Russia on Wednesday accused Ukraine of carrying out an overnight drone attack on the Kremlin in a failed attempt to assassinate President Vladimir Putin. A senior Ukrainian presidential official denied the allegations, the most dramatic since Russia invaded its European neighbor more than 14 months ago.
Here is a timeline of key developments from the start of the so-called military operation by Russia:
February 2022: At dawn on February 24, 2022, after repeatedly denying plans to invade Ukraine, Putin announced a “special military operation” to demilitarize and “de-Nazify” the former Soviet country of Ukraine . A full-scale offensive begins with missile attacks on several Ukrainian cities and ground forces entering the country from the north, south and east. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky remains in the capital Kiev to lead the resistance, despite US warnings that Russia is out to “disintegrate” his government. The invasion, which comes after frantic diplomatic efforts to keep Putin at the negotiating table, has caused an international outcry as the West imposes unprecedented sanctions on Russia and progressively increases them. The EU agrees to send weapons to Ukraine – a first for the bloc – and the US has flagged billions of dollars in military aid.
March 2022: Russia has tightened control over many areas of southern Ukraine. They also capture Kherson province and the Black Sea coast, thus dealing an economic blow to Ukraine. The aim was to create a land bridge between the region of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. The land bridge would also include Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions where Moscow-backed separatist forces have provided aid to Russian forces. Civilians were killed in an airstrike on a hospital in Mariupol.
April 2022: Russian forces withdraw from northern Ukraine to focus on the east and south. As Moscow’s forces retreat from Kiev’s western suburbs, they leave behind scenes of horror. On 2 April, the bodies of at least 20 civilians were discovered, some with their hands tied behind their backs, lying on a single street in the northwestern Kiev suburb of Bucha. In the following weeks, hundreds more bodies, many bearing signs of torture, were found in homes, crypts and shallow graves across the north. Russia is accused of massive war crimes, which it denies.
May 2022: Ukrainian fighters surrender to Russian forces in Mariupol. Ukrainian troops – who were said to be the last defenders of Azovstal – faced intense bombardment, which reduced the port city and industrial center on the Sea of Azov to rubble. Thousands of civilians were killed and the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works plant was besieged, forcing the Ukrainian defenders to surrender.
June 2022: The Ukrainian military dealt a heavy blow to Russian naval forces as they raise a flag on Snake Island in the Black Sea off the Ukrainian city of Odessa. In the early stages of the conflict, Snake Island was used to launch missile strikes on Ukraine. Ukraine also sets aside the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva
July 2022: Severodonetsk and Lysychansk are under the Russian army. After a ‘strategic reset’ the Russian army calls in reinforcements and replenishes its food, fuel and ammunition reserves for the next phase of the war.
August 2022: Ukrainian counter-offensive begins in southern Kherson. Ukrainian forces were strengthened following the arrival of HIMARS and other advanced weapons from the US and its Western allies, and destroyed Russian ammunition storage centers and military infrastructure. An airport in Crimea has also been attacked.
On 17 August, Ukrainian authorities conducted disaster response drills after repeated shelling at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, the largest of its kind in Europe.
September 2022: Ukraine controls parts of Kharkiv, including the city of Izium. Izium was a major logistics center for the Russians. Russia announced a referendum for the Russian-occupied Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson. Russian proxies claim victory and Russia prepares to declare these territories as part of the Russian Federation.
On 21 September, Putin ordered Russia’s first mobilization since World War II and endorsed plans to annex swaths of Ukraine, warning the West that it would bluff when it was ready to use nuclear weapons. Wasn’t giving On 24 September, more than 700 people were detained across Russia in protest against a mobilization order. Russian men fled to neighboring Georgia to avoid involvement in a war they did not agree with.
On 30 September, Putin signed documents on the incorporation of four Ukrainian regions into Russia in a televised ceremony at the Kremlin.
October 2022: Russia changed tactics and turned its attention to Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which it has repeatedly targeted with missile and drone strikes. The strikes leave millions of people without power and heat at once in the middle of winter.
The Kerch Strait bridge was damaged on 8 October, affecting a vital route for the supply of fuel, food and other products to Crimea, incorporated into Russia. On 10 October, Russian missile attacks occurred in Kiev during rush hour, breaking a sense of relative security in the Ukrainian capital since the previous missile attack four months earlier. Authorities said they exhumed dozens of bodies, including those of civilians and a one-year-old child, to determine the cause of death after Russian troops retreated from two recently liberated towns in the eastern Donetsk region.
November 2022: The Russian army suffered one of the biggest setbacks in the war when they were forced to abandon Kherson. When Ukrainian forces arrive a few days later, they are greeted as liberators. On 9 November, relatives of those killed in the Battle of Mariupol came to remember their loved ones at a cemetery on the outskirts of the city. On 15 November, Russia attacked cities and energy facilities across Ukraine, killing at least one person and launching what Kiev said was the heaviest wave of missile attacks in nearly nine months of the war. On 15 November a stray missile targeted Poland, killing two people. NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg has said it appears the firing was mistaken by Ukraine’s air defenses rather than a Russian attack.
December 2022: On 5 December, Russia rained long-range missiles over Ukraine, killing two people, destroying homes in the southeast, and causing power outages, but Kiev said its air defenses had responded. The damage has been limited. Air raid sirens sounded across the country and men, women and children flocked to the capital’s cavernous metro system to seek cover during the latest major wave of missile strikes.
January 2023: Regional prosecutors said a Russian missile hit a market in a village in eastern Ukraine on January 9, killing two women and injuring four others, including a 10-year-old girl. At least 16 people, including Ukraine’s interior minister, other senior officials and three children, were killed on 18 January when a helicopter crashed near a nursery outside Kiev. Ukraine confirmed on 25 January that its troops had withdrawn from Soledar in eastern Ukraine, nearly two weeks after Russian troops said they had captured the small salt-mining town. Germany said on 25 January it would supply its Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, overcoming misgivings about sending the heavy weaponry that Kiev views as key to defeating Russia’s aggression, but Moscow sees as a dangerous provocation. puts in
Russia accused the Ukrainian military of deliberately attacking a hospital in a Russian-held region of eastern Ukraine on January 28, saying it was a war crime that killed 14 people and injured 24 patients and medical staff .
February 2023: Ukraine and Russia traded around 200 prisoners of war on 4 February in an exchange announced separately by both sides, with the bodies of two British volunteers also being returned to Ukraine. US President Joe Biden made an unannounced visit to Kiev on February 20, pledging to stand with Ukraine on a trip timed to topple the Kremlin ahead of the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion. On the occasion of one year of the war, the US and EU urged the 193-member UN General Assembly of nations to vote on a resolution calling for peace in Ukraine, in a vote the US said would “go down in history”. The UNGA heavily isolated Russia when Moscow invaded Ukraine calling for a “comprehensive, just and lasting peace” and again demanded Russia to withdraw its troops and stop fighting.
March 2023: The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Putin on 17 March, alleging that Moscow’s forced deportation of Ukrainian children was a war crime, as the Kremlin reacted with outrage. The Kremlin immediately rejected the allegations and the Russian Foreign Minister said that the ICC’s decisions “have no meaning for our country, including from a legal point of view”. On 19 March, the Kremlin reported that Putin made a surprise visit to Mariupol, the first visit by a president to the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine’s Donbass region since the start of the war. The visit came on the ninth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of the peninsula from Ukraine following the president’s unannounced visit to Crimea on March 18.
On 20 March, Chinese President Xi Jinping met with his “dear friend” Putin in Moscow, seeking to both deepen economic ties and boost Beijing’s role as a potential peacemaker in Ukraine. Xi was the first leader to meet the Russian President after the arrest warrant was issued by the ICC.
April 2023: On 2 April, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, says his forces raised the Russian flag over Bakhmut’s administrative building in Ukraine. Finland became a member of NATO on 4 April, completing a historic security policy shift triggered by the Ukraine War. Putin will visit military headquarters in Ukraine’s Kherson and Luhansk regions, which are partly occupied by Russia, on April 18.
On 28 April, Russia fired missiles at cities across Ukraine while people were sleeping, killing at least 25 civilians in the first large-scale airstrikes in nearly two months. A day later, a Ukrainian drone strike set a Russian fuel storage facility on fire in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, sending a huge column of black smoke into the sky in the latest assault on Russia’s occupied peninsula.
May 3, 2023: Russia claims Ukraine attempted to kill Putin via drone, while Kiev denies the allegations and says it had nothing to do with the alleged incident. The Kremlin said two drones were used in the alleged attack on Putin’s residence in the Kremlin citadel, but were disabled by electronic security. It said Russia reserved the right to retaliate – a comment that suggested Moscow could use the alleged incident to justify further escalation in its war with Ukraine.
(with agency inputs)
read all Breaking News Here