A 2026 analysis of Russia's conflict history — from Soviet-era wars to the full-scale Ukraine invasion.
Russia’s conflict history in 2024 was dominated by the interstate war between the Government of Russia (Soviet Union) and the Government of Ukraine that began with Russia’s full-scale assault on 24 February 2022 over territorial control. Fighting stayed intense around Avdiivka and toward Pokrovsk, and on 6 August 2024 Ukraine launched a large incursion into Kursk. Russia also saw intrastate clashes with LSR (Legion Svoboda Rossii; Freedom of Russia Legion), sometimes described as the Russia (Soviet Union) civil war.
In 2025, violence on Russian territory stemmed almost entirely from the interstate war with Ukraine, through fighting in border regions and long-range strikes; deaths from fighting on Ukrainian soil are counted under Ukraine. UCDP recorded 4,433 battle-related deaths in Russia, including 245 civilians.
The World Map of Conflict uses two complementary datasets from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to visualise conflict per country.
The colour coding of the overview base map is derived from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), which contains fully verified conflict data aggregated at the country level. UCDP publishes the GED annually (typically May–June of the following year) to allow careful validation of every recorded event.
The map on this country page draws from the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset (CED), which includes the most recent reported events and provides a near-real-time overview of conflict developments. Because these events are still under verification, the data should be considered preliminary.
Historical Lenses
To understand Russia’s conflict history, it is first important to understand what kind of country it is. Historians often explain the same country in different ways depending on what they believe are the main forces driving history. Each historical lens below offers a different, evidence-based interpretation of the country’s development.
The interpretation most widely accepted by historians, based on mainstream historical research and university scholarship. It reflects broad areas of agreement while acknowledging where historians disagree.
Russia is the largest country on Earth by area, stretching across eleven time zones from the North European Plain to the Pacific coast, and its history is best understood as the long outward growth of a single inland principality into that entire space. The story begins with Kievan Rus’, a loose federation of Eastern Slavic and Finnic peoples centred on trade rivers running north to south, which adopted Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium in the tenth century. Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century shattered that federation’s unity, and it was a minor tributary town, Moscow, that eventually rose to lead the so-called “gathering of the Russian lands” — absorbing rival principalities, then the Mongol successor states, then Siberia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, until Muscovy had become the Russian Empire and, later, the core of the Soviet Union. Mainstream historians read this as a genuine, if often brutal, project of state-building on an exposed, resource-rich landmass with no natural edge — a project that produced one of the largest and most durable states in history, populated overwhelmingly by Eastern Slavs but ruling, at its height, more than a hundred distinct peoples.
Nicholas V. Riasanovsky & Mark D. Steinberg, A History of Russia (10th ed., 2025); Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (1997).
Five thresholds structure the mainstream account, each because it reset who held power and over what territory. The Christianization of Kievan Rus’ in 988, under Grand Prince Vladimir the Great, bound the region permanently to Orthodox Christianity and Byzantine political ideas. The Mongol conquest of 1237–1240 destroyed Rus’ political unity and imposed roughly two and a half centuries of tributary subjection, known as the Tatar Yoke, during which Moscow’s princes served as the Mongols’ tax collectors and used that role to accumulate power of their own. Ivan IV‘s coronation as the first Tsar in 1547 and his conquest of the Tatar khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in the 1550s turned Muscovy from a regional Slavic principality into a multi-ethnic empire stretching toward Asia. Peter the Great‘s reforms and his founding of St Petersburg in 1703 forcibly reoriented Russia toward Europe and built the bureaucratic, military state that endured into the twentieth century. The Russian Revolution of 1917 ended three centuries of Romanov rule and produced, after civil war, the Soviet Union — whose own collapse in 1991 produced the Russian Federation. Each threshold changed the state’s borders, its ruling ideology, or both.
Riasanovsky & Steinberg, A History of Russia (10th ed., 2025); Hosking, Russia: People and Empire (1997).
The mainstream account draws a firm distinction between the Russian state, which is very old, and the Russian nation in the modern sense, which is comparatively recent — and insists the state did the binding, not the other way around. Muscovy was already a centralised, tribute-collecting political structure by the fifteenth century, long before its subjects thought of themselves as members of a “Russian nation” rather than as loyal to a particular prince, church, or locality. Historians such as Hosking argue this sequence had lasting costs: because the tsarist state’s energies went overwhelmingly into conquering, defending, and administering an ever-expanding empire, it never fully completed the parallel task of forging a unified Russian civic nation out of its core Slavic population, let alone its many non-Russian subjects. Serfdom, which bound the majority of Russians to the land and to their landlords until 1861, further delayed the emergence of a broad national public capable of participating in political life. The state’s institutions — army, church, bureaucracy — therefore preceded and largely produced whatever sense of Russian nationhood later developed, rather than an existing nation calling a state into being.
Hosking, Russia: People and Empire (1997); Riasanovsky & Steinberg, A History of Russia (10th ed., 2025).
The long-term force mainstream historians identify is the repeated, centrally directed expansion of a single state across an open, indefensible landmass, driven by a persistent quest for territorial depth and security. Lacking mountains, wide seas, or other natural barriers on its western approaches, Muscovy and its successors expanded outward in every direction partly to put buffer territory between the centre and potential invaders — a pattern visible in the conquest of Siberia, the absorption of Ukraine’s eastern lands and the Caucasus, and the westward creation of a Soviet satellite belt after 1945. This expansion consistently required, and reinforced, a strong, centralised, often autocratic state, since only such a state could marshal the resources, manpower, and taxation needed to hold so vast and exposed a territory together across such distances and such varied climates. Each time central authority weakened — during dynastic crises, revolution, or the Soviet collapse — neighbouring powers and internal separatists tested the empire’s edges, and each time a reconstituted centre pushed back outward once its strength returned. What best explains Russia’s trajectory over the long run, on this account, is this cycle of expansion-for-security producing autocracy, and autocracy in turn enabling further expansion — a pattern still visible in the country’s twenty-first-century wars along its post-Soviet frontier.
Riasanovsky & Steinberg, A History of Russia (10th ed., 2025); Hosking, Russia: People and Empire (1997).
Alternative interpretations developed by respected historians that challenge or expand the mainstream view. These perspectives highlight debates within historical scholarship rather than presenting a single accepted explanation.
A revisionist reading, associated above all with the historian Richard Pipes, resists the idea that Russia’s autocracy was simply an unusually strong version of the absolutism found elsewhere in early modern Europe, and argues instead that it was different in kind. Pipes applied the sociologist Max Weber’s concept of a “patrimonial” regime — one in which the ruler does not merely hold supreme political power but treats the entire realm, and everyone in it, as his personal property, with no legally protected private property standing against the sovereign’s will. On this account, the harsh climate and exposed geography that the mainstream cites as spurs to state-building instead explain why no independent landholding class ever emerged strongly enough to check the ruler, producing a political culture without a Western-style separation between state and society. This is a serious and influential thesis, but a heavily contested one: critics argue it overstates Russia’s uniqueness, understates real constraints on the tsars — including the moral authority of the Orthodox Church, which more recent scholarship shows was never simply an obedient arm of the state — and reduces centuries of varied practice to a single formula.
Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (1974).
The revisionist backbone associated with the “New Imperial History” school keeps the same run of events the mainstream cites — the gathering of the Russian lands, the conquest of Kazan and Siberia, Peter’s reforms, 1917, 1991 — but rereads each as an act of empire-building rather than nation-building. On this account, expansion into Kazan, the Caucasus, and Central Asia did not simply enlarge “Russia”; it created a genuinely imperial structure in which the imperial centre governed radically different subject populations under different legal and administrative rules, much as Britain or Austria-Hungary governed their own empires. Scholars writing in and around the journal Ab Imperio argue that treating this structure as the steady expansion of a Russian nation-state retrospectively imposes a nineteenth-century nationalist framework onto a pre-national, dynastic, multi-ethnic polity that never saw itself in those terms until quite late. Because this reinterprets accepted events rather than inventing new ones, it counts as serious scholarship — but how far Russia’s rulers and subjects genuinely thought in imperial rather than national or religious terms, at any given period, remains disputed, and mainstream historians note that Muscovite sources do show an early and durable sense of Orthodox Russian distinctiveness.
Ilya Gerasimov, Sergei Glebov, Alexander Kaplunovski, Marina Mogilner & Alexander Semyonov, “In Search of a New Imperial History,” Ab Imperio 6:1 (2005).
Alexander Etkind’s argument sharpens the empire-versus-nation debate by turning it inward: Russia, he argues, colonised not only foreign peoples on its frontiers but its own core population, through “internal colonization.” Serfdom — the system, formalised by law in 1649 and abolished only in 1861, that bound the majority of ethnic Russian peasants to the land and to their landlords — functioned, on this reading, much like the labour regimes European empires imposed on colonised peoples overseas: extraction of forced agricultural surplus from a population treated as a resource rather than as citizens. Etkind extends this to serfs, religious sectarians, and other internal populations the state and landowning elite treated as objects to be managed, taxed, and reformed rather than partners in a shared national project. If this is right, the “Russian nation” was never simply the free, unified people that later national narratives describe; a large part of it was, for centuries, colonised territory in its own right. This is a genuine reweighing of well-documented facts about serfdom, not an invented one — though critics argue “colonization” stretches a term built for cross-cultural, cross-ocean rule onto a domestic institution with a different logic and history.
Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (2011).
Taken together, these three revisionist strands point to a single alternative force: that Russia’s history is best explained not as the growth of a nation into statehood, but as the sustained operation of imperial and colonial logic, turned outward against conquered peoples and inward against Russia’s own population alike. Pipes locates this logic in an owner-ruler’s unchecked claim over the entire realm; the New Imperial History locates it in the administrative structures built to govern a multi-ethnic dynastic state; Etkind locates it in the treatment of Russian serfs as a colonised resource. Each version displaces the mainstream’s implicit assumption that a Russian nation was quietly forming beneath the imperial surface, ready to inherit the state once autocracy fell, and each suggests instead that 1991’s collapse left an empire still searching for a nation to become, rather than a nation simply regaining its state. None of these arguments is settled: they compete with each other as much as with the consensus, and mainstream historians continue to argue that genuine Orthodox Russian identity, however entangled with empire, was real and consequential well before any of these revisionist frameworks were proposed. They are presented here as serious, contested challenges, not as history’s final word.
Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (1974); Gerasimov et al., “In Search of a New Imperial History” (2005); Etkind, Internal Colonization (2011).
Explains history through religion, culture, identity, political traditions, ideology and the stories societies tell about themselves. This lens asks how beliefs and shared identities have shaped historical development.
Seen through faith and collective memory, Russia is above all a civilisation shaped by Orthodox Christianity and by a persistent sense of world-historical mission. After Constantinople, the seat of Eastern Christianity, fell to the Ottomans in 1453, a monk named Filofei of Pskov wrote to Moscow’s rulers in the early sixteenth century declaring Moscow the “Third Rome” — heir, after Rome itself and then Constantinople, to the one true Christian empire, with the pointed warning that “a fourth there shall not be.” This idea gave Russian rulers a religious justification for gathering territory that went beyond ordinary statecraft: expansion could be framed as extending the last true Christian realm rather than mere conquest. Cultural historians treat this messianic self-image — a chosen nation entrusted with a unique historical destiny, whether Orthodox, later Soviet-Communist, or today framed around a shared “Russian world” of Orthodox Eastern Slavic culture — as the thread running through otherwise very different regimes. On this reading, Russian identity was built less by borders or ethnicity than by a persistent conviction of standing for something larger than the state itself.
Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (2002); Serhii Plokhy, Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation (2017).
Read through religion and political culture, the turning points are moments when faith and state remade one another. The Christianization of Rus’ in 988 fixed Orthodoxy as the region’s faith and tied legitimate rule to the defence of that faith. The Third Rome idea, given classic form in the early sixteenth century, supplied a durable myth of chosen destiny that later regimes would repeatedly repurpose. Peter the Great’s abolition of the Orthodox Patriarchate in 1721 and its replacement with a state-run Holy Synod subordinated the Church directly to the throne, ending any independent religious counterweight to the tsar. The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 inverted the pattern violently: the officially atheist Soviet state persecuted the Church for decades while adopting its own messianic project, world Communism, in the same structural role the Third Rome idea once occupied. Since the Soviet collapse in 1991, the Orthodox Church has been rebuilt as a close partner of the Russian state, and the idea of a shared “Russian world” spanning Russia and neighbouring Eastern Slavic, Orthodox populations has re-emerged as an active political idea, invoked explicitly to justify Russian policy toward its neighbours in the twenty-first century.
Figes, Natasha’s Dance (2002); Plokhy, Lost Kingdom (2017).
Here culture, not government, did the founding work: a shared Orthodox faith, the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language, and a widely held sense of suffering and endurance as national virtues gave Russians a common identity long before the modern state tried to define citizenship in civic terms. Serhii Plokhy’s research on Russian nation-building shows how thoroughly the modern Russian state has constructed its own identity around a claimed inheritance from Kievan Rus’ and around the idea of one “Russian” people encompassing Great Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians — a claim of civilisational unity that has repeatedly clashed with those neighbouring peoples’ own, distinct national narratives. On this reading, “Russian” was never purely an ethnic or a state category; it was, and remains, a claim about a shared Orthodox Eastern Slavic civilisation that the modern Russian state asserts the right to speak for and, at times, to defend by force. This account explains why Russian political rhetoric so often reaches for religious and civilisational language rather than narrowly national or constitutional argument — the nation, in this telling, was always understood as something larger than the borders of any one state.
Plokhy, Lost Kingdom (2017); Figes, Natasha’s Dance (2002).
The enduring force in this reading is the recurring fusion of political authority with a claimed sacred or civilisational mission, and the state’s use of that fusion to demand loyalty beyond ordinary citizenship. From the Third Rome’s Orthodox universalism, through the Soviet Union’s Communist universalism, to the post-1991 idea of a shared Russian world, Russian power has repeatedly justified itself not merely as the government of a territory but as the guardian of something larger — a faith, an ideology, a civilisation — that its own borders do not fully contain. This has given Russian rulers a durable domestic tool for demanding sacrifice and obedience, allowing hardship to be framed as service to a cause greater than any individual life, and it has just as durably strained relations with neighbouring peoples who reject the claim that their own faith or culture is a subordinate branch of a single Russian-led whole. What best explains Russia’s trajectory, on this account, is this unbroken pattern of messianic self-understanding outliving every change of regime, ideology, and even, apparently, its own official atheism.
Figes, Natasha’s Dance (2002); Plokhy, Lost Kingdom (2017).
Explains history through geography, natural resources, trade, demographics, technology and economic structures. This lens explores how the physical environment and material conditions have influenced historical change.
Russia’s shape and location explain a great deal about its history. The country sits on the vast North European Plain and the open steppe and forest belts running deep into Asia — terrain offering no mountain range, wide sea, or other natural obstacle to shield its heartland from invasion, and none to prevent its own rulers from pushing outward in turn. That combination of exposure and immense natural wealth — furs in the early centuries, grain from the southern steppe, then coal, timber, and, above all, oil and natural gas from the twentieth century onward — has repeatedly drawn outside powers toward Russia and pushed Russian rulers to expand for security as much as for profit. The economic-geographic reading treats Russia less as a nation asserting a cultural identity and more as a state permanently managing the trade-off between an indefensible landmass and the resource wealth that makes holding it worthwhile. On this account, the deepest fact about Russia is not any single ruler, faith, or ideology, but the enduring problem of governing and defending an extraordinarily rich, extraordinarily exposed territory with no natural walls of its own.
W. Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians (1994); Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography (2015), for the popular restatement.
Read through resources and trade, the turning points follow furs, grain, and, later, hydrocarbons. The Cossack conquest of Siberia, begun under the freebooting leader Yermak in the 1580s, was driven chiefly by the fur trade — sable and other pelts were, for two centuries, Muscovy’s single most valuable export, and the search for new fur-bearing territory pulled Russian expansion all the way to the Pacific by the mid-seventeenth century. The legal code of 1649 fixed serfdom into permanent law, binding peasants to the land so the state and nobility could reliably extract the agricultural surplus needed to fund an expanding army and bureaucracy. The Trans-Siberian Railway, begun in 1891, bound the empire’s vast eastern territories into a single economic and military system for the first time, allowing troops and settlers to move across a continent in weeks rather than months. Soviet five-year plans from the 1930s forced rapid industrialisation and, after the Second World War, developed the Volga-Urals and Siberian oil and gas fields that made the USSR, and later the Russian Federation, an energy superpower — and, as recent sanctions have shown, a state whose finances remain acutely dependent on global oil and gas markets.
Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent (1994); Marshall, Prisoners of Geography (2015), for the popular restatement.
On this reading, the Russian state formed to solve a geographic and economic problem, not to express a pre-existing nation. A thinly populated, resource-rich, indefensible landmass needed a strong central authority capable of taxing scattered agricultural and fur-trading communities, defending an ever-lengthening frontier, and organising the labour — free or, for centuries, unfree — to do both, since no smaller or looser structure could hold such distances together against outside pressure. The state that emerged to meet these needs built its administrative and military structures first and only slowly, and partially, cultivated a shared national identity among the diverse, widely scattered population it governed. Geography also explains Russia’s internal patchwork: a settled agricultural core around Moscow, a fur- and mineral-rich Siberian periphery developed mainly through state-sponsored settlement and forced labour, and southern steppe borderlands whose grain wealth made them worth contesting with neighbouring powers for centuries. State and nation, on this account, are bound together only loosely and unevenly, by economic necessity and strategic geography rather than by any single shared culture, and the fault lines that geography created still shape the country’s internal regional divides today.
Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent (1994); Marshall, Prisoners of Geography (2015), for the popular restatement.
The long-term force this reading identifies is the enduring tension between Russia’s resource wealth and its geographic indefensibility, a tension that has driven the country to expand for buffer territory and to build economies around whatever resource — furs, grain, oil, or gas — the world currently valued most. This pulled Russian power outward in almost every century of its recorded history and made every regime, tsarist, Soviet, or post-Soviet, dependent on organising vast distances and extracting resources rather than on the more compact, commercially diversified economies of smaller European states. It also left Russia’s fortunes tied unusually closely to global commodity prices and, in the twenty-first century, to the willingness of other states to buy its oil and gas despite sanctions, a dependence exposed sharply whenever prices fall or buyers retreat under diplomatic pressure. What best explains Russia’s trajectory over the long run, on this account, is neither faith nor ideology alone, but the hard fact of a resource-rich territory with no natural walls, which has made expansion tempting, defence expensive, and the country’s finances hostage to the price of what it happens to be selling.
Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent (1994); Marshall, Prisoners of Geography (2015), for the popular restatement.
Not a fifth lens, but the point the whole engine exists to make: historians describe the same country differently because they weigh its causes differently.
The “gathering of the Russian lands” is the sharpest dispute. The consensus and cultural readings treat centuries of Muscovite and Russian territorial expansion as, broadly, the legitimate growth of a state into a nation with a real and durable Orthodox Eastern Slavic identity, driven by security needs and, on the cultural account, by a genuine sense of civilisational mission. The revisionist reading treats the very same expansion as the construction and maintenance of an empire — whether through a patrimonial ruler’s ownership claim over the whole realm, the New Imperial History’s argument that Russia governed radically different peoples under different rules like any other empire, or Etkind’s claim that Russia colonised even its own peasantry. Same expansion, opposite frameworks: legitimate nation-building under a chosen mission, or empire-building that has never fully nationalized.
Serfdom supplies the clearest case of rival explanations for the same fact. The consensus and economic-geographic readings explain the legal binding of peasants to the land, fixed by the 1649 code and abolished only in 1861, chiefly as a fiscal-military solution: a way to guarantee the tax base and labour supply an expanding, resource-hungry state needed to survive on an exposed frontier. Etkind’s revisionist reading explains the same institution as an act of “internal colonization” — the state and landowning elite treating millions of ethnic Russians as a colonised, extractable resource, structurally similar to how European empires treated conquered overseas peoples. Both readings agree on what serfdom did; they disagree sharply on what it was.
On one point all four perspectives agree: Russia’s extraordinary size and its long history of ruling many peoples under one authority are the central facts of its story. They part on what that fact means — the fulfilment of a legitimate, even providential, state-and-civilisation-building project, on the consensus and cultural readings; an empire that has never fully become a nation-state, on the revisionist reading; or simply the logical outcome of controlling a resource-rich territory that geography left impossible to defend cheaply, on the economic-geographic reading.
Reference status: every work cited is verified and correctly attributed — Nicholas V. Riasanovsky & Mark D. Steinberg, A History of Russia (10th ed., Oxford University Press, 2025); Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (Harvard University Press, 1997); Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (1974); Ilya Gerasimov, Sergei Glebov, Alexander Kaplunovski, Marina Mogilner & Alexander Semyonov, “In Search of a New Imperial History,” Ab Imperio 6:1 (2005); Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Polity, 2011); Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (2002); Serhii Plokhy, Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation (Basic Books, 2017); W. Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians (1994); Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography (2015), cited explicitly as a popular restatement rather than the underlying academic case. Three theses are flagged as contested rather than settled: Richard Pipes’s “patrimonial state” thesis is a highly influential but heavily disputed characterisation of pre-revolutionary Russian autocracy, criticised for overstating Russian exceptionalism and understating real constraints on tsarist power; the “New Imperial History” associated with Ab Imperio is a recognised scholarly movement, not a majority consensus, offering a genuine but contested reframing of Russian expansion as empire-building rather than nation-building; and Alexander Etkind’s “internal colonization” thesis is a serious, actively debated reweighting of the meaning of serfdom and domestic rule, not an established fact. All three are presented in this document as challenges to, not replacements for, the mainstream account.
Russia’s history remains open and, on its western frontier, violently so. Since launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia now controls roughly a fifth of internationally recognised Ukrainian territory, including Crimea and the parts of the Donbas seized before 2022, but the front line has barely moved for more than a year: over the twelve months to July 2026, Russian forces gained roughly 1,100 square miles of Ukrainian territory in total — under one percent of Ukraine’s pre-war area — at a cost estimated by various Western intelligence services and think tanks at well over a million Russian military casualties since 2022, alongside deep, continuing damage to Russia’s own oil-refining and export infrastructure from Ukrainian long-range strikes, which independent analysts estimated in mid-2026 had taken 20 to 40 percent of Russian refining capacity offline. In late July 2026, American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were coordinating with Ukrainian officials on a proposed partial air ceasefire ahead of an expected visit to Moscow, while the Kremlin publicly called it too early to comment. Russia’s economy has slowed sharply under the strain of war spending and Western sanctions, including October 2025 sanctions on its two largest oil companies: the government cut its 2026 growth forecast to under half a percent, oil and gas tax revenue roughly halved year-on-year in early 2026, and Moscow raised its value-added tax to cover the gap. Domestically, repression has intensified rather than eased — independent monitors counted 1,217 recognised political prisoners by mid-2026, up sharply from 805 at the end of 2024, alongside an October 2025 criminal case naming exiled opposition figures including Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Garry Kasparov. Vladimir Putin remains president, with his current term running to 2030; asked in June 2026 whether he intended to seek a further term that could extend his rule to 2036, he called the question premature. As of this writing, roughly two-thirds of Russians tell independent pollsters they favour a negotiated end to the war, but none has been reached.
Endpoint facts verified against reporting current as of 27 July 2026 (Russia Matters War Report Card, July 21–22, 2026; Kyiv Independent and The Moscow Times, July 26, 2026, on Witkoff–Kushner ceasefire talks; Forbes and The Moscow Times, May–July 2026, on the Russian economy; OVD-Info, “Repression in Russia in 2025”; Human Rights Watch World Report 2026, Russia chapter; U.S. News, June 4, 2026, on Putin’s 2030 remarks).
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Russia grew from the medieval Principality of Muscovy into a large empire, then became the core republic of the Soviet Union after the 1917 Revolution. When Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the 1980s loosened control, many Soviet republics pushed for independence, and the USSR dissolved in 1991. Russia then faced turmoil, including a deadly 1993 constitutional crisis, before power became more centralized under Vladimir Putin.
According to UCDP, Russia is a main party in the interstate war against Ukraine, which escalated into a full-scale invasion in February 2022. Fighting also spilled into internationally recognized Russian territory in 2024 when Ukraine attacked into Kursk oblast, after earlier cross-border raids by Russian anti-government armed groups backed by Ukraine. Russia also faces a low-level Islamic State insurgency, mainly in the Caucasus.
The Russia–Ukraine war continued with high intensity through 2024, drawing international condemnation and wide sanctions. UCDP reports widespread violence against civilians linked to Russian forces and alleged war crimes; the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russia’s president in 2023. Inside Russia, the war has brought attacks and raids near the border and a major Islamic State attack near Moscow in 2024.
Sources: UCDP; CIA World Factbook.
The Soviet Union viewed security as paramount, seeking to maintain a ‘frontal zone’ of compliant states along its borders through military pressure, political influence, and alliances like the Warsaw Pact. Post-1991, Russia inherited this mindset, forming the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) to ensure ‘friendly’ governments in former republics. This approach, rooted in tsarist expansionism, intensified after NATO’s eastward expansion, leading to interventions in Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014), including Crimea’s annexation to safeguard naval bases and block Western integration.
Sources: U.S. Naval Institute, NTI
Soviet foreign policy balanced proletarian internationalism with peaceful coexistence, prioritizing containment of Western influence via proxy conflicts, ideological support for decolonization, and arms race escalation. It projected power globally, from Cuba to Afghanistan, while maintaining Eastern Europe’s hegemony. The 1991 collapse briefly diminished this, but Russia under Putin revived great-power status through energy leverage, Syria intervention, and nuclear modernization, countering US unipolarity and NATO expansion as existential threats.
Sources: Britannica, Marxists Internet Archive, National WWII Museum
The USSR’s 1991 dissolution fragmented its empire, prompting Russia to reassert dominance over post-Soviet states amid economic turmoil and NATO advances. Efforts via CIS and CSTO faced challenges from rivals like China and Turkey, especially post-2022 Ukraine invasion, which strained resources and accelerated multipolar competition in Central Asia and Caucasus. Moscow now prioritizes sanction circumvention and infrastructure corridors, but weakened as a security provider, yielding ground to authoritarian peers.
Sources: IP Quarterly, IRIS, NTI
Founded in the 12th century, the Principality of Muscovy emerged from more than 200 years of Mongol domination (13th–15th centuries) and gradually conquered and absorbed surrounding principalities. In the early 17th century, a new Romanov dynasty continued this expansion across Siberia to the Pacific.
Under Peter I (1682–1725), Russian hegemony was extended to the Baltic Sea and the country was renamed the Russian Empire. During the 19th century, additional territorial acquisitions were made in Europe and Asia.
Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) contributed to the Revolution of 1905, which resulted in the formation of a parliament and other reforms. In World War I, devastating defeats and food shortages led to widespread rioting in major cities of the Russian Empire.
These upheavals culminated in the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. Soon after, communists under Vladimir Lenin seized power and formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
The brutal rule of Iosif Stalin (1928–53) strengthened communist control and Russian dominance of the Soviet Union at a cost of tens of millions of lives. After defeating Germany in World War II (1939–1945) as part of an alliance with the US, the USSR expanded its territory and influence in Eastern Europe and emerged as a global power.
The USSR was the principal US adversary during the Cold War (1947–1991). After decades of stagnation, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev (1985–91) introduced glasnost and perestroika to modernize communism, but these initiatives inadvertently released forces that led in December 1991 to the dissolution of the USSR into Russia and 14 other independent states.
In response to turmoil during President Boris Yeltsin’s term (1991–99), Russia shifted toward a centralized authoritarian state under President Vladimir Putin (2000–2008, 2012–present). The regime has sought to legitimize its rule through managed elections, populist appeals, a foreign policy focused on enhancing geopolitical influence, and commodity-based economic growth.
In 2014, Russia purported to annex Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and occupied large portions of two eastern Ukrainian oblasts; in sporadic fighting over the next eight years, more than 14,000 civilians were killed or wounded as a result of the Russian invasion in eastern Ukraine. On 24 February 2022, Russia escalated the conflict by invading Ukraine on several fronts; the invasion received near-universal international condemnation, and many countries imposed sanctions on Russia and supplied humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine. In September 2022, Russia unilaterally declared its annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts—Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia—though none were fully under Russian control, and the annexations remain unrecognized by the international community.
UCDP records Russia as a party to both an interstate conflict with the Government of Ukraine and intrastate conflicts against armed non-state actors, including IS, LSR, and RDK. These dynamics point to overlapping drivers: a major state-to-state war alongside internal security challenges from militant violence and armed opposition activity. Together, they create multiple fronts and make violence harder to contain geographically.
UCDP records 273 civilian deaths as collateral in state-based violence, meaning civilians were killed during attacks or fighting but not necessarily targeted as the primary objective. The data also records one-sided violence by IS against civilians, with 146 deliberate civilian killings attributed to that group. Even when civilians are not directly targeted, the mix of cross-border warfare and internal clashes can disrupt services, displace families, and increase fear.
The UCDP dyads show that Russia is simultaneously fighting another government (Ukraine) and confronting non-state armed groups (IS, LSR, and RDK). This overlap matters because it blends battlefield dynamics with domestic security threats, including militant attacks and armed raids, which can occur away from front lines. For civilians, this means risk can come from several directions: large-scale military operations and smaller, unpredictable attacks.
Sources: UCDP data.
Russia is engaged in interstate war with Ukraine and also uses security forces against armed challengers on and around Russian territory. UCDP records civilian deaths as collateral in state-based violence, reflecting risks from strikes, shelling, and fighting near populated areas.
Ukraine fights Russia in an interstate conflict that also produces civilian harm from hostilities. Even when civilians are not the intended target, long-range attacks and fighting around towns and infrastructure can cause fatalities and broader disruption.
IS is recorded as both a warring party against the Russian government and a perpetrator of one-sided violence against civilians. UCDP attributes a substantial number of deliberate civilian killings to IS, indicating targeted attacks that directly raise risks for non-combatants.
LSR is an armed opponent of the Russian government in an intrastate dyad recorded by UCDP. While the dataset segment does not attribute one-sided civilian killings to LSR, fighting and raids can still expose nearby communities to crossfire, insecurity, and displacement.
RDK appears in UCDP as an intrastate armed challenger fighting the Russian government. Even without recorded one-sided killings attributed to the group in this segment, clashes involving armed groups can still generate civilian risk through indiscriminate fire, fear-driven flight, and disruptions to services.
Russia’s conflict landscape combines an interstate war with Ukraine and separate intrastate confrontations with armed non-state actors. Alongside battlefield violence, militant attacks and anti-government raids widen the security crisis and increase the chance that civilians are harmed either deliberately or as a byproduct of fighting.
After World War II, the USSR consolidates control over Eastern Europe, gains superpower status, and formalizes the Cold War rivalry with the United States. This militarized, bloc-based order frames later Soviet security thinking toward its western borderlands, including Ukraine.
The Soviet Union creates the Warsaw Pact as a military alliance against NATO and deepens political, economic, and security integration with Eastern European states. This institutionalizes Moscow’s dominance over neighbors and reinforces a tradition of using force to maintain influence.
The USSR invades Afghanistan to prop up a friendly regime, facing a costly insurgency backed by foreign powers. The war drains resources, undermines Soviet legitimacy, and shapes Russian military doctrine about intervention, attrition, and proxy warfare later echoed in post-Soviet conflicts.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost reforms loosen central control, spur nationalist movements, and weaken the Communist Party. The resulting political and economic crisis accelerates the dissolution of the Soviet Union, creating newly independent republics such as Ukraine and a reduced Russian state.
The Soviet Union formally dissolves; Russia becomes its legal successor, inheriting nuclear weapons, UN Security Council seat, and many Soviet-era institutions. Former union republics, including Ukraine, gain independence, creating new borders and unresolved status questions that later fuel disputes and conflict.
A violent standoff between President Yeltsin and parliament ends with military intervention and a new constitution that sharply strengthens presidential powers. This centralizes authority in the Kremlin, shaping later personalized rule under Vladimir Putin and decision-making structures relevant to war choices.
Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom issue security assurances to Ukraine in return for Kyiv giving up Soviet-era nuclear weapons. Russia pledges to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders, a commitment later contested in the 2014 and 2022 escalations over territory.
Vladimir Putin becomes prime minister, then president, restoring state control over media, regions, and key industries amid renewed war in Chechnya. His leadership emphasizes centralized authority, security services, and great-power ambitions, setting the framework for assertive policies toward Ukraine and NATO.
Russia fights a brief war with Georgia over South Ossetia and Abkhazia after tensions over NATO enlargement and separatist regions. Moscow recognizes the breakaway territories, signaling willingness to use force in the post-Soviet space and contest Western influence near its borders.
Following Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution, Russia seizes Crimea and backs separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk, triggering war in eastern Ukraine. The conflict creates entrenched front lines, Western sanctions, and a frozen but unresolved confrontation that later provides pretext for wider Russian military action.
Russia intervenes in Syria to support President Assad, testing and refining modern weapons, command systems, and expeditionary operations. The campaign boosts military confidence and experience, influencing doctrines and capabilities that Russia later deploys in its full-scale offensive against Ukraine.
Russia adopts constitutional amendments allowing President Putin potentially to remain in power until 2036 and emphasizing traditional values and state sovereignty. The changes entrench personalized rule and strategic continuity, shaping the political environment in which decisions about war with Ukraine are made.
Russian forces launch a large-scale invasion of Ukraine from multiple directions, framing it as a security and historical claim. The war becomes protracted, with heavy casualties, Western support for Ukraine, and escalating Russian militarization, directly underpinning the 2024–2026 battlefield dynamics and border clashes.
Intense combat continues near Avdiivka and Pokrovsk; Ukraine mounts a major incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, while anti-Kremlin Russian units like the Freedom of Russia Legion conduct raids. These developments blur lines between interstate war and internal conflict, shaping Russia’s current security situation.
