The Russia-Ukraine War Looks Very Different Depending on Where You Start the Story

The Russia-Ukraine war is usually presented through a simple sequence: Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraine defended itself, and the international community responded by supporting Ukrainian sovereignty. That description captures an important part of what happened, but it leaves out the eight years of conflict that preceded the full-scale Russian intervention.

In 2014, following the political upheaval in Kyiv, armed conflict erupted in the Donbas. Separatist authorities declared the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics independent. Ukraine rejected those declarations and launched what it called an "anti-terrorist operation" to restore government control. From Kyiv's perspective, these were Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian-backed separatists. From the separatists' perspective, they were resisting a government they no longer regarded as legitimate and seeking political separation from Ukraine.

That distinction matters because it changes the question being asked. If Donetsk and Luhansk are understood as Ukrainian territory throughout the period, then Russia's recognition of them as independent states in February 2022 was an attack on Ukraine's territorial integrity. That is the position adopted by the United Nations. The Secretary-General explicitly described Russia's recognition of the two entities as violating Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, while the UN has consistently maintained Ukraine's internationally recognised borders.

But there is another part of the story that is frequently compressed or omitted. These regions had not simply appeared in 2022 as a Russian invention. They had been outside Kyiv's effective control since 2014, had established their own political institutions and had fought Ukrainian forces for years. The Minsk agreements, endorsed by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2202, were an attempt to end that conflict. They called for a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons, constitutional reform, decentralisation and special status for certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, while ultimately envisaging restoration of Ukrainian control over the state border.

That means the conflict cannot accurately be reduced to the idea that everything began with Russia's February 2022 invasion. There was already a war in eastern Ukraine, and thousands had been killed before Russian troops crossed the wider Ukrainian frontier in February 2022.

The harder question concerns the legitimacy of the separatist declarations themselves. The fact that a territory declares independence does not automatically make it an independent country under international law. Crimea provides a particularly clear example. In March 2014, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 68/262, affirming Ukraine's territorial integrity within its internationally recognised borders and rejecting the validity of the Crimea referendum organised without Kyiv's authorisation. The resolution passed 100 to 11, with 58 abstentions.

The same principle was subsequently applied to Donetsk and Luhansk. When Russia recognised them in February 2022, the UN did not accept that recognition as creating two new sovereign states. It continued to regard the territories as part of Ukraine.

But international recognition is not the same thing as explaining why people in those regions rebelled in the first place. That requires looking at the political divisions that followed the 2014 crisis, the linguistic and cultural divisions between different parts of Ukraine, the fighting between Ukrainian forces and separatist forces, Russian involvement, and the failure of the Minsk process to produce a durable political settlement.

This is where starting the story in 2022 can produce a distorted understanding of the conflict. It removes the years in which the Donbas was already a battlefield and reduces a complicated civil, political, and international conflict into a single event.

At the same time, starting the story in 2014 cannot be used to erase the legal status of the territories. The separatist governments were not broadly recognised as sovereign states, and Russia's 2022 decision to recognise them was itself rejected by the United Nations. Nor does the existence of a separatist movement automatically give an outside power an unlimited right to intervene militarily.

The most honest interpretation is therefore more complicated than either side's preferred narrative. Ukraine regarded the Donbas as its territory and fought to restore control. The separatist authorities claimed a right to separate from Ukraine. Russia supported them politically and militarily and eventually recognised them. The United Nations rejected that change in territorial status and continued to recognise Ukraine's sovereignty over the areas.

That complexity matters because wars are often understood according to the moment at which the television cameras arrive. February 24, 2022 is undoubtedly a defining moment, but it was not the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The war had already been burning in the Donbas for eight years.

If the objective is genuinely to understand how the crisis became so catastrophic, the question should not simply be, "Who invaded in 2022?" It should also be, "What happened between 2014 and 2022 that made a peaceful settlement increasingly impossible?" Those are different questions, and both need to be answered if the world is serious about understanding how the war began and, eventually, how it can end.