Why did Putin’s Russia invade Ukraine and does he want to get rid of Zelensky?

When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered up to 200,000 soldiers into Ukraine, his aim was to sweep into the capital, Kyiv, in a matter of days.

He wanted to overthrow the pro-Western government and return Ukraine to Russia’s sphere of influence.

Putin failed, but more than three years on a fifth of Ukrainian territory is in Russian hands, and the US – until recently Ukraine’s strongest ally – has paused aid under President Donald Trump and blamed Ukraine for starting the war.

As Putin launched the biggest European invasion since the end of World War Two, he gave a fiery speech on TV declaring his goal was to “demilitarise and denazify” Ukraine.

Russia has repeatedly painted modern Ukraine as a Nazi state, in a crass distortion of history.

Putin had already seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula eight years earlier, after a revolution that ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian president and replaced him with a more pro-Western government.

Putin then prompted a lower-level war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, with pro-Russian proxy forces occupying territory and setting up rebel states supported by Moscow.

But the 2022 invasion was on a different scale.

Putin had just recognised the rebel states as independent. Then, as the invasion began, he said the people there – many of whom are Russian speakers – needed protection from the Kyiv “regime”.

A day later, Putin called on Ukraine’s military to “take power into your own hands” and target the “gangs of drug addicts and neo-Nazis” running the government.

Putin then added another objective – to ensure Ukraine stayed neutral. He accused the Western defensive alliance, Nato, of trying to gain a foothold in Ukraine to bring its troops closer to Russia’s borders.

The Russian leader has long questioned Ukraine’s right to exist, claiming that “modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia” after the communist revolution in 1917.

In a long-winded 2021 essay he even suggested “Russians and Ukrainians were one people” dating back to the late 9th Century. Last year he told US TV talk show host Tucker Carlson that Ukraine was an “artificial state”.

Those comments have led many to believe that the goal of the invasion was in effect to erase the state of Ukraine.

Russia’s state-run Ria news agency explained that “denazification is inevitably also de-Ukrainisation” – seemingly tying the idea of erasing Ukraine to the stated goal of the invasion.

Ukrainian culture and identity have in fact existed for centuries independently of Russia.

Fact-checking Putin’s ‘nonsense’ history

Zelensky – from comedian to wartime leader

Putin has long sought to get rid of Ukraine’s elected pro-Western president, and Zelensky was apparently a target from the very start of the war.

Russian troops made two attempts to storm the presidential compound soon after the invasion, according to Zelensky’s adviser, and Ukraine’s elected leader said they wanted him dead.

“The enemy has designated me as target number one; my family is target number two.

“They want to destroy Ukraine politically by destroying the head of state.”

Zelensky said later that Putin had initially tried to replace him with the wealthy head of a pro-Russian party, Viktor Medvedchuk, who was accused of treason in Ukraine and is now in Russia.

Even now, three years on, Putin refuses direct peace talks with Zelensky “because of his illegitimacy” – a false narrative that has been repeated by President Trump.

As evidence Putin cites the postponement of Ukraine’s March 2024 presidential election, although it is because of Russia’s war that Ukraine is under martial law and elections are barred under the constitution.

Putin’s own re-election in 2024 is highly questionable, as Russia’s opposition leaders are either in exile or dead.

Putin has for years complained about Nato’s eastward expansion as a security threat, and sees any possibility of Ukraine joining the alliance as a major red line.

Before Russia’s 2022 invasion he demanded that Nato remove multinational deployments from the Central and Eastern European states that joined the Western alliance after 1997.

But it was Russia who launched military action in Eastern Europe, when it invaded Georgia in 2008 and then Crimea in 2014.

After the Crimea invasion, Nato established a continuous presence on its eastern flank – closest to Russia.

Nato has always stressed the whole purpose of the alliance is to defend territories “with no aggressive intentions”. Sweden and Finland have joined Nato in the past two years precisely because of the perceived Russian threat.

It is part of Ukraine’s constitution to join the European Union and Nato, but there was no real prospect of this when the full-scale war began.

Zelensky said as much two weeks into the invasion: “Nato is not prepared to accept Ukraine.”

He has since said he would consider resigning in exchange for Nato membership, but Trump says Kyiv should “forget about” joining the Western alliance.

Putin has accused Nato of participating in the war, because its member states have increasingly sent Ukraine military hardware, including tanks and fighter jets, air defence systems, missile systems, artillery and drones.

Nato has provided security assistance and training to Ukraine, but it insists that does not make it a party to the war.

Putin’s grievance against Nato dates back to 1990, when he claims the West promised not to expand “an inch to the West”.

However that was before the Soviet Union collapsed and it was based on a limited commitment made to then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachev said “the topic of Nato expansion was never discussed” at the time.

Read more: What is Nato?

At the start of the 2022 invasion, Putin vowed to protect people in occupied areas of eastern Ukraine from eight years of Ukrainian “bullying and genocide, during the war in the east.

More than 14,000 people died on both sides of the front line between 2014-2022, but Russian claims of Ukrainian Nazis committing genocide in the occupied regions never added up, and no international body has spoken of genocide. Germany’s chancellor called the allegation “ridiculous”.

The Russian taunts of Nazis in charge in Kyiv are also not correct.

Modern Ukraine has no far-right parties in parliament – they failed to get enough votes in the 2019 elections. On top of that, Zelensky is Jewish and many of his relatives were murdered by the Nazis in World War Two.

Putin condemns him as a “disgrace to the Jewish people”, but the US Holocaust Memorial Museum rejects his claims outright, saying he “misrepresented and misappropriated Holocaust history”.

Putin himself was accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court in 2024, although that has been rejected by the Kremlin.

Russia’s attempt to stop Ukraine leaving its sphere of influence goes back years, and its initial invasion began in 2014 when pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted after months of mass demonstrations.

Yanukovych had abandoned an EU deal under Putin’s pressure, prompting protests that ended when snipers shot dead dozens of demonstrators. Yanukovych soon fled to Russia.

Putin quickly seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and Russian proxies took up arms against the government, occupying parts of the eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions.

Two attempts to stop the war came to nothing.

They were known as the Minsk agreements and were brokered by France, Germany and Russia itself. They reduced the scale of violence, but Zelensky has called them a trap that created a frozen conflict on Russia’s terms.

Both sides accused each other of violations, and the Kremlin said ultimately the failed accords were a precursor to Moscow’s full-scale invasion.

The Ukrainian leader has warned the Trump administration not to trust Putin: “He broke the ceasefire, he killed our people.”

After three years of offensives and counter-offensives, Russian and Ukrainian forces are in a war of attrition on an active front line of more than 1,000km (629 miles).

Neither side has any realistic prospect of winning this war.

Russia annexed four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine after sham referendums in 2022, and yet it can really only claim to have full control of one of them, Luhansk.

Ukrainian forces were able to liberate large areas of the north and parts of the south in 2022, but more recent counter-offensives have not had the same success. They still control part of Russia’s Kursk region after launching an offensive there in August 2024, but have lost ground in the east.

Much of Russia’s firepower has been turned towards the Donetsk region, as towns and villages are destroyed in a slow and grinding advance.

The war is taking its toll on Russia’s economy, with high interest rates and inflation and defence spending this year of at least 33% of the federal budget.

Ukraine has lost a big part of its economic wealth to Russian occupation and destruction in its industrial east. Growth has been hit by attacks on its energy infrastructure.

Although inflation and interest rates are high, Ukraine has secured Western aid to cover its budget deficit.

Tens of thousands of people have died since Putin sent in the troops in 2022.

Ukraine’s president has spoken of 43,000 Ukrainian military deaths, but open source site ualosses.org suggests the number is above 70,000.

More than 12,000 civilians have lost their lives in Ukraine, according to the UN.

Russia rarely admits to military losses, but BBC analysis estimates that Russian deaths could range from 146,194 to 211,169.

The war has forced 6.9 million Ukrainians to seek refuge abroad, and a further 3.7 million to flee their homes inside Ukraine.

At the start, Putin did not even call it war but a “special military operation”. Eventually in 2024 he accepted it was, but claimed it was instigated by Kyiv or its “Western handlers”.

Putin appears to believe that Ukraine should remain in Russia’s sphere of influence because of the historical links between the two countries.

From 1922-91 Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and many Ukrainians speak Russian especially in the east, including Volodymyr Zelensky who is a native speaker.

Many Russians view Crimea as their own. It was annexed by Catherine the Great in 1783 and handed to Ukraine by Soviet leader Khrushchev in 1954. Ten years earlier, his predecessor Stalin had deported Crimea’s Tatar population, so the majority population was ethnic Russian.

Since 1991 Ukraine has been an independent state. It abandoned its nuclear weapons in 1994 in return for guaranteed security from Russia, the UK and US which Moscow failed to respect.

Since the war, many Ukrainians have turned their back on Russian, and Zelensky himself avoids using the language in public.