The Invasion of Ukraine

FEB 24 2022 · 12:00

Map of territorial control during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, launched 24 February 2022. Place: Kyiv, Kharkiv, the Donbas; eventually most of Ukraine Figures: Vladimir Putin, Russian President · Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukrainian President The 4 a.m. Decree Putin's pre-dawn televised speech declares a special military operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. Russian forces cross the border before the speech finishes. Zelenskyy, offered evacuation by the US, refuses with a line that immediately enters the war's mythology: Потрібні набої, а не таксі — I need ammunition, not a ride. Westphalian sovereignty is invoked by both sides at once: Russia claims Ukraine is not really sovereign (it is, on this argument, a historical anomaly within the Russian world); Ukraine claims that whatever it is, sovereign states do not cross each other's borders with armored columns at 4 a.m. What the War Reveals The war reactivates NATO. Sweden and Finland join, ending two centuries of Swedish neutrality and seventy-five of Finnish. Western sanctions reach a scope no previous regime has attempted: SWIFT cutoffs, energy import bans, and (the genuinely unprecedented move) the freezing of roughly 300 billion dollars of Russian central bank reserves held in Western financial systems. The reserves a sovereign holds abroad are now visibly conditional on geopolitical alignment. Three years in (early 2025) the war has not ended. The lessons are still being drawn. One reading: the Westphalian system holds; sovereign borders matter; the international community will fund their defense at scale. Another reading: the system is more porous than its idealizers believed; sovereign immunity was always conditional on access to the dollar and Brussels-issued payment rails. Both readings are correct. The question of which one is more interesting is the question Hope and Ludlow's book makes urgent. Video: Vladimir Putin's pre-dawn televised address on 24 February 2022 announcing what the Kremlin called a special military operation. Within minutes Russian missiles struck Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa.