Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. In response to the growing sense that his invasion has backfired, Mr Putin staged a televised address in September 2022 in which he ordered a partial military mobilisation of 300,000 reservists and reiterated his threat to use nukes against the West, a major escalation of his rhetoric in which he assured the world: “It’s not a bluff.” Vladimir Putin The Kremlin’s faltering troops, otherwise saddled with outmoded equipment and sub-standard supplies, have employed brutal siege warfare tactics throughout the war, surrounding Ukraine’s cities and subjecting them to intense shelling campaigns, a strategy previously seen in Chechnya and Syria. Mr Biden, his European counterparts Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz and UN secretary general Antonio Guterres have all condemned the Kremlin’s “unprovoked and unjustified” invasion and promised to hold it “accountable”, with the West introducing several rounds of tough economic sanctions against Russian banks, businesses and oligarchs while supplying Ukraine with additional weapons, hardware and defence funding. Rumbling tensions in in the region first began in December 2021 when Russian troops amassed at its western border with Ukraine, creating widespread international concern but not acting until the final week of February 2022, when Mr Putin moved to officially recognise the pro-Russian breakaway regions of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic as independent states. Ukrainians return to Kyiv’s Maidan Square to celebrate the liberation of Kherson in November 2022 Weeks later, Russia threw its weight behind two separatist insurgency movements in Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland, the Donbas, which eventually saw pro-Russian rebels in Donetsk and Luhansk declare the DPR and LPR independent states, although their claims went entirely unacknowledged by the international community.