Twelve years of war: Ukraine’s long road to real independence

Ukraine, Donbas, Vodyane village, Donetsk Oblast, October 2015.
Marika has replaced her windows with plastic panels so that constant shelling will not shatter the glass.
© Ugo Lucio Borga / Six Degrees

Very often, the beginning of the war in Ukraine is made to coincide with February 24, 2022, the date of the large-scale invasion by the Russian armed forces.

For me, having followed these events since their inception, that is a convenient simplification. And a false one.

In February 2014, Crimea was occupied.

On April 12, 2014, in Sloviansk, in the Donetsk oblast, one of the first direct armed clashes took place between pro-Russian separatist forces and Ukrainian armed forces.

One of the first acts of war.

In the years that followed, between 2014 and 2021, I witnessed some of the most brutal battles I have covered in twenty-five years of war reporting: the Donetsk airport, Debaltseve, to name just two.

Beyond the definitions still used today – often deliberately ambiguous or misleading – on the ground, it was already clear that a war was being fought.

To define it as “low-intensity” is to have neither seen it nor lived it.

What is certain is that the war I began documenting then is no longer the same as today. It has shed its skin, as conflicts often do when they drag on over years.

War is a pathogen: it mutates, adapts, survives, and spreads.

What we are witnessing today, however, is the product of a process – or, if we prefer, of a gamble – whose roots lie in something that, at first glance, did not yet appear to be a military confrontation.

For this reason, in the twelfth year of a war destined to reshape the world as we have known it, I believe it is necessary to take a step back.

To return to its genesis, to the moment it became a chronic conflict. And to what, incubated in a bloody limbo for eight years, led to its escalation.

Note to the reader
There are always multiple layers of truth.
There is a geopolitical truth, which concerns the aspirations of great powers, their perception of living space, the brutal logic of spheres of influence. Within this level, European activism in promoting the signing of the Association Agreement with Ukraine can also be read as a gamble: a push that did not fully take into account the predictability of the Russian reaction, nor the fact that Moscow would interpret that agreement as an unacceptable strategic loss, nor the necessity of guaranteeing Ukraine adequate protection from potential consequences.
At this level, Maidan marks the end of a dangerous illusion: namely, that the strategic orientation of a country can be decided quietly, through agreements among elites, without colliding with the power structures that such a trajectory inevitably challenges.
From that moment onward, the central question is no longer whether Ukraine truly wants to be free and independent, but how much it is willing to pay for that freedom and independence.
Maidan also belongs within a competition between blocs, and pretending that this level does not exist simply because it is not explicitly codified in norms, treaties, and agreements is misleading.
But stopping here means stopping halfway.
There is a second level of truth: that of legitimacy.
Ukraine has been a formally independent state since 1991. International law recognizes its prerogative to choose its own political, economic, and institutional trajectory. No logic of power can erase this principle without emptying the very idea of sovereignty of its meaning. The very fact that exercising this right could lead to an existential threat suggests that Ukraine still had to secure a real independence.
And then there is a third level, perhaps the most fragile: the expectations of a people. What a people believes is possible for itself. What it hopes to become. What it refuses to continue being.
It is on this plane that Maidan finds its deepest roots. Maidan was not a geopolitical experiment, nor the result of Western mass manipulation, as is often suggested. Maidan was the revolt of a people against a system perceived as closed, stagnant. And predatory.
If the first two levels – as they often do – can enter into tension with one another and generate debate, the third cannot.
Because no architecture of power can freeze the aspirations of a society without, sooner or later, generating a fracture.
And it is this, ultimately, that legitimizes Maidan: the fact that millions of Ukrainians refused the idea that their future could be decided without them.

Chapter I – The End of Illusions

In the simplified version circulating today, Maidan is often portrayed as a sudden outburst of pro-European enthusiasm. A square that wakes up one morning and decides to change history, more or less aware of the consequences, more or less a victim of external manipulation.

Reality is less cinematic. And far more unsettling.

Euromaidan did not begin with a romantic impulse. It began with a collision between a political decision, a structural economic vulnerability, and sustained external pressure.

What erupted in Kyiv in November 2013 was not the birth of a revolution, but the collapse of a fragile illusion: the idea that a country’s strategic direction could be negotiated quietly, without cost, and without consequences.

By the end of 2013, Ukraine had spent years negotiating with the European Union an Association Agreement, including the creation of a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA). Formal talks began in 2007. By 2012, the text was largely finalized. In March 2013, the Ukrainian government adopted an official action plan to prepare the country for the signature scheduled for November, at the Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius.¹

This was not a ceremonial document.

The agreement implied profound reforms: alignment with EU legal standards, market liberalization, competition rules, state aid discipline, judicial reform, anti-corruption mechanisms, governance oversight. In practice: the reconfiguration of large portions of the Ukrainian state.²

For many Ukrainians – especially in the central and western regions, but increasingly elsewhere – the agreement became something more than a commercial framework. It turned into the symbol of a possible systemic rupture with decades of corruption, selective justice, and oligarchic capture of institutions.

On November 13, 2013, The Guardian openly described Ukraine’s slowdown on the Association Agreement as a “victory for Vladimir Putin”.³

According to the British newspaper, Kyiv was blocking or delaying the approval of EU-required legislation – particularly measures enabling former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to travel abroad for medical treatment – seriously jeopardizing the signature of the agreement at the Vilnius summit.

The article emphasized how President Yanukovych’s hesitation resulted from cross-pressure: Brussels insisting on judicial reform and rule-of-law guarantees, Moscow threatening trade retaliation and warning of severe economic consequences if Ukraine signed with the EU.

A similar reading appeared in the French press. Le Monde described Ukraine as trapped in a tug-of-war between the European Union and Russia, highlighting how Russian economic pressure and insufficient progress on EU-required reforms were making the Vilnius signature increasingly uncertain.⁴

In this context, the legislative stalemate did not appear as a technical accident, but as a signal that Ukraine was slipping off the European path under the combined weight of internal vulnerability and external coercion.

Meanwhile, another actor observed and acted carefully.

For Russia, Ukraine’s integration into the European economic and regulatory space represented a strategic loss. A Ukraine governed by EU standards would become structurally more difficult to influence through traditional trade, energy, and customs levers.⁵

Throughout 2013, Moscow translated its opposition into concrete measures. During the summer, it introduced reinforced customs controls and temporary restrictions on Ukrainian imports, amounting in practice to a partial trade blockade.⁶

The message was explicit: access to the Russian market was not guaranteed and was conditional on Kyiv’s geopolitical orientation.

Alongside pressure came incentives. Loans, purchases of Ukrainian government bonds, significant gas discounts. Immediate financial relief, contrasted with the painful reforms demanded by Brussels.⁷

Ukraine entered this tug-of-war in a condition of economic exposure. Weak growth. Declining currency reserves. Public finances under strain. The immediate costs of EU alignment were real. The immediate benefits of Russian assistance were tangible.

It was within this corridor that the decision matured.

On November 21, 2013, the Ukrainian government announced the suspension of preparations to sign the Association Agreement with the European Union. Officially, the decision was justified by national security concerns and economic considerations.

Politically, it was a reversal: a signal that the cost of signing – internal and external – was suddenly deemed too high.

The European Commission would later acknowledge that this suspension “triggered mass civil protests (the so-called ‘Euromaidan’) in support of political change”.⁸

For broad segments of Ukrainian society, the announcement did not appear as a technical pause. It was experienced as the sudden withdrawal of a promise of change publicly cultivated for years.⁹

The first reaction was not insurrectionary.

That same evening, several thousand people gathered at Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kyiv’s central square. Students, young professionals, activists, ordinary citizens. The demand was limited: reverse course. Return to the European path.

The first demonstrations were peaceful. There were no calls to overthrow the president. No barricades. No weapons.

But beneath the surface, an accumulation existed.

Years of systemic corruption, unaccountable power, and selective justice had eroded trust in institutions. The agreement with the EU had become, for many, not an act of emotional attachment to Europe, but an expectation of rules, limits on arbitrariness, constraints on predation – a state that could not be treated as private property.

When that symbolic anchor was removed, frustrations that had little to do with Brussels suddenly found a point of condensation.

For about nine days, the protests remained relatively contained.

Then came the night of November 30, 2013.

Riot police units, including the special Berkut forces, intervened to clear a peaceful encampment composed largely of students. Batons were used. Protesters were beaten. Dozens were injured.¹⁰

A tactical operation that resulted in a strategic disaster: instead of extinguishing dissent, the violence transformed it.

What had begun as a protest against an administrative suspension became a protest against a state that struck its own citizens. The frame shifted.

In the following days, hundreds of thousands filled the streets of Kyiv and other cities. The movement assumed a national dimension and a new language: accountability, rights, limits on power.

Euromaidan was not born out of idealism.

It was born from the collision between a political promise built over time and its sudden withdrawal, between external geopolitical pressure and internal vulnerability. And between a society demanding a voice and a state responding with violence.

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Notes