​Ukraine staring down the barrel as it marks three years of war

Today marks three years since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and in the last two weeks the conflict has suddenly been propelled back to the top of the news agenda and into the public consciousness again.

US president Donald Trump’s love-in with Russia’s Vladimir Putin has upended all previously held expectations about the war’s future and potential peace negotiations. Just as they were three years ago, Ukrainians are staring down the barrel of a gun, feeling the full weight of the existential threat facing their country. Ukrainian sovereignty and its existence as an independent country are once again in serious doubt, as they were in February 2022. Then, a 35-mile-long column of tanks was heading towards Kyiv from the Belarusian border and the Russians were aiming to assassinate Volodymyr Zelensky and install a puppet leader as president of Ukraine.

“How do I begin to describe what it feels like here, on the ground? It feels oddly similar to these very days three years ago,” says Olga Rudenko, editor-in-chief of the Kyiv Independent. “That anxious February of 2022, filled with a buildup to a disaster. We saw it coming closer but didn’t want to believe it would happen – it seemed so insane, impossible to imagine. A military invasion to take over a free country? Impossible. Just as impossible as it is to believe that the leader of the free world will side with the Russian dictator. And yet, it’s happening.”

For three years, Ukrainians have stood up to the Russian aggressors. The resilience and defiance of the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian people has shocked and impressed much of the world. Since February 2022, nearly 50,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed on the battlefield, as well as thousands of civilians. Eighty percent of Ukrainians have personal experience of loss, be it a close relative, friend or acquaintance. Ukrainians cannot allow themselves to believe that the carnage of this brutal war is all for nothing.

In the few short weeks since Trump’s inauguration, he has upended the geopolitical principles that have been in place since the end of World War II and in doing so, he appears to have pivoted the US from an ally of Ukraine to a foe.

Many Ukrainians were justifiably frustrated with former president Joe Biden. His regime furnished Ukraine only with sufficient military assistance to prolong the fighting, not enough to win the war. Had Biden been willing to supply more sophisticated weaponry earlier, before the Russians had time to build their formidable lines of defence, he could have saved lives, territory and, probably, money in the long run. But for all that, Ukrainians always knew the US was on their side.

One can only guess at the content of the infamous 90-minute phone call between Trump and Putin, but the Russian president was clearly very persuasive. From that moment on, Trump began parroting Russian propaganda and hurling well-worn Russian insults at Zelensky: calling him a dictator, falsely claiming his approval ratings are at rock bottom, and even insinuating that it was Ukraine that started the war.

It comes as little surprise that the Russian leadership and its state-run media are euphoric, the current state of play goes beyond their wildest dreams. Before negotiations to end the war in Ukraine have even begun, Trump’s team has blithely conceded two of the West’s key leverage points without demanding any concessions in return, stating that a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is unrealistic and that Ukraine will never join NATO, not to mention ending Russia’s isolation.

Putin’s three years as an international pariah have come to an abrupt end. He is soon to have a seat at the table with the American president, while US negotiators agreed to reestablish full diplomatic relations and talked about potential joint energy ventures. Trump has even signalled an intention to invite Russia back into the G7.

Numerous historical comparisons with the period before and during the Second World War have already been made by myself and many others. Most obviously, Trump’s appeasement of Putin calls to mind the Munich Agreement of 1938, in which the leaders of Britain, France and Italy signed away part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in an attempt to avert a wider war. Any freezing of the frontlines in Ukraine is likely to set the scene for further Russian incursions down the line.

Then there’s the notion of two nationalist dictators making a deal behind the backs of other world leaders (while Putin is a dictator in every sense of the word, Trump merely acts like one), reminiscent of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 – the ill-fated non-aggression treaty that enabled Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to carve up parts of Eastern Europe unopposed.
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And, of course, the meeting of Russian and American officials in Saudi Arabia to discuss the fate of Ukraine without inviting representatives from Kyiv or the rest of Europe to the table smacks of the 1945 Yalta Conference. Then, the three chief allied leaders – Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin – met in the Crimean resort town to decide the fate of Germany, carving up the country into zones and deciding the future of the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe. 

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