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 ever-growing sense that his invasion has backfired, Mr Putin staged a televised address in September 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. However, US president Joe 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. Of the latest aggressions against Bakhmut, the deputy commander of Ukraine’s Svoboda battalion, Volodymyr Nazarenko, said: “The city, the city’s suburbs, the entire perimeter, and essentially the entire Bakhmut direction and Kostyantynivka are under crazy, chaotic shelling.” But after months of costly and violent warfare like this, it is believed that Russian citizens are finally beginning to see through the fog of Kremlin propaganda and understand Mr Putin’s misjudgement of the war for what it is, the aggressor having suffered devastating losses and economic consequences as a direct result of its leadership’s actions. At the time, Mr Putin warned: “To those who allow themselves to make such statements about Russia, I would like to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and for some components more modern than those of the Nato countries.” The threat was the most significant suggestion of the use of nuclear weapons by a leader with access to those weapons in decades and threatened to return Washington and Moscow to the height of tensions not seen since the Cold War.