War in Ukraine: eight infographics to understand everything about the crisis

“I am sure that the Russian armed forces will fulfill their mission professionally and courageously.” This Thursday, February 24 at dawn, on Russian television, Vladimir Putin announced a massive and coordinated military offensive in Ukraine. An operation that the last weeks of diplomatic talks and the deployment of the Russian army along the Ukrainian and Belarusian borders foreshadowed. The speech by the Russian president was followed by a ground attack in the east of the country. Bombardments had started a little earlier in the night.

Explosions were heard in several major Ukrainian cities, including the capital, Kiev, or Odessa in the south. Several command centers and military bases appeared to be targeted by Russian fire. Assaults followed by several cyber attacks. A set of operations that forced thousands of Ukrainian citizens to take refuge in metro stations or to flee by road.

Russia was quick to congratulate itself on having destroyed Ukrainian air bases and air defense, while ensuring that it was not targeting civilians. However, the repercussions are already being felt in daily life: the airspace has been closed, electricity and Internet cuts are recurrent, and the Ukrainian authorities have called on residents to stay at home after the introduction of the martial law. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called the offensive a “large-scale invasion”. Emmanuel Macron spoke of “war”.

• How did Russian troops get into Ukraine?

By mid-morning, there was no longer any doubt that the Russian tanks entered Ukrainian territory, as the border guards confirmed in a statement: “Russian military vehicles, including armored vehicles, violated the border in the regions of Cherniguiv (north, Belarusian border), Sumy (northeast, Russian border), Lugansk and Kharkiv (east, Russian border).” It is indeed the scenario of a total invasion which seems to have been favored by the staff of the Kremlin. An assault prepared for several weeks by Vladimir Putin and feared by the Americans.

Over the past few months, Russia has deployed hundreds of tanks, self-propelled artillery and even short-range ballistic missiles both on its territory and on the Ukrainian border. Satellite images providing information on the movements of war vehicles according to the evolution of military strategy attest to this. At least 130,000 soldiers were mobilized. The whole of the Russian army could be deployed, in particular to occupy certain metropolises in the event of a takeover.

“The political and military cost of such an operation would be absolutely gigantic for Putin”, confided François Heisbourg, special adviser to the Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS) and author of the essay. Return from the war (Odile Jacob, 2021), end of January. Thanks to its winter maneuvers, Russia has opened up three gateways to its neighbor’s territory: via Belarus, to the east, and in the south via the Black Sea. Three channels employed that night.

• What do we know about the deployments of Russian troops?

In the south of the country, 300 kilometers from Sevastopol, capital of Crimea annexed by Russia since 2014, the city of Odessa was bombed. A series of explosions was also listed in Kramatorsk, a city in the east which serves as the headquarters of the Ukrainian army, and in Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city, in the east as well. Images captured by CCTV systems or posted by Internet users on social networks show the advance of tanks from the Russian-Belarusian border, taking the road that leads to the capital, Kiev.

All of these offensives are the fruit of a Russian expansion policy that has been nibbling at the territory of its neighbors for three decades. For less than a decade, the Russian regime has managed to secure positions in eastern Ukraine by supporting pro-Russian secessionist militias in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. A support which has been reinforced in recent days, since the Russian president had recognized, on Monday, the independence of the two self-proclaimed “republics”.

Russia also benefits from another support given to a neighboring territory. By reaching out to authoritarian Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko when he was rocked in the fall of 2020 by a popular uprising, Vladimir Putin moved closer to a profitable neighbour. If Belarus clarified, this Thursday morning, not to take part militarily in the Russian offensive, the country served as a rear base for the Russian army to prepare its attack.

To retaliate, the Ukrainian army does not have military means comparable to those of its adversary. Faced with the 2,840 tanks of the Russian army, Ukraine has less than 1,000. Its active forces are half as numerous and Russia has 150 ballistic missiles when Ukraine has 90. Faced with the Russian strike force , the Ukrainian forces could very quickly be scattered all over the country.

Faced with the threat, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for the creation of “an anti-Putin coalition” to “force Russia to peace”, after talks with American, British and German leaders. Vladimir Putin has already anticipated a European or American military rallying to his ally and the Head of State has shown himself to be threatening: “Anyone who intends to get in our way or threaten our country and our people must know that the Russian response will be immediate and will have consequences never before seen in your history.”

At the end of the morning, the Russian army announced that it had made territorial gains against Ukraine. At least 40 soldiers and a dozen civilians were killed Thursday in the early hours of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters. The Ukrainian army claims to have killed around fifty “Russian occupiers”.

• What will Vladimir Putin do now?

Putin’s decision to formally recognize the territorial claims of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk allows him to justify a new invasion of Ukraine beyond the existing line of contact. This could, in turn, be the prelude to a wider conflict.

The most aggressive scenario, that of an all-out offensive aimed at taking control of the whole of Ukrainian territory, is the least probable in the eyes of the experts. “Even if Putin managed to defeat the Ukrainian military forces and occupy the whole country – which is not certain – he would continue to face increased resistance from the population. His troops could suffer many casualties and would risk becoming bogged down in the country,” said Tomas Ries, professor of security and strategy at the National Defense College (Försvarhögsklan) in Stockholm, Sweden.

Putin could also be content to reconstitute the “Novorossia“(“New Russia”) of the Imperial era. This scenario also involves a mobilization of Russian forces on a large scale, although the objective would be more limited. This would result in a takeover of the Russian-speaking area in the eastern and southern Ukraine, which would allow the land connection between Russia and the separatist Moldavian territory of Transnistria (pro-Russian, not recognized by the international community).

Another hypothesis: to establish the terrestrial junction between the Crimea and the Donbass. In this scenario, Russia would continue its nibbling of Ukraine by purely and simply annexing the Donbass – which is not the case today – and by creating a “land bridge” linking this region to Crimea. The objective here would be to open a new route to the peninsula annexed in 2014, which is currently connected to Russia only by a bridge built over the Kerch Strait (in the far east of Crimea, towards Krasnodar).

• What is the role of Nord Stream 2?

On Tuesday, February 22, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz suspended the certification process for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in response to Russia’s recognition of the two self-declared republics.

First announced in 2015, the $11 billion (9.9 billion euros) gas pipeline owned by Russian energy giant Gazprom was built to transport gas from Western Siberia in Lubmin to the north -eastern Germany, doubling the existing capacity of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline and keeping 26 million German homes warm at an affordable price.