Ukrainian soldiers fire a Pion artillery system at Russian positions near Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Friday, Dec. 16, 2022.
AP Photo/LIBKOS
One year of war in Ukraine has devastated cities and left thousands of soldiers and civilians dead.
The conflict has ebbed and flowed in multiple phases, as both sides have gained and lost territory.
Here are the important fights and moments that have shaped a year of war.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine a year ago, he expected to quickly capture Kyiv in a knockout blow against his eastern European neighbor.
But right from the start, things went sideways for Russia due to early blunders and a stiff Ukrainian resistance that shocked both Moscow and the Western leaders whose intelligence agencies predicted Kyiv would fall in a matter of days.
Still, Russia saw some early gains, but its forces have been losing ground for months. A new Russian offensive is underway, but so far, little has come of it as Ukraine continues to hold the line.
Over the past year, cities and towns have been flattened, and the death toll continues to rise. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been killed, and both militaries have suffered well over 100,000 casualties.
The war has spiraled into a grinding and bloody affair being played out in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. NATO is warning that the conflict has turned into a race for logistics as Russia throws poorly trained soldiers at the front lines to increase offensive pressure with limited success and Ukraine hopes it can regain momentum once it has an influx of heavy and advanced Western-made weaponry.
Here are some of the significant battles and major moments that have shaped the past year of brutal war in Ukraine and brought it to where it is today.
RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP via Getty Images
Putin began his war believing his forces could capture Kyiv in a matter of days, seemingly misguided by his own intelligence agencies, but that didn’t happen.
Russian forces approached Kyiv from multiple directions, seizing notable areas like the Chernobyl nuclear plant and assaulting a key airport on the outskirts of the city. Russia also made a push forward with a massive armor convoy that stretched for miles.
But not long after the large-scale assault began, Russia’s miscalculations became clear. It overestimated the strength of its own military, it underestimated Ukraine’s determination to fight, and it completely botched its logistics, battlefield operations, and strategy.
Ukraine managed to take advantage of the Russian missteps and showed the world that its military could make good use of the weapons it had on hand, such as Soviet-era equipment and some Western-made hardware — like the Javelin anti-tank missiles — that was sent to Kyiv while Russia was still gathering troops on its border.
Ukraine also called on its people to fight and even provide battlefield intelligence. Civilians formed territorial defense groups as leaders urged people to pick up weapons and even make Molotov cocktails as a means to fend off the Russian invaders. This came as artillery and small groups of fighters targeted advancing armored vehicles on Kyiv’s urban outskirts. That sent an unmistakable message.
The weeks-long battle for Kyiv matters because “they were able to show that they were up to the fight — ‘Give us the tools and we’ll do the job’ kind of thing,” Jim Townsend, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO Policy, told Insider. This helped to earn Ukraine the respect and support from Western countries that have sustained its war effort.
Not only did Ukraine prevent Russia from sacking its capital, but it also managed to force Russian troops to retreat from the entire region.
“If you look at what they’ve been able to do just thus far — Putin has achieved exactly zero of his strategic objectives inside Ukraine,” John Kirby, then the Pentagon press secretary, said in early April, when the tough Battle for Kyiv ended.
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Though they failed to capture Kyiv, Russian forces saw some success as they pivoted their focus to territory in eastern Ukraine. By early April, Moscow had taken control of the key eastern city of Izium, Ukraine’s military confirmed at the time.
The city — which had a pre-war population of over 46,000 people — was an important rail hub for Russia’s resupply efforts and could be used as a launching point for attacks in multiple directions. Control meant Russia unlocked new attack opportunities for Russia.
But, as was the case with its attempt to capture Hostomel Airport outside of Kyiv, Russia couldn’t effectively leverage its gains.
“When the Russians kept on winning battles and taking territory, they essentially overstretched their resources,” Marina Miron, an honorary research fellow at King’s College London’s Centre for Military Ethics, told Insider. “So the line of contact was greater than they could potentially hold.”
In other words, she explained, Russia didn’t leave enough manpower to defend the city, and Ukraine was able to exploit weak points in the Russian lines. By early September, after months of Russian occupation, Ukrainian forces liberated Izium as part of a sweeping counteroffensive in the northeastern Kharkiv region, a move that few saw coming.
AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File
As Russian forces tried for Kyiv and continued their push to seize territory in the east, Russian troops also made moves in southeastern Ukraine throughout the spring and waged a scorched-earth campaign to capture the strategic port city of Mariupol.
Putin’s troops laid siege to the city for months, relentlessly and indiscriminately bombing non-military targets like schools and hospitals. Thousands of civilians were killed, and the city was left in ruins.
The city eventually fell to Russian forces — a decisive victory that gave them a land bridge from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region to the occupied Crimean peninsula.
“What the Russians did there — and that’s what they are doing pretty much everywhere — is they created a meat grinder, so to say,” Miron said. “Basically looking to destroy the Ukrainian forces’ capability and morale to withstand.”
Russia’s capture of Mariupol came at a great cost to its military, which was bogged down by fierce Ukrainian resistance at the sprawling Azovstal steel plant. For weeks, Ukraine’s fighters held out there and weathered Russian attacks, forcing Moscow to commit a disproportionate amount of resources and depriving its forces in the area of the ability to launch attacks in other regions.
Even though Ukraine ended up losing control of the city, the country still showed it would fight to the “bitter end,” Townsend noted. This proved to be a morale victory for Kyiv, and it showed the West that Ukraine was tough.
REUTERS/Gleb Garanich
Summer in Ukraine saw a slow-moving and grinding conflict unfold across the Donbas region.
Russian forces had pushed toward the major eastern city of Lysychansk, which sits opposite of its twin city Severodonetsk on the other side of the Seversky Donets River. But these gains did not come without a price — Ukraine in one instance devastated a large force of Russian armor as it tried to cross the river.
After capturing Severodonetsk in late June, Moscow eventually managed to cut off the logistics of the defending Ukrainian troops in Lysychansk and largely surround them — forcing their retreat within the first few days of July.
Putin’s troops managed to bombard the Ukrainians with artillery in these two cities, constantly pounding them and out-firing Kyiv’s military at a much higher rate.
It was critical for the Russians to capture such cities and industrial hubs because they were focused on capturing the entire Donbas, Miron said.
“It was kind of important for them in order to be able to move forward — to have kind of a springboard to move forward — and force the Ukrainians away, to fall back to their defensive lines,” she added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at the time that if his country’s military withdraws from areas where Russia has the firepower edge — like in Lysychansk — it means “only one thing: we will return thanks to our tactics, thanks to the increase in the supply of modern weapons.”
AP Photo/Kostiantyn Liberov
Toward the end of the summer, Ukraine launched two major counteroffensives along the war’s northeastern and southern fronts.
In the northeast, Ukrainian forces unleashed a surprise offensive that featured a blitz-style campaign to push Russian troops out of the Kharkiv region. The offensive was punishing, and Moscow was quickly routed in the region — its forces abandoning heaping piles of weaponry and equipment.
Ukraine also made effective use of its longer-range weaponry like the US-provided 155 mm howitzer artillery pieces and High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers, according to a January analysis by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.
The much-celebrated HIMARS in particular allowed Ukraine to strike Russian ammunition depots and command and control centers, among other targets.
This advance in Kharkiv came as a major surprise to the Russians because Ukraine had been mainly telegraphing moves for a counteroffensive along the southern front.
Ukraine liberated thousands of square miles of territory previously under Russian occupation during this offensive and secured mountains of military hardware left behind by Putin’s troops — some of whom fled the battlefield in what Western intelligence deemed was an apparent panic.
“Ukraine was shown as being pretty clever in terms of their planning,” Townsend said. “That really cemented in everyone’s mind that these guys can fight.”
AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky
As Ukraine routed the Russians in the northeast, Kyiv’s forces delivered another, albeit slower, counteroffensive punch in the southern Kherson region. It came as less of a surprise than the one around Kharkiv, but it was equally noteworthy.
Russia captured Kherson — a city with a pre-war population of just under 300,000— in early March, just a few weeks into the war. It was the first major city and only regional capital that Putin’s troops managed to capture.
Throughout the fall, Ukrainian forces slowly pushed toward Kherson and continued to make progress in liberating territory throughout the wider region from under Russian occupation. As Ukraine gradually closed in on the city, Russia began evacuating some of its personnel and tens of thousands of civilians.
In early November, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu ordered his troops to withdraw from Kherson and retreat across the Dnieper River — a major blow after what had otherwise been a significant early win for Moscow. But Russia didn’t leave without a trace, leaving behind booby traps and minefields.
Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
With little to show for Putin’s war efforts ahead of the one-year anniversary, Russian forces have been concentrating their efforts on trying to capture the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.
This war-torn city, which had a pre-war population of over 73,000 people, has been the epicenter of intense fighting for months now. US officials have previously described the fighting there as “really severe and savage,” featuring constant artillery barrages.
In addition to freshly mobilized troops in Russia’s conventional military, Kremlin-linked mercenaries from the notorious Wagner Group have thrown recruited prisoners at the front lines to absorb heavy Ukrainian fire. Meanwhile, some experts have argued that the city likely does not hold much strategic utility.
“It’s probably close to being one of the bloodiest battles in terms of losses on both sides,” Miron said.
Ukrainian forces defending Bakhmut are exhausted, she added, and Russian troops appear to be encircling those forces, with the intent being to completely destroy Kyiv’s military capabilities by killing as many soldiers as possible.
Bakhmut highlights a dilemma facing Ukraine, which is its ability to pick its battles and understand when to pull back to save precious manpower, Townsend said.
“Ukraine doesn’t have the forces to just expend them needlessly,” he added. “They can’t afford to be attrited for, to defend something that’s not very strategic.”
Russia has the manpower but not necessarily the capability though. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said earlier this month that Putin has been sending scores of troops to apply pressure on Ukraine while accepting a high casualty rate.
“What Russia lacks in quality, they try to compensate in quantity,” he said, explaining “that the leadership, the logistics, the equipment, the training, don’t have the same level as the Ukrainian forces, but they have more forces.”
The outcome of the fight in Bakhmut has yet to be decided, but front-line troops have said the battle is a “meat grinder.”
Ukrainian Presidency / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Throughout this year of war in Ukraine, as the Russians and Ukrainians have fought intense battles in the field, there has also been a critical fight that has transcended the battlefield, the battle for public opinion. There have been major moments — some of which were symbolic — that saw the country take steps to harness crucial Western military support and also boost its own morale.
One of the earliest symbolic fights in the “battle of public opinion” was waged by Zelenskyy when he decided to stay in Kyiv and push for security assistance as Russian forces were trying to capture the city, Townsend said.
For example, just one day after Russia launched its assault, Zelenskyy posted a defiant video from the streets of Kyiv with a simple message — that he’s not going anywhere.
This was “absolutely critical” because for Ukraine to be able to fight against the Russians, Zelenskyy needed help from the West and the United States,” Townsend said. Zelenskyy needed to capture public opinion and show himself to be a wartime leader to secure Western support, and he “would not have gotten that if he had fled the capital.”
While Zelenskyy’s presence helped to gain Western support, several other moments helped to sustain it and also boost the country’s morale.
At the start of the war, a Ukrainian border-guard member went viral for profanely refusing to surrender as the invading Russian forces tried to capture Snake Island in the Black Sea. A few weeks later, Ukrainian forces sank a key Russian warship in the Black Sea — a huge blow to Russia’s naval strategy. And in October, Ukraine bombed a crucial bridge connecting Crimea with mainland Russia that Putin’s troops used to transport equipment.
Ukraine has also attacked several Russian bases in mainland Russia and in Crimea, bringing the war closer to the Russian people.
“Those kinds of things are critical. It’s not just the battles themselves,” Townsend said. “But these things built — brick by brick — this Western support that has been crucial to them.”
The fight continues to rage in eastern Ukraine as Western countries weigh how to arm Kyiv, and face the pressure to provide more advanced and heavy weaponry.