Path to war in Ukraine was laid in months of plans

Lori Hinnant, Mstyslav Chernov, Associated Press

The week before Russia attacked, a Ukrainian soldier peered through a periscope from the bottom of his trench. Mud seeped into his boots, his clothes and every crack in his gear as he walked the narrow space where he had spent his days for the past 10 months.

Zakhar Leshchyshyn was just 23. He had no memory of Ukraine as anything but a fully independent country. But now he was charged with helping to keep it that way, posted at Ukraine’s eastern front line since early last spring, when 100,000 Russian land and naval forces first encircled most of his country.

“These wars for territory are madness,” he said, “but probably this is human nature.”

Within days, Ukraine was engulfed by what the soldier in the trench saw as humanity’s dark impulse. The largest invasion Europe has seen since World War II has imperiled a young democracy while risking geopolitical instability far beyond the flashpoints of the new war.

In the conflict’s earliest days, each side has managed to surprise the other. Russia unleashed a broader, larger invasion than almost anyone had predicted. And Ukraine, at least by US and other Western accounts, has put up a more tenacious fight than many thought possible against the neighbouring superpower. Fortunes can turn at any moment.

“It’s not apparent to us that the Russians over the last 24 hours have been able to execute their plans as they deemed that they would. But it’s a dynamic, fluid situation,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said on Friday.

And so it has been for much of the past year. Russia alternately added and subtracted troops along the border, diplomacy seemed to make progress until it didn’t, Russian President Vladimir Putin seemed restrained, then not, then maybe, then not.

The path to war was convoluted — but also inexorable.

It was back on March 31 of last year when the US military raised an alert of a “potential imminent crisis” arising from Russian drills near the Ukrainian border. Not long after, Russian troops were ordered back to their permanent bases and the sense of alarm eased.

But those orders also required Russian troops to leave their heavy weaponry in Crimea and the Voronezh region bordering Ukraine, where it would already be in place if the forces returned — which they did. The reprieve was brief for Leshchyshyn’s unit and for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had tweeted that the redeployment “proportionally reduces tension.”

Soon afterward, US President Joe Biden agreed to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva, a summit widely seen as a reward for suspending the drills. But by the end of summer, it was clear that Putin’s military plans were just getting started — even if they hadn’t quite taken shape yet. When Zelensky visited Washington on Sept. 1, he came away with a pledge of $60 million in military aid.

Leshchyshyn’s life in the deserted front-line village of Zolote continued as before, circumscribed by the labyrinth of trenches he commanded. The monotony of four-hour shifts on guard was broken by periodic exchanges of fire with Russia-backed separatists, and by the news he caught on his mobile phone.

Roots poked out along the walls of the trench, but they were never enough to hold up the mud when a shell exploded nearby. Those not on guard duty shored up the sides with hand shovels.

When they returned to their basement barracks in a house with no roof, the same shovels scraped the congealed mud from their boots. When night fell, the village was dark and quiet enough that Leshchyshyn’s men and the separatists sometimes shouted curses at each other from their respective trenches.

By early November, the mud was back, thick enough to weigh down the soldiers’ boots. So were the Russian troops — 90,000 of them again near the border, with more on the way from all corners of the world’s largest country.