Ukraine and the War That Never Really Ended

On February 24, 2022, Russian forces crossed into Ukraine in the largest land invasion Europe had seen since the end of World War II.

Missiles struck Kyiv before dawn. Armored columns pushed across the border from the north, east, and south. Within hours, the Russia–Ukraine war had entered a new and far more dangerous phase.

But the truth is that the war did not begin that morning.

It began years earlier.

In fact, the deeper you look into the Ukrainian history, the clearer it becomes that the conflict did not emerge suddenly at all. It is the latest chapter in a much longer struggle between Russian imperial power and national identity.

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The Question Many Americans Ask

Americans often start with a simple question:

Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

The answer is not complicated, though it is deeply unsettling.

Ukraine chose independence.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine became a sovereign nation. For millions of Ukrainians, it was the first opportunity in generations to determine their own political future.

For Vladimir Putin, however, that independence was never legitimate.

In a speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. To Western audiences, the statement sounded bizarre. The twentieth century had witnessed world wars, genocides, and mass suffering on a scale previously unimaginable.

But Putin was speaking from a different perspective—the perspective of an unabashed Russian nationalist incapable of acknowledging the legitimate aspirations but Russian ones

From his point of view, the catastrophe was the loss of Russian power.

Understanding that worldview is essential to understanding the Putin Ukraine strategy that has shaped events ever since.

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Why Ukraine Matters So Much

Ukraine is not just another neighboring country in Russia’s sphere of influence.

It is central to the entire geopolitical balance of Eastern Europe.

Geographically, Ukraine sits between Russia and the European Union. Historically, it has been both a buffer and a gateway between the two worlds. Control of Ukraine has long meant strategic leverage over the European continent.

Economically, Ukraine has also been enormously valuable. The country contains some of the most fertile agricultural soil on Earth—what historians often call the “black earth belt.” Ukraine has also been Russia’s breadbasket for centuries as well as Europe’s and now Africa’s.

During the Soviet era, Ukraine’s agricultural output was critical to feeding the Soviet population.

Without Ukraine, there can be no restored Russian empire. Russia without Ukraine is smaller, weaker and less able to dictate to its near neighbors. Russia without Ukraine is nothing but a regional player, now more than ever with the collapse of its allies in the Middle East—Syria, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.

With Ukraine, it becomes something very different, more menacing to Europe and the world.

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A Thousand Years of Invasions

Modern Ukraine became independent only in 1991, but the Ukrainian people themselves have a far older and richer story.

More than a thousand years ago the region was home to a powerful medieval civilization centered in Kyiv—the Rus. That civilization eventually collapsed during the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century.

What followed was a long and often brutal history of foreign domination.

For centuries Ukrainian lands passed between competing empires—the Mongols, the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Turks, the Russian Empire, the Austrians, and eventually the Soviet Union.

Historians sometimes note that Ukraine has been conquered or occupied nearly ten times in the last thousand years.

But the most devastating period came during the twentieth century.

Under Joseph Stalin, Soviet policies of forced collectivization triggered a catastrophic famine in the early 1931 known as the Holodomor. Millions of Ukrainians died—historians estimate between four and eight million victims.

The famine was not simply a natural disaster. It was engineered by Stalin to break the backs of the Ukrainian peasants who resisted collectivization.

That historical trauma remains deeply embedded in Ukrainian memory and experience, especially as today’s Ukrainians were raised by parents and grandparents who lived through the horror. The Holodomor reminds us of William Faulner’s dictum, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." The Great Famine is a vivid reminder of how Russia does its business.

The War Actually Began in 2014

To understand the current war, one must also understand what happened eight years before the 2022 invasion.

In the winter of 2013-2014, Ukrainian citizens rose up against a pro-Russian government during a series of demonstrations now known as the Maidan Revolution.

The protests were sparked when Ukraine’s president abruptly abandoned plans for closer ties with Europe and instead aligned the country more closely with Moscow.

Millions of Ukrainians took to the streets.

The government collapsed.

And Russia responded immediately.

Unmarked Russian soldiers—later nicknamed the “little green men”—appeared in eastern Ukraine and seized territory in the Donbas region. Moscow initially denied they were Russian troops, but the evidence soon made that claim impossible to sustain.

The Russia–Ukraine conflict of 2014 became the opening act of the wider war that would follow.

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A Personal Window into Ukraine

For Dr. Gary Kellner, Ukraine is not a distant geopolitical topic.

It is a country he knows personally and intimately.

Beginning in 1999, he worked in Ukraine helping build the first Western-style graduate school in the country and collaborating with religious leaders from across Ukrainian society.  

When the Russians invaded in 2014, Kellner leverage more than 15 years of relationships to cobble together a coalition of Catholics, Orthodox bishops, Protestant pastors, Muslim leaders, and Jewish rabbis to care for the people displaced by war and to press the plight of Ukraine on leaders of both parties, and on media influencers.

The members of this unlikely coalition all shared a common message: whatever their differences, none of them wanted to return to life under Moscow’s control.

Many had lived through Soviet oppression themselves.

They remembered families imprisoned, churches closed, and communities shattered under communist rule.

Those memories were not ancient history.

They were lived experience.

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The Human Cost of the Donbas War

When Russian-backed forces entered eastern Ukraine in 2014, the violence quickly became personal.

In the city of Sloviansk, Russian forces detained one of Kellner’s friends, Bishop Alexei Demidovich, and interrogated him for hours. Four young pastors connected with the Kellner’s activities were murdered by Putin’s secret police in the first hour after the town fell under Russian control. Their bodies were dumped on the town’s central square.

Stories like these rarely appear in Western headlines, but they help explain why Ukrainian resistance has been so determined.

For Ukrainians, the war is not about abstract geopolitics.

It is about the survival of their country.

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Western Timidity in the Face of Russian Aggression

The United States and Europe have supported Ukraine throughout the war in 2014 and again in the current war, but often cautiously.

Western leaders have repeatedly tried to balance two competing goals: helping Ukraine defend itself while avoiding direct military confrontation with Russia. Russian may be as Senator John McCain characterized them during the 2014, “a gas station masquerading as a country,” But Russia is a gas station with nukes and that is what gives the West pause.

Barack Obama sent blankets and pancakes. The Europeans did little more.

Western performance has improved since the most recent Russian invasion. Long neutral Sweden and Finland have joined NATO. European countries have supplied the Ukrainians with missile systems, tanks, and machine guns.

The US has also delivered weapons systems but slowly.  Advanced aircraft such as F-16 fighters arrived a year and a half after the most recent invasion began.

Much of that hesitation reflects a familiar fear—that escalation could eventually lead to nuclear confrontation.

Putin has repeatedly invoked nuclear threats throughout the war, attempting to deter deeper Western involvement.

So far, those threats have not materialized.

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The Larger Question

The war in Ukraine is often described as a regional conflict.

But the implications are far larger.

If Russia succeeds in conquering Ukraine, it will signal to the world that powerful nations can redraw borders by force. It will also raise urgent questions about the future security of other countries along Russia’s frontier—countries that are members of NATO.

That is why analysts increasingly ask another question:

Will the war in Ukraine expand?

No one knows the answer yet.

But history suggests that unresolved imperial ambitions rarely remain contained.

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A War That Defines an Era

The Russia–Ukraine war has already reshaped the geopolitical landscape of Europe.

It has revived NATO. It has transformed European defense policy. It has forced democratic nations to reconsider how they respond to authoritarian aggression.

And it has awakened something powerful inside Ukraine itself.

For centuries, the country struggled under the rule of others. Not surprisingly, Ukrainians did not have a great sense of themselves.

Today, Ukrainians are fighting not simply for territory, but for the right to determine their own future.

That struggle has defined the past.

It may also define the future of Europe.

A question worth asking:   If Ukraine is fighting for the right of a nation to choose its own destiny, what happens to that principle if the world allows it to fall?