# Why did Putin's Russia invade Ukraine and does he want to get rid of Zelensky?

## 5 days ago

### Paul Kirby
**Europe Digital Editor**

When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered up to 200,000 soldiers into Ukraine, his aim was to sweep into the capital, Kyiv, in a matter of days. He wanted to overthrow the pro-Western government and return Ukraine to Russia's sphere of influence.

Putin failed, but more than three years on a fifth of Ukrainian territory is in Russian hands, and the US - until recently Ukraine's strongest ally - has paused aid under President Donald Trump and blamed Ukraine for starting the war.

## Why did Putin invade Ukraine?



Ukrainians sought shelter in underground shelters as Russian forces attacked on 24 February 2022.

As Putin launched the biggest European invasion since the end of World War Two, he gave a fiery speech on TV declaring his goal was to "demilitarise and denazify" Ukraine. Russia has repeatedly painted modern Ukraine as a Nazi state, in a crass distortion of history. Putin has made repeated false allegations of genocide and Nazi taunts against Ukraine.

## Does Putin want to get rid of Zelensky?



Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president in Ukraine in 2019.

Putin has long sought to get rid of Ukraine's elected pro-Western president, and Zelensky was apparently a target from the very start of the war. Russian troops made two attempts to storm the presidential compound soon after the invasion, according to Zelensky's adviser, and Ukraine's elected leader said they wanted him dead. "They want to destroy Ukraine politically by destroying the head of state."

Zelensky said later that Putin had initially tried to replace him with the wealthy head of a pro-Russian party, Viktor Medvedchuk, who was accused of treason in Ukraine and is now in Russia. Even now, three years on, Putin refuses direct peace talks with Zelensky "because of his illegitimacy", a false narrative that has been repeated by President Trump.

As evidence Putin cites the postponement of Ukraine's March 2024 presidential election, although it is because of Russia's war that Ukraine is under martial law and elections are barred under the constitution. Putin's own re-election in 2024 is highly questionable, as Russia's opposition leaders are either in exile or dead.

## Was Nato expansion to blame for the war?

Putin has for years complained about Nato's eastward expansion as a security threat, and sees any possibility of Ukraine joining the alliance as a major red line. Before Russia's 2022 invasion he demanded that Nato remove multinational deployments from the Central and Eastern European states that joined the Western alliance after 1997.

But it was Russia who launched military action in Eastern Europe, when it invaded Georgia in 2008 and then Crimea in 2014. After the Crimea invasion, Nato established a continuous presence on its eastern flank - closest to Russia.

Nato has always stressed the whole purpose of the alliance is to defend territories "with no aggressive intentions". Sweden and Finland have joined Nato in the past two years precisely because of the perceived Russian threat. It is part of Ukraine's constitution to join the European Union and Nato, but there was no real prospect of this when the full-scale war began.

## Who is winning the war?

After three years of offensives and counter-offensives, Russian and Ukrainian forces are in a war of attrition on an active front line of more than 1,000km (629 miles).

Neither side has any realistic prospect of winning this war. Russia annexed four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine after sham referendums in 2022, and yet it can really only claim to have full control of one of them, Luhansk.

Ukrainian forces were able to liberate large areas of the north and parts of the south in 2022, but more recent counter-offensives have not had the same success. They still control part of Russia's Kursk region after launching an offensive there in August 2024, but have lost ground in the east.

Much of Russia's firepower has been turned towards the Donetsk region, as towns and villages are destroyed in a slow and grinding advance. The war is taking its toll on Russia's economy, with high interest rates and inflation and defence spending this year of at least 33% of the federal budget. Ukraine has lost a big part of its economic wealth to Russian occupation and destruction in its industrial east. Growth has been hit by attacks on its energy infrastructure.

Although inflation and interest rates are high, Ukraine has secured Western aid to cover its budget deficit.

## How many people have died in the Ukraine war?

Tens of thousands of people have died since Putin sent in the troops in 2022. Ukraine's president has spoken of 43,000 Ukrainian military deaths, but open source site ualosses.org suggests the number is above 70,000.

More than 12,000 civilians have lost their lives in Ukraine, according to the UN. Russia rarely admits to military losses, but BBC analysis estimates that Russian deaths could range from 146,194 to 211,169.

The war has forced 6.9 million Ukrainians to seek refuge abroad, and a further 3.7 million to flee their homes inside Ukraine.

At the start, Putin did not even call it war but a "special military operation". Eventually in 2024 he accepted it was, but claimed it was instigated by Kyiv or its "Western handlers".

## What are the historical ties between Ukraine and Russia?

Putin appears to believe that Ukraine should remain in Russia's sphere of influence because of the historical links between the two countries. From 1922-91 Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and many Ukrainians speak Russian especially in the east, including Volodymyr Zelensky who is a native speaker.

Many Russians view Crimea as their own. It was annexed by Catherine the Great in 1783 and handed to Ukraine by Soviet leader Khrushchev in 1954. Ten years earlier, his predecessor Stalin had deported Crimea's Tatar population, so the majority population was ethnic Russian.

Since 1991 Ukraine has been an independent state. It abandoned its nuclear weapons in 1994 in return for guaranteed security from Russia, the UK and US which Moscow failed to respect.

Since the war, many Ukrainians have turned their back on Russian, and Zelensky himself avoids using the language in public.

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