Two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 2024 will be a tipping point

Amid talk of stalemate, the balance of forces on the second anniversary of Putin’s invasion is very different from how it stood on the first, says Mary Dejevsky. This time next year, I doubt Ukraine will even be at war

Ukraine is incontrovertibly the wronged party in this conflict (Reuters)

It is often said that anniversaries are artificial landmarks with little meaning of their own, and there is truth in that. They can, nonetheless, offer a useful gauge of change. The second anniversary of what Russia then called its “special military operation” – and what Ukraine and most of the Western world now calls Russia’s “full-scale invasion” – presents a salutary reminder of where we were two years ago, one year ago, and where we are today.

Before that, though, forgive a small digression into terminology. Personally, I tend to call what happened in the early hours of 24 February 2022 simply an invasion. That is what it was: an old-fashioned invasion of one sovereign state by another. Russia’s term, “special military operation”, cast its action as something akin to a short-term punitive raid, a designation disproved many times over by the numbers of troops fielded by Russia and the fact that a war is still raging.

To speak of Russia’s “full-scale invasion”, however – as is now almost compulsory in the English-speaking world – carries a coding of its own. It is to follow the Kyiv government’s view that there was an earlier Russian invasion, in 2014, which went largely unacknowledged internationally.