February 24 – March 30, 2022 · Northern Ukraine Theater

Russia's opening gambit — a rapid armored thrust from Belarus toward the Ukrainian capital, accompanied by an airborne seizure of Hostomel Airport. The plan called for Kyiv's fall within 72 hours. Instead, Ukrainian defenders, armed with Javelin missiles and fierce resolve, halted the advance. Russian columns ran out of fuel and were ambushed on clogged roads. The airborne bridgehead at Hostomel was contested and destroyed. After five weeks, Russian forces withdrew completely, having failed to take a single major Ukrainian city.

February 24 – May 16, 2022 · Southern Ukraine Theater

The port city of Mariupol was surrounded within days of the invasion's start. The Ukrainian garrison — primarily the Azov Regiment and marine infantry — withdrew to the vast Azovstal steel plant and conducted a siege-within-a-siege that lasted 82 days. The plant's underground tunnels sheltered fighters and hundreds of civilians. Russia bombarded the complex with artillery, air strikes, and thermobaric weapons. The world watched as the defenders — massively outgunned and out of ammunition — finally negotiated a surrender on May 16.

February 24 – May 14, 2022 · Northeastern Ukraine Theater

Ukraine's second city — just 40 km from the Russian border — faced intense fighting in the opening weeks of the invasion. Russian forces entered Kharkiv's outskirts and shelled the city center extensively, destroying civilian infrastructure, the central market, and government buildings. However, Ukrainian forces prevented Russian troops from taking the city itself. Sustained artillery bombardment of residential areas produced large civilian casualties. By mid-May, Ukrainian counterattacks had pushed Russian forces back toward the border, out of artillery range of the city.

February 24 – June 30, 2022 · Black Sea Theater

A tiny Ukrainian island outpost in the Black Sea became the war's first legendary moment. On February 24, the Russian warship Moskva and a border guard vessel demanded the island's 13-man garrison surrender. The garrison's radio response — 'Russian warship, go f**k yourself' — went viral globally and became a rallying cry. The garrison was captured, but the island became a contested symbol. Ukraine launched repeated drone and missile strikes on Russian naval assets supporting the island occupation. On June 30, Russia withdrew from Snake Island entirely, citing 'goodwill gesture' — in reality abandoning an exposed position Ukraine had made untenable.

May 2022 – May 20, 2023 · Eastern Ukraine (Donbas) Theater

The longest and deadliest battle of the war. The Wagner Group, Prigozhin's mercenary army that recruited convicts from Russian prisons, led the assault on the small city of Bakhmut over ten months of brutal urban and trench warfare. Ukraine chose to fight for every block, turning Bakhmut into an attritional nightmare for both sides. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to rubble. By the time Wagner raised its flag over the city's ruins on May 20, both sides had suffered catastrophic losses estimated at tens of thousands each.

May 12 – July 3, 2022 · Eastern Ukraine (Luhansk Oblast) Theater

Following the fall of the Kyiv front, Russia concentrated force on capturing the Luhansk Oblast's administrative capital. The city became a miniature Stalingrad — Ukrainian forces clung to the Azot chemical plant and its tunnel system in a familiar pattern of industrial-structure last stands. For weeks, Ukraine controlled only the plant and a single bridge to the sister city of Lysychansk. Despite fierce resistance, Ukrainian forces were ordered to withdraw on July 3 to avoid encirclement, and Russia captured both cities by early July.

August – November 11, 2022 · Southern Ukraine Theater

Ukraine's southern counteroffensive methodically cut Russian supply lines to Kherson Oblast, isolating the Russian garrison west of the Dnipro River. Bridges and pontoon crossings were destroyed by HIMARS rocket artillery. Russian General Surovikin — newly appointed as overall commander — made the strategically sound but politically humiliating decision to withdraw across the river to avoid encirclement. On November 11, Ukrainian forces entered Kherson city to jubilant crowds.

September 6 – October 2, 2022 · Northeastern Ukraine Theater

One of the most dramatic military operations of the 21st century. Ukrainian forces, having lured Russian attention to the south with a publicized Kherson offensive, secretly massed forces in Kharkiv Oblast and struck with stunning speed on September 6. The Russian line collapsed instantly — Russian troops abandoned equipment, vehicles, and ammunition depots as Ukrainian forces advanced 50–60 km per day in some sectors. The major logistics hub of Izyum, holding the equivalent of a division's ammunition, was abandoned in 24 hours. Ukraine liberated over 8,000 km² in less than two weeks — more territory than Russia had captured in six months of fighting.

June 4 – November 2023 · Southern Ukraine (Zaporizhzhia Oblast) Theater

Ukraine's long-anticipated summer counteroffensive aimed to cut through Russian defenses in Zaporizhzhia Oblast and reach the Sea of Azov, severing Russia's land bridge to Crimea. Equipped with Western tanks including Leopard 2s and Bradley IFVs and months of NATO training, the offensive launched on June 4 into a system of defenses far deeper and denser than Western military planners had anticipated. Extensive minefields, layered anti-tank obstacles, and mutually supporting artillery positions blunted Ukrainian mechanized formations before they could close with the main defensive line. By autumn, Ukraine had liberated only a handful of villages at great cost in men and equipment.

October 2023 – February 17, 2024 · Eastern Ukraine (Donbas) Theater

Russia encircled and captured Avdiivka — a fortified industrial town that had been a Ukrainian stronghold since 2014 — in a grinding four-month operation. The battle bore close resemblance to Bakhmut: overwhelming Russian artillery, relentless infantry assaults, and Ukraine's decision to defend as long as possible before ordering a tactical withdrawal. Ukraine's ammunition shortage, caused by the stalling of US Congressional aid, was critical. The garrison withdrew on February 17, 2024.

August 6 – October 2024 · Kursk Oblast, Russia Theater

In a stunning surprise, Ukrainian forces crossed the Russian border into Kursk Oblast on August 6, 2024, seizing hundreds of square kilometers of Russian territory. The operation — the first foreign military seizure of Russian soil since WWII — shocked Moscow and forced Russia to divert forces from the Ukrainian front. Ukraine held a corridor of Russian territory for weeks, taking Russian civilians as bargaining chips for prisoner exchanges. Russia eventually committed North Korean troops to the counteroffensive, and Ukraine withdrew in late 2024.

September 2024 – December 2025 · Donetsk Oblast Theater

Pokrovsk was the logistical hinge of Ukraine's entire Donetsk defense — the road and rail junction through which the Donbas front was supplied — and Russia spent eighteen months taking it. The advance averaged roughly seventy meters a day. Ukrainian defenders held through the summer offensive of 2025 and five further weeks of concentrated assault in the autumn; Russia claimed the city in early December 2025. It was the costliest single battle of the war for both armies, fought in the manner that had come to define it: fiber-optic drones that cannot be jammed, infantry infiltrating in twos and threes rather than assaulting in formation, and artillery on a scale Europe had not seen since 1945.

January – March 2025 · Kursk Oblast, Russia Theater

The Kursk incursion of August 2024 had been Ukraine's boldest stroke since Kherson — the first occupation of Russian soil by a foreign army since 1941, intended to seize a bargaining chip and force Russia to divert forces from the Donbas. It did neither for long. Through the winter Russian forces, reinforced by North Korean troops, ground the salient down; by March 2025 Russia's chief of the General Staff reported that more than 86 percent of the captured territory had been retaken, and the remainder followed. Ukraine's most experienced assault brigades had been committed to holding it, and they were not in the Donbas when the pressure there intensified.

June 1, 2025 · Russian strategic airbases — Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan, Amur Theater

After a year, six months, and nine days of preparation, Ukraine's SBU smuggled 117 drones deep inside Russia hidden in the roofs of ordinary cargo trucks, drove them to within striking distance of five strategic airbases across five regions — Murmansk in the Arctic, Irkutsk in Siberia some 4,000 kilometers from Ukraine, Ivanovo, Ryazan, and Amur in the Far East — and opened the roofs by remote command. The drones destroyed or damaged 41 aircraft, including Tu-95 and Tu-22M3 strategic bombers and A-50 airborne early-warning planes. The SBU assessed that 34 percent of Russia's cruise-missile-carrying bomber fleet was disabled, at roughly $7 billion in damage. The truck drivers had no idea what they were carrying.

August 15, 2025 · Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson, Alaska Theater

The American and Russian presidents met for nearly three hours in Alaska on August 15, 2025 — Putin's first visit to the United States in a decade and the end of his diplomatic isolation over the invasion. Both delegations called the talks constructive. Nothing concrete was agreed. Ukraine was not at the table. Earlier US-led efforts that year to broker limited ceasefires covering the Black Sea and energy infrastructure had already failed on incompatible readings of what each side had agreed to, and the pattern held: negotiations proceeded in parallel with a Russian summer offensive rather than instead of one.

January 6, 2026 · Paris Theater

Thirty-five countries met in Paris on January 6, 2026 as the 'Coalition of the Willing' and issued the Paris Declaration on Security Guarantees for Ukraine — a commitment to what Ukraine would receive after a ceasefire, given that NATO membership remained unavailable. The declaration addressed the question that has blocked every settlement since 2022: Ukraine will not accept a ceasefire that merely pauses the war and lets Russia reconstitute, and Russia will not accept guarantees that amount to NATO by another name. Paris was an attempt to define a third thing. It committed no one to fight.

April 11, 2026 · Front line Theater

A thirty-two-hour truce for Orthodox Easter — proposed by Zelenskyy, with the duration set by Putin — began on April 11, 2026. Both sides reported that the other continued operations throughout; Ukraine logged 469 Russian violations, most of them drone attacks. It was the first agreed pause of the war, and it demonstrated the problem with all the larger proposals: neither army trusted the other enough to actually stop, and neither wanted to be the one that had stopped when the other did not.

Spring – Summer 2026 · Donetsk Oblast — Kostiantynivka, Huliaipole, Zaporizhzhia axis Theater

Russia's bet on a decisive winter and spring breakthrough after Pokrovsk did not pay. Fighting ran at over two hundred clashes a day along the Pokrovsk, Kostiantynivka, and Zaporizhzhia axes — infiltration fights inside Kostiantynivka itself, sustained pressure toward Huliaipole — without producing an operational rupture anywhere. Over the year from July 2025 to July 2026, Russia took territory amounting to roughly half a percent of Ukraine's area. In May 2026, for the first time since autumn 2023, the monthly change in Russian-occupied territory turned negative: Russia lost more ground than it gained. Putin's own account in March put Ukrainian control of Donetsk Oblast at 15–17 percent, down from about 35 percent six months earlier — an advance real enough to matter and far too slow to end the war.

May 9 – 11, 2026 · Front line Theater

A second truce covered May 9–11, 2026, timed to Russia's Victory Day commemorations, and included a prisoner exchange — the one form of cooperation that has continued more or less uninterrupted since 2022. Like the Easter truce it was short, unmonitored, and expired into resumed fighting. The prisoner exchanges, by contrast, have run to tens of thousands of people and constitute the only functioning channel between the two governments.