After 4 years of war by Russia in Ukraine, peace still elusive despite US push for settlement

When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine surpassed 1,418 days last month, it officially exceeded a historic milestone — the same span of time it took Moscow to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II.

And unlike the Red Army that pushed all the way to Berlin eight decades ago in what it called the Great Patriotic War, Russia’s 4-year-old, all-out invasion of its neighbour is still struggling to fully capture Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland.

After Moscow failed to seize the capital of Kyiv and install a puppet government in February 2022, the conflict turned into trench warfare with tremendous cost.

By some estimates, nearly two million soldiers are dead, wounded or missing on both sides in Europe’s most devastating conflict since World War II.

Russia has occupied about 20% of Ukrainian territory since illegally annexing Crimea in 2014, but its gains after the February 24, 2022, invasion have been slow.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte this month likened Moscow’s advance to “the speed of a garden snail.”

Russian troops have moved only about 50 kilometres (about 30 miles) into the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine in the past two years in a grinding battle for control of a few strongholds.

Despite the slow pace and high cost, President Vladimir Putin has maintained his maximalist demands in US-mediated peace talks, saying Kyiv must pull its forces from the four Ukrainian regions that Moscow illegally annexed but never fully captured. He has repeatedly brandished his nuclear arsenal to prevent the West from boosting military support for Kyiv.

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