regions of the Donetsk and the Luhansk People’s Republics since they seized territory in the east of the country in the same year. This week he formally recognised the independence of both states.
When the leadership of the DPR and LHR claimed that the Ukrainians were shelling their positions earlier this week and sent thousands of evacuees over the border into Russia, the White House predicted that Russia would use the
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