The Ukraine war is usually presented as beginning on 24 February 2022: Russia invaded, Ukraine resisted and the West rallied to its defence. But political scientist Ivan Katchanovski argues the real story begins years earlier, with Maidan, the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych, Crimea, Donbas and Western intervention. His research raises a far harder question: how many Ukrainians can be sacrificed before defending the country becomes indistinguishable from destroying it?
By INR Editorial team
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
Voltaire
What If the War Did Not Begin in 2022?
There is something extraordinarily convenient about beginning the history of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. It provides an uncomplicated morality tale: Vladimir Putin woke up one morning, invaded a peaceful neighbouring country without meaningful antecedent cause, and Ukraine became the innocent victim of Russian aggression. Russia did indeed make the decision to send its military across Ukraine’s borders, and Katchanovski himself describes the invasion as illegal. But an illegal invasion can still have a history, and legality does not relieve us of the responsibility to understand causation.
To understand that history requires going back not months, but years. Ukraine had already been at war since 2014. Crimea had already been absorbed by Russia. Donetsk and Luhansk had already become centres of armed separatism. Ukrainian forces had already fought Russian-backed formations in Donbas. Thousands of civilians and combatants had already died. NATO and Russia were already moving steadily towards confrontation, and Ukraine had become increasingly central to the geopolitical contest between them.
The Maidan Story Western Audiences Were Told
That earlier conflict itself emerged from the upheaval of Maidan. The conventional Western account describes the events of late 2013 and early 2014 as a democratic popular uprising against President Viktor Yanukovych after he abandoned an association agreement with the European Union. Protesters filled Kyiv’s Maidan Square, the government became increasingly repressive, demonstrators were shot, Yanukovych fled and Ukraine chose a new democratic and European direction.
It is a compelling story, and parts of it are unquestionably true. But Katchanovski’s research suggests the event that ultimately broke the government may have been far more complex than the version Western audiences were given.
His 2024 book, The Maidan Massacre in Ukraine, is the product of more than a decade examining the shootings that transformed the uprising. Katchanovski analysed thousands of videos, photographs and audio recordings, testimony from wounded protesters and witnesses, forensic medical evidence, ballistic examinations, court material, hundreds of hours of trial proceedings and Ukraine’s enormous Maidan verdict.
From that material he reaches a deeply controversial conclusion: elements of the Maidan opposition, including far-right participants, were involved in a false-flag operation in which both police and protesters were shot.
The Massacre That Changed the Political Balance
This matters because Katchanovski does not treat the shootings as some peripheral mystery at the edge of the revolution. He regards them as the decisive event.
The massacre destroyed what remained of Yanukovych’s political legitimacy, shattered the compromise then being negotiated and created the conditions under which the president fled and the opposition assumed power. In Katchanovski’s interpretation, mass protest alone had not removed Yanukovych. Political violence changed the balance, which is why he characterises the resulting transition as a coup rather than a straightforward democratic revolution.
His argument is not based simply on speculation about mysterious snipers. He points to wounded protesters who testified that they or those around them were fired upon from the Hotel Ukraina and other Maidan-controlled positions. He cites forensic examinations showing bullet trajectories inconsistent in some cases with fire from government police positions, including shots arriving from steep angles, the side or rear. He also analyses early ballistic findings that failed to match some bullets recovered from victims with the Berkut rifles alleged to have killed them.
What the Maidan Trial Revealed
Most significantly, Katchanovski argues that Ukraine’s own Maidan trial eventually acknowledged facts far more complicated than the public story.
His reading of the verdict is that some protesters were killed or wounded by unidentified persons who were not members of law enforcement, and that firing occurred from the activist-controlled Hotel Ukraina and other Maidan locations. He also notes that the trial did not establish the presence of Russian snipers or an order from Yanukovych directing a massacre.
None of that means a Ukrainian court judicially endorsed every part of Katchanovski’s false-flag thesis, and it would be wrong to suggest otherwise. But it does mean that one of the foundational events of modern Ukraine remains considerably more contested than most Western reporting ever acknowledged.
Washington Was Not Merely Watching
That brings Washington into the story.
The United States had spent years cultivating political, civil-society and institutional relationships inside Ukraine. Victoria Nuland, then a senior State Department official, publicly referred to billions of dollars spent by Washington since Ukrainian independence, money the United States described as assistance for democracy, economic development and civil society rather than regime change.
Yet the intercepted telephone conversation between Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt exposed a level of political involvement difficult to reconcile with the image of an impartial observer.
Before Yanukovych had been removed, the two American officials were already discussing which opposition leaders should occupy which positions in the government likely to follow. Nuland’s view of Arseniy Yatsenyuk was unmistakable: “Yats is the guy.” Yatsenyuk subsequently became prime minister.
That conversation does not prove that Washington orchestrated every event at Maidan, nor does it establish that the CIA simply selected Ukraine’s leadership. What it does establish is that senior American officials were actively attempting to influence the political configuration emerging from Ukraine’s crisis.
Whether one calls that democracy promotion, intervention or regime change almost becomes a semantic argument. The important point is that Ukraine’s political future was already the subject of intense foreign involvement.
A Country Divided After Maidan
Russia was attempting to keep Ukraine inside its own economic and strategic orbit. The United States and European powers were attempting to draw it towards theirs. Ukrainians themselves were divided over those competing directions, and those divisions did not disappear when Yanukovych left Kyiv.
They hardened.
The post-Maidan government inherited a country containing profound regional differences. Western and central Ukraine generally looked towards Europe and Ukrainian nationalism. Much of the east and south remained culturally and linguistically close to Russia, with markedly different voting patterns, political loyalties and attitudes towards NATO.
Crimea broke from Kyiv and was annexed by Russia. Armed separatist movements emerged in Donetsk and Luhansk. Kyiv responded militarily. Moscow supplied the separatists politically, economically and eventually militarily.
For the people living there, the result was not an academic argument over international relations.
It was war.
The Donbas War Did Not Begin in 2022
Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Donbas lived through shelling, displacement, detention, torture and death. Ukrainian soldiers and civilians suffered the same. Serious abuses were committed by both sides.
It would go beyond the evidence to claim that Kyiv was systematically exterminating Russian-speaking citizens immediately before the 2022 invasion, but it would be equally dishonest to behave as though no war existed before Putin ordered Russian forces across the border.
For eight years, people in eastern Ukraine had already been living inside the conflict that the wider world suddenly discovered in February 2022.
That raises an uncomfortable question about Moscow’s motives.
Could Moscow Simply Stand Aside?
Did Russia have genuine security concerns about the political and military direction of Ukraine after 2014? Did it regard the fate of Russian-speaking populations across its border as a matter in which it had a strategic or historical interest?
Almost certainly.
Does that automatically legitimise an invasion of a sovereign state?
No.
But acknowledging that Russia perceived threats does not amount to endorsing its response.
Western governments routinely distinguish between explaining an adversary’s behaviour and approving it. That same distinction should apply here. Russia may have exaggerated threats, manipulated them or used them as justification for objectives of its own. Yet pretending those concerns did not exist leaves us with caricature rather than history.
Ukraine Becomes the Battlefield
By the time Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine had therefore become much more than a dispute between two neighbouring states.
In The Russia-Ukraine War and its Origins, Katchanovski describes the conflict as containing overlapping dimensions: an interstate war between Russia and Ukraine, remnants of the civil conflict that developed after Maidan, and an increasingly explicit proxy struggle between Russia and the West.
Moscow escalated the conflict catastrophically by invading, but Ukraine became the territory on which a much larger confrontation was fought.
And this is where the moral equation begins to change.
The United States can provide weapons. Europe can provide money. NATO members can provide intelligence, training and political support. Russia can provide soldiers, missiles and artillery.
But Ukraine provides the thing its Western supporters cannot manufacture.
Ukrainians.
Ukraine provides the young men who are mobilised. It provides the fathers who do not return home, the husbands who are disabled, the children who grow up without them, the families that scatter across Europe and the towns in which there are fewer young people left to rebuild what remains.
Whatever strategic objectives Western governments may have pursued in weakening Russia, Ukrainians have borne the human cost of pursuing them.
The Peace That Might Have Been
That cost becomes even more difficult to justify when the failed negotiations of spring 2022 are considered.
Russian and Ukrainian representatives met repeatedly, culminating in discussions associated with Istanbul. Precisely how close those talks came to a final agreement remains contested, and claims that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson simply arrived in Kyiv and ordered Zelensky to abandon a completed peace deal cannot be stated as established fact.
The history is more complicated.
But several things are clear enough to matter.
Negotiations were taking place.
Zelensky continued publicly supporting negotiations even after the revelations from Bucha.
He said that meeting Putin sooner could reduce casualties.
The diplomatic process continued for a period before eventually collapsing, after which Ukraine’s objectives hardened around recovering all occupied territory, including regions Russia had controlled before the February invasion.
What If Victory Was Never Attainable?
Katchanovski argues that this was the point at which the war entered a phase Ukraine could not ultimately win on its stated terms.
His position is that Russia possessed structural advantages in manpower, military-industrial capacity and the ability to escalate that Western assistance could mitigate but not eliminate.
Western weapons could prolong Ukraine’s ability to fight. They could inflict greater costs upon Russia. What they could not necessarily do was enable Ukraine to militarily recover Crimea, Donbas and every piece of territory occupied by Russian forces.
If that assessment is correct, everything after that point deserves a different moral calculation.
It is one thing to ask citizens to defend their country when sacrifice has a plausible relationship to victory.
It is another to continue feeding citizens into a military strategy after victory, as officially defined, has ceased to be realistically attainable.
What Are Ukrainian Lives Purchasing?
The question is not whether soldiers sometimes die defending their homeland. Of course they do. Nor does the death of soldiers make their government murderers.
The question is what happens when political leaders know that the military objective for which those soldiers are dying cannot be achieved.
Suppose another 100,000 Ukrainians are killed or permanently disabled. Does Crimea return?
Suppose the number becomes 250,000. Does Russia abandon Donbas?
Suppose it becomes half a million. Does Ukraine then achieve the borders its political leadership insists remain non-negotiable?
If the answer remains no, then we are entitled to ask what those lives are actually purchasing.
Perhaps they purchase negotiating leverage. Perhaps they delay defeat. Perhaps they protect additional territory. Perhaps they impose costs on Russia. Perhaps they strengthen NATO. Perhaps they preserve the Ukrainian government’s political position.
Those are all possible objectives.
But they are not the same objective, and Ukrainians deserve to know the distinction.
The Democratic Paradox
This is made more troubling by the democratic circumstances under which such decisions are now being made.
Volodymyr Zelensky was elected in 2019 for a five-year presidential term. That term reached its scheduled end in May 2024, but Ukraine has not held another presidential election.
There is a legitimate constitutional and wartime basis for his continued exercise of presidential authority. Elections are prohibited under martial law, and the Ukrainian Constitution provides for the incumbent president to continue exercising powers until a successor is elected and assumes office.
So describing Zelensky simply as an “illegal president” overstates the constitutional case.
Yet legality does not remove the democratic paradox.
The war requires martial law. Martial law prevents elections. Without an election there can be no successor. Without a successor the incumbent continues governing.
At the same time, that government participates in the decisions determining whether mobilisation and war continue, while Ukrainian men may be compelled into military service under a political system whose presidential mandate has not been renewed by voters.
That is not a trivial constitutional curiosity. It goes directly to the relationship between government and governed when the state claims the power to send citizens into battle.
When Does Sacrifice Become Something Else?
Conscription itself is not murder. No serious argument requires pretending otherwise.
But there must surely be some point at which the moral authority to compel sacrifice depends upon the possibility that the sacrifice can accomplish its stated purpose.
Imagine political leaders know that their declared war aims cannot be achieved. Imagine they nevertheless continue replacing battlefield losses with newly mobilised citizens. Imagine possible compromises remain politically unacceptable because they require surrendering territory.
Imagine foreign powers have strategic reasons for continuing the conflict because every additional month damages their principal adversary.
And imagine the foreseeable consequence is tens or hundreds of thousands more dead or permanently injured Ukrainians.
At what point does “sacrifice” cease adequately describing what is happening?
How far removed, morally, is knowingly consuming the lives of citizens for an objective that cannot be achieved from mass killing?
That is not an accusation of murder in the criminal-law sense. It is not a claim of genocide, and it should not be disguised as one.
It is a question of political morality.
You Cannot Rebuild a Dead Generation
Ukraine is not simply losing territory or infrastructure.
It is losing people.
Its population had already been shrinking before 2022. War then accelerated emigration, displacement, family separation and collapsing birth rates. Millions of Ukrainians now live abroad. Some will return. Others have established new careers, homes and families elsewhere and may never permanently return.
A country can repair a railway line.
It can reconstruct an apartment building.
It can rebuild an electricity network.
It cannot rebuild a dead generation.
And this may ultimately become the defining contradiction of the entire war.
What does it mean to save Ukraine if Ukraine survives territorially but loses much of the population that was supposed to inhabit it?
A Nation Is Its People
A nation is not merely the coloured shape that appears on a political map.
It is not its presidential administration, its army, its parliament or its international recognition.
A nation is fundamentally its people.
If those people are progressively killed, disabled, scattered abroad or replaced demographically because there are too few left to sustain the country, then the meaning of “defending Ukraine” becomes increasingly difficult to separate from the destruction of the society being defended.
That demographic catastrophe also raises legitimate questions about what comes afterwards.
Who Owns the Reconstruction?
Ukraine will eventually require staggering amounts of reconstruction capital.
Roads, hospitals, power infrastructure, homes and industry will require rebuilding. Foreign governments, corporations and financial institutions will inevitably have interests in that process.
Ukraine may also eventually require substantial immigration or foreign labour simply because its own working-age population has been so severely diminished.
Who finances the reconstruction?
Who receives the contracts?
Who acquires the assets?
What happens to agricultural land, strategic resources, housing and infrastructure?
What migration policies emerge when there are no longer enough Ukrainians to supply the labour force?
Those questions should be investigated rigorously because enormous economic interests will accompany Ukraine’s reconstruction.
But they should also be kept separate from claims for which evidence is presently lacking. There is no demonstrated basis in the material before us for saying that Ukrainians are deliberately being removed so that Israelis can repopulate the country as part of a “Greater Israel” project.
If evidence for such a programme exists, it should be followed through legislation, migration agreements, property ownership, investment structures and government documentation.
Until then, speculation would weaken rather than strengthen the much larger case already supported by evidence.
Everyone Had a Vision for Ukraine
Russia wanted Ukraine outside NATO.
Washington wanted Ukraine anchored securely to the West.
European institutions wanted Ukraine integrated with Europe.
Ukrainian nationalists wanted a politically and culturally consolidated Ukrainian state.
Russian-speaking regions resisted important parts of that project.
NATO policymakers saw strategic value in denying Moscow control over Ukraine’s orientation, while Moscow regarded Western military integration on its border as intolerable.
Everyone had a vision for Ukraine.
The people who paid for those visions were Ukrainians.
The Great Obscenity of the War
That may be the central obscenity of the entire conflict.
A war supposedly fought to preserve Ukrainian sovereignty could leave Ukraine more dependent than before: dependent on Western military support for its defence, foreign finance for its budget, foreign capital for its reconstruction and immigration for its demographic survival.
Russia may retain territory.
Western governments may claim they weakened Russia.
Defence contractors will have made extraordinary profits.
Political leaders will write memoirs explaining why the sacrifices were unavoidable.
Ukrainian families will still know who is missing from the dinner table.
Who Answers for the Dead?
None of this absolves Russia of responsibility for invading Ukraine.
Nor should it.
But Russian responsibility cannot logically confer innocence upon every other actor.
Those responsible for the still-contested violence surrounding Maidan should answer for what occurred. American officials should answer for the extent and purpose of Washington’s political intervention. European governments should answer for their decisions.
Ukraine’s own political leadership should answer for the choices it has made about negotiation, mobilisation and the lives of its citizens.
And Western policymakers who supported continuing the war should eventually answer one question that is almost painfully simple:
What outcome did you believe justified the number of Ukrainians who would have to die to obtain it?
Define Victory
If the answer was victory, then victory must be defined.
If victory meant restoring every inch of Ukrainian territory, policymakers should explain when they last believed that objective was militarily attainable.
If the objective became weakening Russia, then that should be stated plainly.
Because weakening Russia and saving Ukraine are not necessarily the same thing.
It is entirely possible for Russia to emerge damaged by this war while Ukraine emerges devastated by it.
It is entirely possible for NATO to become stronger while Ukraine becomes smaller.
It is entirely possible for Western governments to declare strategic success while the country supposedly being saved suffers a demographic loss that will echo for generations.
The Question We Have Avoided
That is why Katchanovski’s work is so uncomfortable.
It refuses the luxury of beginning history on a date selected for political convenience.
It forces the reader back through Maidan, the unresolved massacre, foreign intervention, Crimea, Donbas, failed agreements and a geopolitical confrontation in which Ukraine progressively became both participant and battlefield.
And once that history is restored, the final question changes.
It is no longer simply who invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
It becomes who created the conditions in which this catastrophe became possible, who prevented or failed to secure peace when opportunities existed, who continues to benefit from the conflict, what military outcome remains realistically achievable, and how many more Ukrainians can be asked to die pursuing it.
Voltaire’s warning has survived for centuries because governments have always possessed an extraordinary ability to transform killing into virtue when enough flags, uniforms and trumpets surround it.
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
Ukraine has heard the trumpets for long enough.
Perhaps it is time to ask not merely who began the latest phase of this war, but who keeps it going, for what achievable purpose, and how many Ukrainians must disappear before defending Ukraine and destroying Ukraine become impossible to tell apart.