Not Just Territory: Four Years into the War in Ukraine

Map of Ukraine highlighting temporarily occupied territories since 2022.

It’s been four years since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In those four years, Russia has justified its war with many historical misconceptions.

Among the misconceptions is the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, where the newly independent Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan gave up their Soviet nuclear weapons to Russia. In exchange, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia all agreed to respect the territorial sovereignty and security of the newly independent countries. Since its signing, many people have criticized the deal, saying that Ukraine should not have given up its nuclear weapons. Still, the reality is that had Ukraine kept them, they couldn’t have used them because the controls to launch the weapons were in Moscow’s hands, and logistically, Ukraine was in no position to maintain the weapons, even if they had launch controls.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has often said there was an agreement that NATO made with Russia not to accept new members east of Germany. Since then, NATO has expanded east of Germany into former Warsaw Pact and Soviet territory. Putin believes that the agreement has been broken by NATO. In reality, there is a 2014 interview with Mikhail Gorbachev where he clarifies that NATO said that it wouldn’t expand into East Germany during 1990. This was before German unification, before the Soviet collapse, and only a few months after the Berlin Wall fell. The status quo hadn’t changed much to create new agreements on Eastern Europe. Countries in Eastern Europe gained their independence in 1991 and gained the right to have sovereign integrity, and they chose to flock west to the Western alliances of NATO and the European Union.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the worst geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. This statement glosses over many tragic events, from war to famine to genocide that occurred throughout the century. The Russian narrative often says that Russia has “never invaded other countries”. This is not accurate as powerful states have invaded weaker states throughout the course of history. But few have outright said that they have never invaded anyone. In the 20th century alone, Moscow sent troops into 20 countries, either by retaking former Empire lands like Ukraine, annexation of the Baltics, World War II invasions to push Germany back, or Cold War interventions in the Eastern Bloc. In the Eastern Bloc and former socialist republics, Russia actively Russified the people by doing its best to strip the non-ethnic Russians of their identity. Russia is attacking the nation of Ukraine by stripping the Ukrainian identity of the local people in the temporarily occupied regions of Ukraine. The most notable ways Russia has russified the people include giving Russian passports to the citizens, taking children away from their parents, and having the people of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk vote in the 2024 Russian presidential election.

Another argument that is often brought up is that Ukraine is a very corrupt country. Russia claims there are many corrupt leaders, and so Russia needs to liberate the people from the corrupt government. Russia often says that there are Nazis in the Ukrainian Government, which is not accurate. While some Nazi paramilitary groups formed after the invasion of Crimea, these groups are not in charge of the government. The current Ukrainian president is Jewish, has family ties to Holocaust victims, and ran on an anti-corruption platform in 2019. In reality, since 2013, Ukraine has ranked above Russia in corruption. According to Transparency.org, in 2025, Ukraine ranked 36th out of 100, and in the same statistic, Russia ranked lower at 26th out of 100. Of the 180 countries the organization surveys, Ukraine ranks 104, and Russia ranks 141 as of 2025. In the modern day, it is important that we remember that a war is not just won on strategic decisions on the battlefield. This war has been fought since 2014, and it’s only been a full-scale invasion since 2022, when everyone, from politicians to citizens of western countries started giving Ukraine attention.

Eastern Europe does not have easy-to-understand Western comparisons, as the countries are deeply divided due to Russian influence; this includes elections. Imagine you run on an anti-corruption platform and then your country is in the midst of an active war where ~20% of your internationally recognized land is under foreign occupation. Would you trust the election results when the enemy often puts people at gunpoint to choose the “correct” candidate? Citizens of a country should vote freely, not under pressure. It is against the Ukrainian constitution for the country to hold elections under martial law.

The roots behind the current invasion go very far back. The historical roots have always been there, ever since the Russian Empire. We need to remember that this is not just territory and strategic decisions on the battlefield. This is also an information war, an economic war, a trade war, and a war of national identity. It has escalated so far and has completely upended the status quo that we’ve had since the end of the Cold War, and really since 1945. This war is not just about territory; it is about whether a nation’s identity and sovereignty can be erased, and whether the post–Cold War order still means anything.