A little over a year ago, on February 24, 2022, Russia began a renewed invasion of Ukraine, the first big, earnest move

in a larger slow-motion invasion that began in 2014 when Russia sent weapons and unmarked soldiers

to back Russia-aligned paramilitary groups in Ukraine's Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts in the country's eastern Donbos region.

Two groups Russia later in 2022 recognized as independent breakaway states that were firmly

entrenched in their ideological orbit.

But parallel to that initial breaking away, Russia also annexed Crimea, a very strategically significant

chunk of Ukraine, which contains, among other things, vital naval infrastructure that

the Russian government was long-term renting from the Ukrainian government up till that point.

The instigating factor for this conflict was another event that happened in early 2014,

the ouster of then Ukrainian president, Victor Yanukovych, as part of what became known as the Revolution of Dignity, or Maiden Revolution.

Basically, protesters in Kyiv had been clashing with government forces for months, beginning in November of 2013,

following Yanukovych's decision to not sign a free trade and political association agreement

with the European Union. This wasn't entirely a surprise, as Yanukovych was in Moscow's pocket,

and probably payroll as well, and was corrupt as hell,

essentially, keeping Ukraine aligned with Russia on pretty much everything and keeping local

oligarchs in charge as part of that overall corruption. But this decision turned Ukraine away

from the rest of Europe in a hard and significant fashion,

and that did not sit well with many of the country's citizens who were thus limited in their

interactions with the rest of the continent, which put them deeper and more unavoidably in Russia's

sphere of influence, which Russia was busily reasserting at the time

in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse and the capture of the Russian state by the oligarchs

who grabbed all the country's resources following that collapse.

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