Four years ago next week, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since February 2022, there have been offensives and counter-offensives by both sides; bold and sophisticated attacks by Ukrainian forces, such as their coordinated drone strikes deep inside Russia last year; and massive aerial bombardment campaigns by Russia targeting Ukrainian civilians. The tactics of this war have ranged from cutting-edge applications of GPS for targeting and drone swarming, to the kind of artillery shelling and trench warfare that hearken back to 19th century combat. The loss of life has been tremendous, with the military casualty level projected to reach 2 million wounded or killed by this spring—a rate that few wars have witnessed since 1945.
By June, the War in Ukraine will become the longest continuous interstate military campaign in Europe in centuries. World War I lasted four years and four months. While it is customary to date World War II in Europe as lasting from September 1939 to May 1945, that is not entirely accurate, since it was not a continuous military campaign. (In fact, there were virtually no Allied military operations in Europe from September 1939 until May 1940, a period that came to be known as the “phony war.”) It was instead a series of related but separate geographically defined campaigns fought by Nazi Germany against the Allied powers, which overlapped in time frame. The longest of those discrete conflicts, the Nazi-Soviet War, lasted about three and a half years.
As the battle lines now stand in Ukraine, the map of territorial control looks largely the same as it did back in late 2022, with Russian forces controlling most—though not all—of the eastern and southern provinces, as well as holding the Crimean Peninsula. As Michael Kofman writes in a recent assessment of the conflict, “it is increasingly a war of adaptation, endurance, and exhaustion, as both sides struggle to break out of the prevailing battlefield dynamic.” It’s been four years of fighting for seemingly marginal territorial gains, rendering the human toll not only tragic but seemingly pointless.