Explainer: A short history of conflict in Ukraine
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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello. David here with a new mini-series from The Briefing Room. We're packaging up some bits you may have heard before on other programmes which are still very relevant so they can explain specific things that are going on in the world.

In today's Briefing Room Explainer, the conflict in Ukraine, a quick rundown on how it developed. Here's Michael Clarke, visiting professor in the Department of War Studies, King's College, London, and a former director of the Royal United Services Institute. When the Russians first walked in on the 24th of February 2022, what they intended quite clearly was a military-backed coup.

because they intended to seize the government in Kiev within 72 hours and then suppress any problems they had in the major eastern cities within three or four weeks after that. That had to be the intention, because they didn't devote enough troops to do anything more. They had fewer than 190,000 troops.

in a territory that's the biggest territory in Europe, apart from Russia itself, and a country of 44 million people. So it's far too small a force to invade the country. When we talk about a coup, most people think of it as an internal struggle. And there was some sense of that in what the Russians were trying. They had a puppet government ready to move in and take over.

And they had at least two or three squads in Kiev, all of whom were tasked to get hold of Zelensky and his family and kill them. And we all remember there was lots of wild firing in the streets of Kiev.

You can hear the artillery. That is outgoing fire from Ukrainian forces. The fear here is that very soon Russian forces will be making their way down here. At least two and probably three of those assassination squads were gunned down. No survivors, they were just summarily gunned down by the Ukrainians. And what really happened was that Zelensky came out on the streets less than 48 hours after the beginning of the invasion and the most important speech of his life...

The head of the President's office is here. Prime Minister Shmigal is here. Podolyak is here. The President is here.

he made out on the street, lasted no more than 40 seconds. And he said, I'm here. The Minister of Defense is here. The Foreign Minister is here. Here we are in Kiev. We're not going anywhere. We are here. And that established the fact that he was alive. He would continue to resist and the Ukrainians would fight. And then the Russian strategy seemed to change to being a strategy of conquest of the Donbass region,

and as much as they could get of the country east of the Dnipro River. Russian and Ukrainian forces have clashed along a broad front across the eastern Donbass region on the first full day of a new phase of Moscow's invasion. So then it turned into a struggle for conquest in the autumn of 2022, but the Russians were doing very badly.

And those first two strategies played to Ukrainian strengths and Western strengths in helping Ukraine to outwit the Russians. And the Russians were very incompetent in the way they conducted their operations.

Then it changed in really 2023, in the spring of 2023, Putin doubled down and doubled down on the doubling down. This is a continued attempt by the Kremlin to try to legitimise its occupation, but also to send a message to Kiev that it's digging in for the long haul. Since the spring and summer of 2023, it has been increasingly a war of attrition.

in which a country like Ukraine, which has actually only got about 33 million people who now live outside the Russian-dominated areas, are up against a country of about 140 million people in Russia with an economy that's a great deal bigger. A war of attrition is a war in which neither side expects to make dramatic breakthroughs but to grind the other side down.

And however brave the Ukrainians are and however inventive they are,

Without more Western support, they were always going to struggle in a war of attrition. And it pointed up the weaknesses of Western support because the West doesn't seem to be prepared really for a war of attrition. Ukraine is desperately in need of continued assistance from the United States and obviously the European community as well, and that it's very important for us to get this. The Russians have lost a great many men, casualties.

are said now to have reached about 700,000. That's killed and seriously wounded. They will certainly go to over a million if they carry on. And they've bent their economy out of shape in order to conduct this war. Ukraine has found itself having to deal with the problem that it cannot win. It can only lose slowly.

Thanks very much for listening to today's Explainer. We'll be publishing these every week, a new mini-series. So make sure you follow The Briefing Room on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts so that you don't miss an episode when we publish them. And also remember you can go back and listen to any of our recent episodes on BBC Sounds. They're available now. Until the next time, goodbye.