Three years of full-scale war produce a timeline that is easy to lose track of. The names pile up — Irpin, Mariupol, Kherson, Avdiivka, Kursk. The phases blur. The scale is numbing.
This is a clear, factual record: what happened, when, and why it mattered.
February–April 2022: The invasion and the failure at Kyiv
24 February 2022 — Russia launches the full-scale invasion. Three axes simultaneously: north toward Kyiv, east toward Kharkiv, south from Crimea toward Kherson and Mariupol. The official Russian position: a “special military operation” that would be over in days.
24–27 February — The battle for Hostomel airport, northwest of Kyiv. Russian paratroopers land, are repelled, land again. The airport changes hands multiple times. The northwest axis — the main thrust toward the capital — stalls.
26 February — Ukrainian forces destroy the bridge over the Irpin River, slowing the northwest advance.
28 February — Civilian evacuation from Irpin begins under fire. The photographs of families crossing the broken bridge become some of the war’s defining images.
March 2022 — Russian forces occupy Irpin and Bucha but cannot hold them comfortably. Fighting continues street-by-street. Kyiv remains under Ukrainian control. International military and economic support begins arriving.
28 March 2022 — Irpin declared liberated. The first significant Ukrainian recapture of the war.
2 April 2022 — Ukrainian forces enter Bucha after Russian withdrawal. What they find — civilian bodies in streets, evidence of mass killings — is documented and published. The images change the international framing of the war permanently.
April 2022 — Russia announces a “reorientation” of its operation away from Kyiv, toward the Donbas. This is the official acknowledgement that the opening strategy — rapid decapitation of the Ukrainian government — has failed.
May–September 2022: Mariupol falls, south holds, Kharkiv counterattack
May 2022 — Mariupol falls after an 86-day siege. The Azovstal steel plant — where the last Ukrainian defenders held out — becomes one of the war’s most significant symbols of resistance. Approximately 2,500 Ukrainian fighters surrender after a negotiated evacuation agreement.
June–July 2022 — Russia intensifies strikes on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. Odessa, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv repeatedly hit. The war in the east grinds slowly westward.
August–September 2022 — Ukrainian forces launch a counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region that surprises almost everyone, including analysts. Russian positions in Kharkiv oblast collapse faster than they were built. By mid-September, Ukraine has recaptured over 8,000 square kilometres — the fastest territorial recapture of the war.
October 2022–February 2023: Kherson liberated, winter infrastructure war
October 2022 — Russia begins systematic strikes on Ukrainian power infrastructure — electricity generation, transmission, heating systems. The goal: collapse civilian morale and Ukrainian state function through winter. Ukrainian engineers and power workers respond with round-the-clock repairs.
11 November 2022 — Kherson city liberated. Russian forces withdraw across the Dnipro River. Kherson had been under occupation since the first days of the invasion. Zelensky personally visits the city within days.
November 2022–February 2023 — The front stabilises roughly along the Dnipro in the south. The east continues grinding. Russia launches mass drone and missile attacks on infrastructure throughout the winter. Ukraine survives the season, though with significant damage and civilian hardship.
2023: Bakhmut, the counteroffensive, and the long grind
January–May 2023 — The battle for Bakhmut — a city in Donetsk oblast — becomes the longest and most costly engagement of the war to this point. Russia deploys Wagner Group forces in waves. Ukraine holds for months, extracting what Ukrainian commanders describe as maximum Russian casualties.
May 2023 — Russia captures Bakhmut’s ruins. Ukraine describes it as a tactical withdrawal to prepared positions. The cost to Russia in personnel and equipment is assessed as severe.
June–September 2023 — Ukraine launches its much-anticipated summer counteroffensive in the south and east. Progress is slower than expected due to extensive Russian minefields and fortified defensive lines. The counteroffensive does not produce a breakthrough comparable to Kharkiv 2022. Western analysts debate lessons about modern warfare, mines, and the limits of combined-arms offensives without air superiority.
October 2023 — Front lines stabilise again. Both sides shift toward attritional warfare.
2024: Avdiivka, Kursk, and shifting dynamics
February 2024 — Avdiivka falls after months of fighting. A significant Russian gain in Donetsk oblast, though at significant cost.
Spring–Summer 2024 — Russia makes incremental gains in the east. Ukraine faces ammunition supply constraints as Western aid packages stall in political processes (primarily the US Congress).
August 2024 — Ukraine launches a cross-border incursion into Kursk oblast — Russian territory. This is the first foreign occupation of Russian territory since World War II. The strategic rationale: draw Russian forces away from Donbas, complicate Russian logistics, demonstrate that the war is not contained to Ukrainian territory. Russia redirects significant forces. The operation continues for months.
September–December 2024 — The Kursk operation gradually winds down under Russian and North Korean military pressure. Ukraine withdraws from most positions while retaining some territory. The strategic effect on the eastern front is debated.
2025: Pressure continues, diplomacy in the background
January–March 2025 — Fighting continues along the eastern front. Russian forces make slow incremental gains in Donetsk oblast. Western support continues, though the political environment in the US creates uncertainty.
March–April 2025 — Diplomatic activity increases. US administration attempts to broker a ceasefire framework. Ukraine’s position: ceasefire only on terms compatible with sovereignty. Russia’s position: effectively unchanged from 2022. Negotiations do not produce agreement.
The war enters its fourth year with the front roughly where it was a year prior, both sides sustaining casualties, and no clear path to resolution visible.
What this timeline tells you
Several things are clear in retrospect that were not obvious in the moment:
The opening weeks decided a great deal. Russia’s failure to take Kyiv in February–March 2022 meant the war would not be a rapid conquest. Everything since — three years of fighting — flows from that failure.
The human cost is enormous and uneven. Ukrainian civilian deaths, displacement (over 6 million external refugees, millions more internally displaced), and infrastructure destruction are documented. Russian military casualties are subject to fog-of-war uncertainty, but Western intelligence assessments describe losses unprecedented for Russia since WWII.
The war is not in stasis. Even in periods that look static on a map, the battlefield dynamics, equipment balance, Western support levels, and political environment are shifting constantly.
Kyiv is not the war’s geography. The capital has been targeted repeatedly but never occupied. The front is in the east and south. But Kyiv is where the Ukrainian government functions, where the international diplomatic community operates, and where you can understand the war’s context most directly.
Want to understand this history with ground-level context? Private guided tours of Kyiv — covering Irpin, Bucha, Hostomel, and the city itself. Guided by someone who was here from the first hours. Book via WhatsApp.