WHEN Russian forces stormed into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Moscow’s strongman Vladimir Putin was supremely confident the “military operation” would be over in a matter of days.
Putin grossly miscalculated. He underestimated the Ukrainian people’s fierce resolve to defend their country. The conquest of Ukraine would take far longer to accomplish.
Four years on, the war in Ukraine has stagnated into a drawn-out conflict that has left thousands dead and millions displaced, and where the prospects for peace wallow in a quagmire of geopolitics.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Putin had failed to achieve his goals in Ukraine. “He did not break the Ukrainians,” Zelenskyy said on Tuesday in an address marking the anniversary of the Russian invasion. “He did not win this war. We have preserved Ukraine, and we will do anything to achieve peace — and to ensure there is justice.”
Putin has clapped back, saying Ukraine has “not managed to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia on the battlefield.”
After the Russian juggernaut was blunted, the fighting on the ground has been largely concentrated in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Moscow sentiments remain high.
A United States-based think tank believes that Russian troops have captured 0.79 percent of Ukrainian territory in the past year of fighting, their biggest accomplishment since 2022.
Battles have been particularly bloody in the Donbas region, Ukraine’s industrial hub, which Putin wants to cede. Ukrainian troops, meanwhile, have made daring incursions into the Russian border regions of Kharkiv and Kursk.
The two sides are also engaged in a drone war, targeting not only military and industrial complexes, but also civilian communities.
Russian drone attacks have knocked out energy facilities, triggering long power outages that exposed Ukrainians to the ravages of a particularly bitter winter.
Several attempts to negotiate the end of the war have fallen by the wayside. United States President Donald Trump has been trying to get Putin and Zelenskyy to accept a peace formula he has drawn up, but the initiative has been snagged in a web of issues that include security guarantees for Ukraine.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres looks at the war in Ukraine as “stain on our collective consciousness, and remains a threat to regional and international peace and security.”
“The longer the war continues, the deadlier it becomes,” Guterres said, adding that “civilians bear the brunt of this conflict.”
Last year, 2,514 people were killed — the largest number so far, he said. This month alone, there have been 55,550 confirmed civilian casualties, including 15,378 fatalities, the UN human rights office reported.
Some 3.7 million Ukrainians have been driven from their homes. “More than 4.4 million people who fled their homes since the war erupted have returned, including over 1 million who arrived from abroad. However, not everyone who crossed the border was able to return home — 372,000 people remain internally displaced,” the UN agency said.
The war in Ukraine has created what a political analyst has described as “a seismic evolution to the world — to the nature of warfare, the balance of global powers, and to European security.”
The UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine, Matthias Schmale, said he was hoping “that the fifth year [of war] will bring a ceasefire, and lasting peace with dignity.”
But peace continues to be elusive because superpowers follow their own agendas beyond ending the fighting.
“China has held back from providing enough military support to guarantee Russia’s victory,” said a CNN online article. “But it buys enough oil and sells enough dual-use drone equipment to keep Russia afloat, as Moscow slowly becomes the junior partner in the relationship.”
India, a US ally in Asia, “has bankrolled Moscow for years, buying cheap oil and may only be slowing because of a larger trade deal with the US.”
“There will be no victory for us in this war,” lamented a wounded Ukrainian soldier. “The price we are paying for it is too high. Too many of our people have been killed.”
The complex nature of the conflict highlights the reality that there are no shortcuts to peace in Ukraine.