Russo-Ukrainian War

The Russo-Ukrainian War began in February 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine following the ouster of Ukraine's Russian-aligned president, and Russian-backed separatist forces simultaneously seized territory in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, together known as the Donbas, touching off years of low-intensity fighting there. The conflict escalated dramatically on 24 February 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on multiple fronts, including a direct assault on the capital Kyiv, in what became the largest conventional war in Europe since the Second World War. Ukrainian forces, bolstered by substantial Western military and financial support, halted and reversed the initial assault on Kyiv and later recaptured significant territory in counteroffensives around Kharkiv and Kherson later in 2022, after which the front lines in the east and south largely stabilized into grinding, heavily fortified positional warfare. The war has continued since with heavy casualties on both sides and no negotiated settlement, its final territorial and political outcome undetermined at the time of this description.