Midterm Assignment: Russias Invasion of the Ukraine

Mid Term Assignment
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Mid-Term Assignment
Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine was a military intervention by Russia in Ukraine. In the year 2014, several military incursions were made by Russia into Ukrainian territories where by Russian soldiers took control of infrastructure, and strategic positions within Crimea (Miller, Vaux, Fitzpatrick, &Weiss, 2015). The invasion followed the fall of the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and Euromaidan protests. Crimea was then conquered by Russia after a disputed referendum, in which the Crimeans voted to join the federation of Russia; subsequently, there were demonstrations by a group of pro- Russian in the area of Donbas area of Ukraine. The demonstrations turned into an armed conflict between the separatist forces of self- declared Lugansk People’s Republic, and the Ukrainian government. Accordingly, this paper explains the event of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, and how realism as a theoretical perspective best explains this post-revolutionary event in Ukraine.
Approximately 8,000 people have been killed in the Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine conflict since April 2014, and 10,000 Russian troops have been deployed in eastern Ukraine for more than a year (Wiser, 2015). The conflict started when Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine was seized by unmarked Russian soldiers in March 2014, an invasion that followed the fall of a pro-Moscow leader. President Vladimir Putin at the time denied that the 10,000 troops deployed belonged to Russia. However, he later admitted that t he deployed the troops. After the conquering of Crimea, president Putin heightened the support of separatists in Eastern Ukraine that belonged to a majority of ethnic Russians. In the Russian military, the reserve officers who also had ties to the intelligent agency commanded the rebel forces to attack, and by June 2014, the Ukrainian military confirmed that more than 40,000 troops had been massed by Russia on Ukraine’s border, and the deployment of 7,000 to 10,000 soldiers inside Ukraine (Wiser, 2015).
The Ukrainian forces attained some victories early in the conflict but the abundance of Russian-supplied weapons helped the separatists to gain the upper hand in the conflict. The advanced weapons included the T-64, and T-72 battle tanks, MANPADS: shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, and Strela-10, an armored vehicle with surface-to-air missiles and machine guns (Miller et al., 2015). The likely use of a long-range anti-aircraft missile by the separatists’ system shot down the infamous Malaysian airline flight MH17 in July 2014 that killed nearly 300 people. The increased use of anti-aircraft weapons by the rebel forces dissuaded the Ukrainian military from using its air power, hindering its forces. Satellite images and other evidence showed that the separatists did not seize the weapons from Ukrainian forces such as the T-72 tank, and not only had the Ukrainian military never used this tank in the conflict, but multiple versions of the tank spotted on the eastern Ukraine were never possessed by the Ukrainian military (Miller et al., 2015).
In September 2014, the Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko was forced to negotiate a ceasefire (Miller et al., 2015). This was triggered by a sequence of defeats by the Ukrainian forces at the southeastern border and at coastal towns like Mariupol, which was a strategic port. According to the Miller et al. (2015) report, evidence stated that the Russian military was at the forefront of every part of the battles that were happening, and ten Russian military infantry unit were even captured on the battlefields in the area. After a quick ending in the fight, the ceasefire negotiation known as the Minsk Agreement, collapsed. Russia resumed providing heavy weaponry to their surrogate forces, which added to separatist’s victories at the Donetsk Airport and the rebel-controlled territory like Debaltsevo. In November 2014, Russia provided their proxy forces with new military equipment like ground-scan radar systems, armored vehicles such as the BPM-97, and GAZ Vodnik armored infantry vehicle (Miller et al., 2015). The weapons are believed to be only used by the Russian military, but also appeared in the hands of rebel forces as well.
The Crimean Peninsula is the main place of conflict in this Ukraine’s crisis. Crimea is a pro-Russian part of Ukraine that is distinguished from the country historically, politically, and geographically. Crimea also holds the Russia’s black sea fleet, but Ukraine has accused Russia of invading it. Crimea is slightly smaller than Belgium with an area of 10,000 square miles, and it is the only formally region of Ukraine that is acting independently with Simferopol acting as its capital (Allison, 2014. Crimea is well recognized as the site of the1945 Yalta Conference where the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the infamous soviet dictator Josef Stalin sealed t...