Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q.)

Ukraine is not a NATO member and has never been a NATO member.
Ukraine has the right to choose unions for itself, and Russia, as it has repeatedly agreed, does not have the right to dictate this choice.
Each sovereign country has the right to choose its own security arrangements. This is a fundamental principle of European security, which Russia also supported (see the Helsinki Final Act).
Furthermore, when Russia signed the Russia-NATO Founding Act, it pledged to "respect the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all states and their inalienable right to choose how to ensure their own security."

As the fighting has dragged on, Russia has gravitated toward tactics that, by design, hurt civilians. In particular, Russia is besieging Ukrainian cities, blocking the supply and escape routes of civilians, inflicting missile and bomb strikes from the air, land and sea. The purpose of the strategy is to wear down the Ukrainian defenders’ willingness to fight, including by inflicting mass pain on the civilian populations. The result has been nightmarish: an astonishing outflow of Ukrainian refugees and tremendous suffering for many of those who were unwilling or unable to leave. As a result, taking Ukrainian cities means besieging them — starving them out, destroying their will to fight, and only moving into the city proper after its population is unwilling to resist or outright incapable of putting up a fight.

Ukraine is not a member of the European Union and has never been a member of the European Union.
Ukraine is a priority partner for the European Union. The EU supports Ukraine in ensuring a stable, prosperous and democratic future for its citizens.

Since 1991 Kyiv has been the capital of Ukraine. But the history of the city began earlier. For the first time, he received the status of the capital in 882, heading Kievan Rus. Then Kyiv was the capital of the Kiev Principality, the UNR, the UNRS, the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian SSR. Now it is the political, cultural and socio-economic center of the country and bears the title of Hero City.

Putin nurses a deep sense of grievance over the loss of Russia’s power and influence since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Ukraine was formerly part of the Soviet Union but declared its independence in 1991. Having a prosperous, modern, independent and democratic European state bordering Russia was perceived as posing a threat to Russia’s autocratic regime. Though the claims of genocide and Nazi rule in Kyiv were transparently false, the rhetoric revealed Putin’s maximalist war aims: regime change (“de-Nazification”) and the elimination of Ukraine’s status as a sovereign state outside of Russian control (“demilitarization”).

Absolutely, both in the traditional and modern sense. It involves a military assault with air, sea and land forces being deployed in combination with sophisticated cyber attacks and relentless propaganda disseminated by conventional as well as social media.
The invasion of Ukraine is just an expansion and escalation of the earlier hybrid war.
It is a war that actually began after Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, also known as Euromaidan, in 2013-14. That’s when widespread protests by citizens who wanted a closer relationship with Europe led to the ouster of then-president Viktor Yanukovych, who had asked Russia for help to put down the protests.

Crimea was the only part of Ukraine to have a slight majority of Russians at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, 55 per cent of the peninsula’s population voted for Ukraine’s independence.
Putin mistakenly believed that by successfully annexing Crimea by stealth and orchestrating an armed uprising in the Donbas, he would shake Ukrainian unity and prompt the southern and eastern provinces of the country to break away from the Kyiv government and seek to join the Russian Federation as a new territory to be known as Novorossiya, or “New Russia.”

The term “Cold War” refers to a period after the Second World War when the Soviet Union and Western democracies were aligned against each other in what was essentially an ideological battle between capitalism and communism.
Putin and his inner circle are very much products of the Cold War and consider the breakup of the Soviet Union and its Communist Party dictatorship a humiliation. In that sense, the current conflict is a renewal or even a continuation of the Cold War because its goal is to restore Russia as America’s greatest military rival.

In a televised speech days before the invasion, Putin suggested that “modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia.”
Putin has inherited much of his world view from the Russian-chauvinist and Russocentric traditions of the former imperial and Soviet Russian regimes. His Ukrainophobic attitudes can be attributed in part to his being steeped in deeply rooted feelings of both Russian superiority and resentment towards Ukrainians who have consistently asserted their distinct identity.
Russia has for four centuries tried to fully subjugate Ukrainian lands and to subdue the Ukrainian nation by means of laws and policies designed to undermine and suppress the Ukrainian language and culture, while at the same time privileging Russians in Ukraine.
Putin has repeatedly sought to disparage Ukraine’s successful declaration of independence in 1991 and is determined to put an end to it.