Council on Foreign Relations
War in Ukraine — Global Conflict Tracker
It is the clearest one-page reference for the war’s actual timeline — useful for anyone who still believes the war began in 2022.
That Russia’s campaign began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas, escalating to the full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Understanding the long arc of the war is the starting point for understanding why Ukraine’s defense innovation matured the way it did.
The Council on Foreign Relations Global Conflict Tracker situates the war in Ukraine within its continuously updated catalogue of global conflicts, and its most important framing contribution is the timeline: the tracker dates the conflict's origin to 2014, not 2022. Russia's annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the subsequent armed conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk — where Russian-backed separatists declared independence following disputed referendums and Russian troops and equipment were reported near Donetsk with cross-border shelling — constitute the conflict's first phase. The full-scale invasion of 24 February 2022 was an escalation of an existing campaign, not a new war. That distinction matters for understanding why Ukraine's armed forces and defense-technology sector did not begin from zero in 2022: they had been adapting under fire for eight years before the full-scale invasion.
The tracker maps the arc of the war through its major phases: the failed rapid seizure of Kyiv in early 2022 and Russia's subsequent withdrawal from Ukraine's capital region by April 6; the pivot east and the fall of Mariupol in May 2022; Ukraine's counteroffensives in the northeast and south in autumn 2022, recovering Kherson and significant territory in Kharkiv region; the grueling siege of Bakhmut through spring 2023; the June 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive that achieved limited gains against heavily fortified Russian positions; and the subsequent consolidation of a largely attritional conflict along contested lines in the east and south. As of the tracker's June 2026 update, Russia occupies roughly 20 percent of Ukraine and gained approximately five thousand square kilometers in 2025. Nearly 56,000 civilian casualties have been recorded since the invasion, 3.7 million Ukrainians are internally displaced, 5.9 million are registered as refugees, and 10.8 million people require humanitarian assistance.
The diplomatic dimension has grown substantially more complex since early 2026. U.S. aid to Ukraine since January 2022 stands at approximately $188 billion; EU aid at approximately $197 billion. The tracker documents the Trump administration's engagement in seeking a settlement, including a twenty-point draft peace proposal and an Alaska summit between Presidents Trump and Putin, while noting that territorial concessions and security guarantees remain unresolved. Ukraine has been deepening security relationships with Gulf states, signing ten-year security agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. Meanwhile, Russia's aerial campaign has intensified: a May 2026 strike involved over 1,560 drones and 56 missiles, and a May 24 attack on Kyiv included a nuclear-capable Oreshnik ballistic missile alongside hundreds of drones.
Because the tracker page is updated as events develop, it is best used as a live orientation tool rather than a fixed historical snapshot. Consulting it provides the current picture — territorial situation, diplomatic status, humanitarian scale — in a format that contextualizes Ukraine's conflict within CFR's broader global-conflict catalogue. This is a Helicon-written summary; for current figures and the latest developments, consult the Council on Foreign Relations directly.
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