Four years of conflict are, in historical terms, too many. That is how long the Ukrainian Armed Forces have been fighting against the large-scale Russian invasion since the early hours of February 24, 2022: 1457 days of destruction and death.
Back then, the world was still struggling to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. In the beleaguered Eastern European country, masks were quickly replaced by combat rifles. The tanks began to race across the steppe, the almost endless wooded plain that is Ukraine. The first photos of bloody corpses in the snow. Through the air, high capacity missiles They tormented the cities furthest from the Russian border. Those nearby, like Kharkiv, have suffered for years the torment of russian artillery.
The conflict is now Longer than the Korean Warwhich lasted three years, from 1950 to 1953. There are quite a few similarities with that conflict. North Korea invaded South Korea to unify the peninsula under the communist regime, in the same way as the Russian Federation invaded Ukrainealso justifying it with historical-ethnic reasoning: the union of what they consider a part of the Russian motherland, the Kievan Rus.
In the Korean War, the South was backed by a US-led UN coalitionand the North through China with Soviet support. Now, they are the countries of the I’LL TAKE those who support Ukraine. The open war ended with an armistice that froze the conflict on the front line, the parallel 38. Now there is also talk, in the trilateral talks between Moscow and kyiv led by the United States, of stopping the conflict in the current lines in dispute.
“The war has led to one of attrition. The traditional ‘war of maneuver’ seems to have died in Ukraine. Now, everyone is looking for a technological solution to overcome the opponent,” says Jesús Manuel Pérez Triana
In three months, the conflict will also exceed the duration of the first great global conflict, the Pfirst world war, which lasted 1,567 days, just over four years, between 1914–1918. It broke out after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in a context of imperialist rivalries and a strong arms race. It was a total deadly clash between the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary and their allies) against the Allies (France, United Kingdom, Russia and then the United States, among others).
A 12-year war in Ukraine
It is still far, yes, from the Second World Warwhich destroyed the world for six years, between 1939 y [1945. Other recent conflicts have been much longer lasting, such as the war between Iran and Iraq (eight years between 1980 and 1988) or the American invasion of Irak and the subsequent internal war (also eight years, between 2003–2011). The syrian civil war It can be considered that it lasted 13 from its beginning in 2011 until the fall of the dictator Bashar al Assad in 2024although there were phases with different intensity. The longest, 20 years, has been Afghanistan (2001–2021)although there were periods of relative stability in the Asian country.
The accounts change if we take into account that, in reality, the war in Ukraine did not begin in 2022, but in 2014. “This Friday, February 20, The war has actually been 12 years old.. That date marked the beginning of the occupation and subsequent annexation of Crimea y Sebastopol and, later, the beginning of Russian aggression against Ukraine in the east“, reminds EL PERIÓDICO Maria Kucherenkosenior analyst at the Ukrainian organization Come back Alive Ukraine. “If we discard the experience of the first eight years of the Russian-Ukrainian war (with its attempts at negotiation and ceasefire in the Normandy and Minsk formats), we are condemned to go around in circles: to try to impose a ceasefire here and now, and to no longer recognize the long-established manipulative tactics that Russia deploys behind these attempts, despite the experience of the Minsk y Normandy “provides a complete overview and catalog of these tactics.”
Why does the Ukrainian war last so long?
One of the surprises that the conflict in Ukraine has left is that a a priori smaller army and weakly it is resisting the onslaught of one of the largest in the world. The Ukrainian Armed Forces managed to repel the first attack. Russia attacked on several fronts: on the one hand, the Hillyin the east; on the other, since Belarus towards kyiv. With a guerrilla strategy, the Ukrainians managed to repel the tank column that was approaching the capital to behead the Government. The president, Volodymyr Zelensky, instead of fleeing, decided to stay and resist. Soon, they managed to push the Russian artillery away from the second largest city, Kharkiv, to a sufficient distance for the city to survive. Russia advanced considerably on the Eastern Front, and took almost the entire region of Luhanskthe bulk of Donetskand parts of Kherson y Zaporizhiaincluding the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. But there too the Ukrainians managed to stop the advances.
In the last three years, this has been a trench war, a carnage in which the taking of each city meant tens of thousands of casualties: Mariupol, Bajmut, Avdiivka, Pokrovsk…Ukraine launched in 2023 a counteroffensive essentially failed. He even took Russian territory in Kurskalthough he lost it after Donald Trump punished kyiv by disconnecting its intelligence information, key to the attacks. Russia attempted other incursions into the north-central Sumy region. But the front line has been virtually frozen for years, a bit like the stalemate in World War I. Because?
The war in Ukraine is lasting so long because the battlefield has stopped allowing classic maneuver warfare: today it is very difficult to concentrate forces, surprise and move reserves without being detected and attacked. “The emergence of the cheap drone, small quadcopters that are launched with one hand, allow us to have a permanent presence of an eye in the sky watching what moves. prevents concentration of force“, the element of surprise and the movements in the rear to launch attacks and counterattacks,” he explains to this newspaper. Jesus Manuel Lopez Trianasecurity and defense analyst.
File – A fighter of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Ukrainian airspace. / Europa Press/Contact/Aleksandr Gusev – Archive
Since the beginning of World War II, almost everything we have understood by high-intensity conventional war like the one in Ukraine started from the same scheme: Two mechanized forces They faced each other on the battlefield with a set of essential supports: sappers, artillery and a logistics group robust. The logic was to locate a weak point in the enemy front line and penetrate through there. To open that gap, sappers entered: they cleared minefields, prepared or repaired bridges, and demolished obstacles to allow passage. Behind them advanced the logistics group, supporting the effort with fuel, ammunition and food. At the same time, artillery punished the enemy’s strong points and, when possible, the entire advance was accompanied by aviation support.
But, in Ukraine, that “war of maneuver” seems to have died. To win you need some technological solution that is not available, which pushes for a longer and less decisive conflict. The crash has led to one of wearwhile trying to find a “philosopher’s stone” that will break the balance: drones, electronic warfare, new adaptations and countermeasures, without any giving a definitive advantage.
It is also prolonged because the attempt to apply the “recipe I’LL TAKE” to break the front in 2023: Ukraine had neither air superiority nor sufficient training and faced continuous minefields and prepared defenses, something those tactics were not intended for.
