On February 24, just before dawn in Moscow, Vladimir Putin delivered the last of a series of televised addresses. His previous appearances have included increasingly ominous tirades about Ukraine. Now here was the climax: the declaration of what the Russian President euphemistically called a “special military operation.”
The goal, Putin said, was the “demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine.
Minutes later rockets were fired at Kyiv, Kharkiv and many other Ukrainian cities. For Ukrainians who woke up to the sound of the impacts, and then for millions around the world who woke up to the news of Putin’s decision, the initial reaction was shock.
Even those Ukrainians in the government who had been rehearsing what to do in the event of a Russian attack for the past few weeks were stunned when the invasion became a reality.
“I panicked for 10 minutes running around the house with no idea what to do. Then I pulled myself together and went to work,” said Natalia Balasynovych, the mayor of Vasylkiv, a town outside of Kyiv that houses an airbase that was hit in the first hours of the war.
Before long, makeshift checkpoints were being set up across the country, volunteers flocked to enlist for territorial defense units, and even some retirees got to work making Molotov cocktails. At the same time, millions of people, mostly women and children, fled to western Ukraine or crossed the borders to neighboring countries.
In the early days of the war, there was a feeling that something terrible and momentous had happened that would irrevocably change the contours of world affairs, but also confusion about exactly what it might look like and what it might mean for the future of Ukraine, Russia, Europe and the World.
As Putin’s invasion hits the month mark on Thursday, some of those questions have been answered, but much remains in the balance.
There are ongoing debates in the international community about how firm a line to take on Russia and where the gap lies between a moral obligation to support Ukraine and a possible provocation by Moscow to further escalation, as Putin, for the first time since the beginning of the 1980s fled the possibility of using nuclear weapons.
The original Russian plan, it seems, was that its operation would be some sort of bloodier version of the 2014 annexation of Crimea, with the elimination of niches of resistance and a Russian puppet regime taking control. The plan, which could only have been based on appallingly flawed intelligence information about the mood in Ukraine and the state of its army, quickly proved futile.
A rapid advance on Kyiv stalled and escalated into bitter fighting in the western suburbs. Attempts to take Kharkiv and other cities to the east were repelled with heavy Russian casualties.
Even in the few cities where the Russians have bloodily taken control, in the south of the country, their forces face angry crowds and have had little success in co-opting local politicians.
“For years they have been lying to themselves that the people of Ukraine are supposedly waiting for Russia to come,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in one of his frequent video addresses. “They found no collaborators who would hand over the city and power to the invaders.”
The lack of success has led to a dark phase of the war. The notion that Russia’s tactics in Syria were morally and politically unacceptable to the Russian leadership, given the family ties between millions of Russians and Ukrainians, quickly proved naïve. Russia showed itself ready to subject Mariupol, Kharkiv and other Russian-speaking cities to ruthless artillery and air attack.
For Ukraine, amid the heartache and bloodshed, there is a sense that a new sense of national identity is being born, even as the threat of the state’s obliteration by the Russian military is far from abating.
A country where many different ideas of what it means to be Ukrainian have lived in sometimes uneasy coexistence has now found a common idea to unite around.
“I suppose they hoped that if ordinary people without guns came out to stop tanks and tell them to leave, it wouldn’t be like that,” said Gennady Trukhanov, the Russian-speaking mayor of Odessa, who once served as Russian henchman was considered. He added that only “a bastard, idiot or scumbag” would drop bombs on Odessa.
The horrific stories of Mariupol residents who have been able to flee in recent days make Putin’s claim a month ago that his attack was intended to protect Russian-speakers from Kiev’s “genocide” sound even more twisted than it sounded at the time.
In 2014, Mariupol was split between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian elements and violent street fights erupted, but it has since been renovated and spruced up by Ukrainian authorities. The terror in which its residents have been held hostage for the past few weeks is a tragedy likely to be remembered for decades to come.
For Russia’s stalled, bloody military campaign, there seems to be no immediate possibility of a graceful disengagement or a peace deal that could be sold as victory, but also no clear path to military victory, except perhaps by stepping up airstrikes to destroy Ukraine instead to subjugate them.
Whether this would be palatable to Putin’s elite is a key question, and one that has led Kremlinologists to make sense of the increasingly opaque world of Putin’s inner circle.
What is clear is that Putin’s decision irrevocably changed both Russia and Ukraine. The Russian president built much of his political appeal on stability and economic progress, and, more recently, liked to compare his rule to that of the turbulent 1990s. Now he has done some work to restore this instability within weeks, when planes stop flying, western brands head for the exit and ruble tanks.
Unlike 2014, when part of the international public was open to Russian narratives about the annexation of Crimea, this time the Russian actions have been so heinous that the Kremlin has few international defenders. Russian officials have been surprised by the strength and scale of the Western response, as well as the speed with which the political climate at home has darkened.
It is difficult to say whether the Ukraine war marks the beginning of the end for Putin and his system, or simply the beginning of a long period that is much darker than what came before.
Some in Russia’s elite – like Russia Today head Margarita Simonyan or Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova – have enjoyed the new, darker climate. Zakharova, who just a week before the war mocked Western journalists for reporting US claims that a Russian invasion was a possibility, has now embraced it. At a flag-waving rally at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium last week, she said Russia was fighting evil.
Many others in the elite are appalled by Putin’s war, and the decision seems to have surprised all but a few close confidants. But that uneasiness has so far remained muted as domestic repression mounts and increasingly sinister public warmongering fills the airwaves.
The behavior and reputation of the President of Ukraine has also changed over the past month. Zelenskiy often seemed on the eve of war a man struggling to play the admittedly terrible hand he had been dealt. He spoke in confused and rambling sentences while simultaneously addressing and reducing the Russian threat, apparently alarmed by the warnings from Washington and London but anxious to save Ukraine’s economy should Putin fail to invade.
Now, while Putin muses in his bunker, Zelenskiy has spoken to presidents, prime ministers and the pope, addressed parliaments around the world and released a series of scathing, impassioned video addresses to his people.
Despite the rather half-hearted attempts by Russian bloggers to claim that Zelenskyy has in fact fled Ukraine long ago and that all the videos are fake, it is clear that the president and his inner circle have remained in the capital, ignoring Western evacuation offers and suggestions, according to the government center Lemberg embarrassed to the west, although there were credible intelligence reports of hit squads sent to kill him.
In doing so, Zelenskyy has won overwhelming support from many Ukrainians, including those who were previously his political opponents. “Free people of a free nation,” he began one of the last of these speeches on Tuesday. “Every day of this war makes it ever clearer what their ‘denazification’ is.”
With weary eyes but a lot of passion in his voice, Zelenskyy listed the recent civilian casualties of the Russian attack and the latest Ukrainians to be awarded medals for bravery.
“It was a day of difficult events … but it was another day that brought us all closer to our victory and peace for our state,” Zelenskyi concluded his speech.
Ukraine has suffered terrible casualties over the past month, but few expected that Russia’s campaign against its neighbor in four weeks would have yielded so few results for Putin on the ground.
There is still a long way to go before a result that could be considered a victory for Ukraine, but every day more Ukrainians Zelenskyy believe that victory of some kind is possible.