Russia on Wednesday accused Ukraine of attacking the Kremlin with drones overnight in a failed bid to assassinate President Vladimir Putin. A senior presidential official from Ukraine denied the accusations, the most dramatic since Russia invaded its European neighbour more than 14 months ago.
Here is a timeline of the main developments from the beginning of the so-called military operation by Russia:
February 2022: At the dawn of February 24, 2022, after repeatedly denying plans to invade Ukraine, Putin announces a “special military operation” to demilitarise and “de-Nazify” Ukraine, a former Soviet country. A full-scale invasion begins, with missile strikes on several Ukrainian cities and ground forces entering the country from the north, south and east. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stays in the capital Kyiv to lead the resistance, despite the US warning that Russia is out to “decapitate” his government. The invasion, which comes after frantic diplomatic efforts to keep Putin at the negotiating table, causes an international outcry. The West imposes unprecedented sanctions on Russia and progressively ramps them up. The EU agrees to send weapons to Ukraine — a first for the bloc — and the US greenlights billions of dollars in military aid.
March 2022: Russia takes firm control in several areas of southern Ukraine. They take the province of Kherson and also the Black Sea coast, thus dealing an economic blow to Ukraine. The aim was to form a land bridge between the region of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. The land bridge would also include Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions where Moscow-backed separatist forces aided the Russian military. Airstrikes at a hospital in Mariupol kill civilians.
April 2022: The Russian army withdraws from northern Ukraine to focus on the east and south. As Moscow’s forces retreat from the western suburbs of Kyiv, they leave behind scenes of horror. On April 2, bodies of at least 20 civilians are discovered, some with their hands tied behind their backs, lying on a single street in the northwestern Kyiv suburb of Bucha. Over the following weeks, hundreds more bodies, many bearing signs of torture, are found in homes, cellars and shallow graves across the north. Russia is accused of widespread war crimes, which it denies.
May 2022: Ukrainian fighters surrender to the Russian military in Mariupol. The Ukrainian soldiers – who were called the last defenders of Azovstal – faced intense bombardment which saw the port city and industrial hub on the Sea of Azov turn into rubble. Thousands of civilians were killed and the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works plant fell to a siege forcing Ukrainian defenders to surrender.
June 2022: Ukrainian forces deal a massive blow to Russian naval forces as they raise a flag over Snake Island, a sliver of land in the Black Sea off the Ukrainian city of Odessa. In the initial phase of the conflict, the Snake Island was used to conduct missile attacks on Ukraine. Ukraine also sund the the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, the Moskva
July 2022: Severodonetsk and Lysychansk fall to the Russian military. A ‘strategic reset’ follows as Russian forces call up reinforcements and replenish their food, fuel and ammo reserves for the next phase of the war.
August 2022: Ukrainian counteroffensive begins in southern Kherson. The Ukrainian military strengthened after the arrivals of HIMARS and other improved weapons from the US and its western allies destroyed Russian ammunition storage centers and military infrastructure. An air base in Crimea is also attacked.
On August 17, Ukrainian authorities performed disaster response drills following repeated shelling at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest of its kind in Europe.
September 2022: Ukraine takes control of parts of Kharkiv, including the city of Izium. Izium was a key logistics hub of the Russians. Russia announces referendum polls for the Russian-occupied Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Russian proxies claim victory and Russia prepares to declare these areas as parts of the Russian Federation.
On September 21, Putin ordered Russia’s first mobilisation since World War II and backed a plan to annex swathes of Ukraine, warning the West he was not bluffing when he said he will be ready to use nuclear weapons. Over 700 people were detained across Russia at protests against a mobilisation order on September 24. Russian men flee into neighbouring Georgia to avoid being drafted in a war they do not agree with.
On September 30, Putin signed documents to incorporate four Ukrainian territories into Russia in a televised ceremony at the Kremlin.
October 2022: Russia changes tack and turns its sights to Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which it targets with repeated barrages of missile and drone strikes. The attacks leave millions without power and heat for hours at a time in the middle of winter.
The Kerch Strait bridge was damaged on October 8, which impacted a crucial route for the supply of fuel, food, and other products to the Russian-annexed Crimea. On October 10, Russian missile strikes slammed into Kyiv during rush hour, shattering the feeling of relative security in the Ukrainian capital since the last missile attack four months ago. The authorities said they exhumed the bodies of dozens, including civilians and a one-year-old baby, to determine the cause of death following the retreat of Russian troops from two recently liberated towns in the eastern Donetsk region.
November 2022: Russia’s forces suffer their greatest setback in the war when they are forced to abandon Kherson. Ukrainian forces are greeted as liberators when they arrive days later. On November 9, relatives of people who died in the fight for Mariupol came to remember their loved ones at a cemetery on the outskirts of the city. On November 15, Russia hit cities and energy facilities across Ukraine, killing at least one person and causing widespread power outages in what Kyiv said was the heaviest wave of missile strikes in nearly nine months of war. A stray missile hit Poland on November 15, killing two people. NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg has said it appeared to have been fired accidentally by Ukraine’s air defences rather than to have been a Russian strike.
December 2022: On December 5, Russia rained long-range missiles on Ukraine killing two people, destroying homes in the southeast, and causing power outages, but Kyiv said its air defences had limited the damage. Air raid sirens blared across the country and men, women, and children huddled in the capital’s cavernous metro system to take cover during the latest big wave of missile strikes.
January 2023: A Russian missile slammed into a village market in east Ukraine on January 9, killing two women and wounding four others including a 10-year-old girl, regional prosecutors said. At least 16 people including Ukraine’s interior minister, other senior officials and three children were killed on January 18 when a helicopter crashed near a nursery outside Kyiv. Ukraine confirmed on January 25 that its troops had withdrawn from Soledar in eastern Ukraine, almost two weeks after Russian troops said they had captured the small salt-mining town. Germany said on January 25 it would supply its Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, overcoming misgivings about sending heavy weaponry that Kyiv sees as crucial to defeat Russia’s invasion, but Moscow casts as a dangerous provocation.
Russia accused the Ukrainian military of deliberately striking a hospital in a Russian-held area of eastern Ukraine on January 28 in what it said was a war crime that killed 14 people and wounded 24 patients and medical staff.
February 2023: Ukraine and Russia traded almost 200 prisoners of war in a swap announced separately by both sides on February 4, with the bodies of two British volunteers also being sent back to Ukraine. US President Joe Biden made an unannounced visit to Kyiv on February 20, promising to stand with Ukraine as long as it takes, on a trip timed to upstage the Kremlin ahead of the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion. Marking one year of war, the US and the EU urged nations of the 193-member UN General Assembly to vote on a resolution for peace in Ukraine, in a vote the US said will “go down in history”. The UNGA overwhelmingly isolated Russia, marking one year since Moscow invaded Ukraine by calling for a “comprehensive, just and lasting peace” and again demanding Russia withdraw its troops and stop fighting.
March 2023: The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant on March 17 for Putin, alleging Moscow’s forcible deportation of Ukrainian children to be a war crime, as the Kremlin reacted with outrage. The Kremlin was quick to dismiss the allegations and the Russian foreign minister said ICC decisions “have no meaning for our country, including from a legal point of view”. On March 19, the Kremlin reported that Putin made a surprise visit to Mariupol, marking the president’s first trip to the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine’s Donbas region since the beginning of the war. The visit came after the president travelled to Crimea on March 18 in an unannounced visit to mark the ninth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of the peninsula from Ukraine.
On March 20, Chinese President Xi Jinping met his “dear friend” Putin in Moscow, seeking both to deepen economic ties and to promote Beijing’s role as a potential peacemaker in Ukraine. Xi was the first leader to meet the Russian president since the ICC issued its arrest warrant.
April 2023: On April 2, head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group Yevgeny Prigozhin says his forces raised the Russian flag over the administration building of Bakhmut in Ukraine. Finland becomes member of NATO on April 4, completing a historic security policy shift triggered by the Ukraine war. Putin visits military headquarters in Ukraine’s Kherson and Luhansk regions, which are partly held by Russia, on April 18.
On April 28, Russia fired missiles at cities across Ukraine as people slept, killing at least 25 civilians in the first large-scale air strikes in nearly two months. A day after, a Ukrainian drone strike set ablaze a Russian fuel storage facility in the Crimean port of Sevastopol sending a vast column of black smoke into the sky in the latest attack on the Russia-occupied peninsula.
May 3, 2023: Russia claims Ukraine made an attempt to kill Putin via drones, while Kyiv denied the accusations and said it had nothing to do with the purported incident. The Kremlin said two drones were used in the alleged attack on Putin’s residence in the walled Kremlin citadel, but had been disabled by electronic defences. It said Russia reserved the right to retaliate — a comment that suggested that Moscow might use the alleged incident to justify a further escalation in its war with Ukraine.
(With agency inputs)
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