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Kathleen Flynn for Vox
Shantel Jones holds her son at her mother Michelle’s home in New Orleans, where they now live, on March 2.

But the hospital’s maternity ward had stopped giving care earlier that year. Its last delivery was in June. The hospital told the driver not to come, Michelle says. They needed to go to Norwich, a 30-minute drive.

The ambulance started down Route 32, a winding road. But they didn’t make it to Norwich in time. Shantel ended up giving birth on the side of the road. It turned out the baby boy would need intensive care that the Norwich hospital could not provide. They were rerouted again to a hospital in Hartford, 30 more minutes away.

The baby and Shantel are fine, both living now with Michelle in New Orleans. But it was a harrowing experience, one that left Michelle in disbelief about the state of the community hospital in a town she had lived in for more than 30 years. She said she was still trying to correct her grandson’s birth certificate more than a year later, because local authorities disagree on where he was actually born.

“I felt really scared for her. I didn’t know what was going to happen,” Michelle said of Shantel. “When you have a city full of women who have to have babies, how are you going to do that?”

Kathleen Flynn for Vox
Michelle Jones spends time with her grandson at her New Orleans home on March 2.

Windham County, once a textile mill boomtown, is a relatively rural and predominantly white area. But it is also home to many Black and Hispanic families and immigrants. The county’s schools have the highest proportion of students with English as a second language in Connecticut. Willimantic, the county seat, is 44 percent Hispanic and 7 percent Black. The story of the hospital’s closed maternity ward shows how care for people giving birth can unravel and the distrust and damage it leaves in its wake.

The saga begins in 2007, when the Hartford HealthCare system acquired the financially struggling nonprofit Windham hospital. Eight years later, its ICU unit was downgraded to a critical care unit that would not be capable of handling the same level of care that it had before. Local leaders objected at the time, but Hartford HealthCare said it was necessary to keep the hospital afloat and provide adequate care.

Community leaders now say that closure led to an exodus of critical staff, such as anesthesiologists, who can be vital to labor and delivery services. The main local OB/GYN practice eventually stopped delivering at Windham and moved to another hospital in nearby Manchester — they say because of the staffing woes.

When Hartford HealthCare made the decision to close the maternity ward permanently, after it stopped childbirth services in 2020, local health providers tried to come up with alternative plans, like proposing residency programs with UConn’s medical school. They told state regulators they were rebuffed by Hartford HealthCare; the hospital has said that the plan would have been impractical.

In Windham, a community coalition has formed to try to block the closure, arguing before a state board recently that the hospital failed to properly consult with its constituents before closing the ward and warning that the health care consequences could be dire. They see the closure as a premeditated, inevitable move meant to largely consolidate Hartford’s labor and delivery services at the William W. Backus Hospital in Norwich, a 30-minute drive from Windham.

Hospital executives, in those public hearings held over the department’s fate, tell it differently. They say they have tried to keep the ward open, but doing so was no longer tenable. The decision was not primarily a financial one, they say, although deliveries in Norwich cost about one-fourth what they do in Windham because a greater volume of patients creates cost efficiencies. Instead, they cite causes that are driving closed maternity wards across the country, starting with a low birthrate.

The number of births at Windham dropped from 374 in 2014 to fewer than 60 by halfway through 2020. When the main OB/GYN practice in the area decided it would deliver babies exclusively in Manchester, hospital leaders say it became difficult to properly staff the unit. The risk grew that with so few births, doctors’ and nurses’ skills would stagnate, which could lead to errors and worst outcomes. Experts say this risk is one common reason that OB departments close.

By November 2019, the Hartford HealthCare board was already talking about closing the ward permanently. Then came Covid-19, which its executives said in public hearings had made it more challenging to properly staff their facilities.

Michelle McLoughlin for Vox

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy at the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, opposes the maternity ward closure at Windham Hospital. She’s shown here with her dog Lucy at her Willimantic, Connecticut, home on February 27.

State regulators are still considering whether to permit the maternity ward’s closure; however, Hartford HealthCare has already been fined for closing the unit without state approval. The hospital system told me it could not comment on the record because of the pending state ruling.

In general, experts say the reasons given by Hartford Healthcare can be legitimate: Skills can deteriorate if hospital staff don’t get enough practice delivering babies. But they also warned of the risks of closing an obstetrics ward, both in the decreased access to care and in the fraying of the connection between the hospital and its patients.

“That risk doesn’t go away, but the risk is abandoned by the hospital,” Kozhimannil said. “If the hospital doesn’t grapple with that, I think there is real damage to the relationship.”

Those bonds are breaking in Windham, compounded by a feeling that the town has lost control of its own community hospital, a common theme in these closures.

In 2000, there were around 30 independent nonprofit hospitals in the state, including Windham, says Lynne Ide, who studies policy at the Universal Health Care Foundation in Connecticut and opposes the closure in Windham. Now there are four, the rest subsumed into larger hospital systems. Hartford HealthCare was recently sued by a group of citizens and another hospital, who alleged its consolidations have led to anti-competitive practices.

The hospital system is pledging to continue providing prenatal and postnatal services to Windham’s mothers and to provide transportation for mothers who need to travel to Norwich or Manchester (also about a 30-minute drive away) or another hospital in order to deliver.

But advocates argue that one of the routes from Windham to Norwich goes along Route 6, which has become known locally as “Suicide 6” because of the high number of fatal accidents. Town council members have called Hartford Healthcare “vulture capitalists.” The hospital has in turn said there has been widespread misinformation about the closure.

“These institutions are making these siloed decisions without collaborating,” said Rose Reyes, a Willimantic town council member who is part of the coalition trying to stop the closure. “Without input, without respecting and deferring to the community.”

Michelle McLoughlin for Vox

Windham Town Council member Rose Reyes, who is also a member of the Windham United to Save Our Healthcare Coalition, at her Willimantic, Connecticut, home on February 27.

Maternity ward closures nationwide are putting patients at risk

Windham is just one example of a widespread trend.

In Texas, at least six rural hospitals have limited or suspended their obstetrics services in the past few years. According to the Texas Tribune, only 40 percent of rural hospitals in the state have a labor and delivery unit. Some patients must drive hundreds of miles to give birth. One woman gave birth in the parking lot of a hospital, after driving an hour to reach it, according to a hospital executive in the Texas Panhandle.

North Carolina lost at least nine maternity wards since 2013, before the pandemic; another closed in mid-2020. A hospital in Lowville, New York, was forced to suspend its labor and delivery services in September 2021 after an exodus of nurses who refused to receive the Covid-19 vaccine. Several OB departments have closed in Florida hospitals during the pandemic, including one that suspended the services because of a Covid- related staffing shortage, then later closed permanently. In those cases, as in Windham, hospitals insist they were making the best decision for patients, even as some of their own doctors protested the closure.

The same story has played out in rural Ohio, in suburban San Diego and in southeastern Pennsylvania, where a closure will mean the number of hospitals with birthing units has been cut in half in the past 20 years.

More closures could be coming. Leslie Marsh, CEO of a rural hospital in Lexington, Nebraska, told me that facilities in her area have either already shut down their labor and delivery services or began discussing whether they would. She says she wants to keep providing it because she believes it is important for the community, especially after another hospital about 45 minutes away closed its maternity ward.

But 80 percent of new mothers who deliver at her hospital are on Medicaid, which has the lowest reimbursement rates of any insurer in the US. And Covid-19 has strained their ability to staff the department.

“You begin to ask the question: Can we offer OB services anymore?” she said. “That will likely be the reason we would stop doing OB services, if staffing shortages were such that we could no longer manage.”

Michelle McLoughlin for Vox

Windham Hospital, part of the Hartford HealthCare system, closed its maternity ward in 2020.

Nobody is tallying in real time the number of obstetrics departments that shutter during the pandemic. But experts believe the downward trend seen before the pandemic may be getting worse.

The research conducted by Kozhimannil’s team on the effect of pre-pandemic closures would suggest that these closures are going to lead to worse outcomes for mothers and their babies and worsen access in the areas already struggling. The closures hit the least populated counties with the fewest doctors. They also tended to have a higher proportion of Black women who were of a reproductive age.

The researchers found that even when there was another nearby hospital for deliveries, there was still an initial spike in people delivering in the emergency room. Although the rate declined over time, it remained meaningfully higher than before the obstetrics closure.

In hospitals that did not have a nearby facility, there was an increase in the number of out-of-hospital births — maybe planned but maybe not. It is a worrisome trend, since rural communities already have higher infant and maternal mortality rates. After an OB ward closed, preterm births also increased, Kozhimannil’s team’s research found, a metric linked to greater infant mortality.

Those are the stakes in each of these decisions. Hospitals can try to ameliorate the consequences by offering transportation and other services and by working to make sure the community is prepared for that transition.

But if those efforts falter, as Kozhimannil told me, there can be long-term damage.

Windham’s community leaders fear they are facing such a future. They worry what the hospital’s maternity ward closure will mean for both expectant parents and the community at large. Reyes said she believed the town would not be able to live up to its full potential and its 10-year economic development plan would end up squandered.

“The residents of the community are actually astonished,” Leah Rawls, head of the local NAACP and one of the members of the Windham coalition, told me. “What do you mean you can’t have a baby in Windham? Where are we supposed to go?”

Putin’s nuclear threats prove the need for disarmament.

Europe’s first major war in decades is bringing with it renewed concerns about the possibility of nuclear conflict. Announcing the invasion of Ukraine last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that countries that try “to stand in our way … must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history”; just days afterward, he raised Russia’s nuclear readiness and put nuclear troops on high alert, evoking Cold War comparisons.

There’s little reason, as things stand, to think things could spiral into nuclear war, but as one expert told Vox’s Neel Dhanesha at the beginning of the invasion, “I’m more worried than I was a week ago.”

Beyond the immediate worry, though, Putin’s saber-rattling is a potent reminder about the state of international arms control, which has made little headway — when not actively backsliding — in recent decades.

“I think the scope of it matters,” Joshua Pollack, a senior research associate with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said of future arms control agreements. “I really think it is not global, I really think it is regional. It is the Europeans above all, because they can see that, once again, they are the ones whose countries would be the battlefields.”

Vox spoke with Pollack, who is also an editor for the journal Nonproliferation Review, about the history of arms control and what the future of the nuclear-armed world could look like.

The conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Ellen Ioanes

I wanted to start by talking about how diplomacy has gone around new nuclear proliferation or nonproliferation, in the past decade? Because it seems like there’s been some efforts, but certainly some treaties have expired. And so where are we with that now?

Joshua Pollack

We’ve seen a real hardening of the partisan divide in this country over this question, to back it up a little bit. Before the decade mark, I would point to really the start of the divergence being in the 1990s. There was a general, if not unanimous, support for the START treaty, which was the first really big US-Soviet, and then US-Russian, arms control treaty that actually reduced numbers of nuclear weapons that could reach each other’s country — strategic weapons, as we call them. That one entered into force in 1994 — it was finalized mostly during the [first] Bush administration, and took effect under Clinton. But by that time, the cracks were starting to build and Republicans were starting to believe that in the post-Cold War world, we were a sole superpower and didn’t have to accept any restraints. So, there was some hard bargaining over the Chemical Weapons Convention that finalized around then, banning chemical weapons and pledging their complete destruction.

The head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, didn’t want to let the treaty out of committee, even though the United States had no interest in having chemical weapons anymore, and could only benefit from the treaty. He got the Clinton administration to agree to dismantle the semi-independent Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and fold its functions into the rest of the State Department. And that was the price for getting a vote, which did lead to the adoption of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Then the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was due to come up for ratification, and the Republicans almost to a man voted against it. It had become a partisan issue. It didn’t matter that this had been sought by presidents of both parties going back decades. They had adopted a different view on the nature of American power and the nature of our strengths and believed that any commitment, any constraint — although we have no intention of testing nuclear weapons again — was illegitimate ipso facto, and it was a real low moment.

When the [second] Bush administration came in, they actually used the withdrawal provision to get the country out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that had been in place since 1972. That limited what kind of missile defenses both sides could deploy. [The administration] didn’t want to see any limits at all anymore. And ironically, to this day, we have not deployed defenses that are substantially in excess of those limits. In fact, I think with very slight modifications to the treaty — deployment locations, things like that — we could still be inside it. But the point was more to get rid of the treaties, in my view, than it was to actually deploy a working defense.

And the [second] Bush administration also pulled us out of an understanding which the North Koreans called the Agreed Framework. And when the Trump administration came in, we saw the same thing — [Trump] pulled us out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which barred the deployment of land-based missiles in Europe beyond a certain range — really, anywhere in the world by the US or Russia, but the point was to keep certain missiles out of Europe. And that turn, I think, has contributed to the present crisis in some ways, although it’s hard to say exactly how much.

The Russians are very upset about the idea that the United States could be deploying previously prohibited missiles into countries that had been inside the Warsaw Pact, or perhaps someday, even [countries that had been] inside the Soviet Union. That has been an issue that has emerged in the Russian Foreign Ministry’s rhetoric. In fact, the State Department, its counteroffer to Russian demands, was to play up that angle and say, “We’re open to talks on reaching some understanding about what weapons can and cannot be deployed in Europe.” [That] was consistent with demands that the Russians had made earlier, but it’s very hard to tell if there’s any real interest in that in Moscow.

Ellen Ioanes

And so is there a political framework now to change? Or is there the possibility of changing the way that political process happens, or that diplomatic process happens, in order to protect against the possibility that there will be that kind of Trumpian or Bushian desire to pull us out of these treaties [in the future]?

Joshua Pollack

I think, other than having a Democratic president, no. I mentioned that the Senate hasn’t ratified the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. But there is an understanding between countries that once the treaty is signed, and before it is ratified, none of the signatories will do anything to violate its purposes. In other words, while all of its provisions may not come into play, and you may not have inspectors visiting certain countries or so on, you cannot take the actual actions that the treaty prohibits. So you can’t conduct nuclear tests that would violate the the purposes of the treaty until [it enters into force]. You can’t exercise a provision of a treaty that’s not enforced, so the supreme national interest clause is not available for use. There’s no ripcord to pull.

The CTBT [Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty] is in this weird limbo where it has a long list of countries that have to ratify it or accede to it in order for it to come into force; that includes the United States, China, Iran, North Korea, and others. There’s a small handful of holdouts, but there are just a lot of political obstacles to making that happen. There’s even an international organization that exists to oversee the treaty. And they actually do have real work to do because they established a global network of sensors to detect nuclear tests, right?

They’re just kind of in limbo, working, but not all provisions of the treaty are in place. And that kind of works in a funny way. There’s no credible allegation that anyone is violating the treaty; there are persistent allegations from the United States that Russia or China interpret it differently and are willing to conduct some very small-scale experiments that violate how the United States interprets it. But no one has actually ever presented any evidence to that effect — it’s just the sort of rampant speculation that builds on itself. So this might be a way for arms control to survive this dry spell, I think — we negotiate treaties. And then we can sign them and obligate ourselves to them. But you actually can’t get out until you get all the way in.

It’s a terrible way of doing things. But if the Republicans are going to tear up every functioning treaty at the first opportunity now, it might be a way to get around that; it does limit what you can do, because it means that until a treaty formally enters into force, some of its provisions, like the specifics of inspections and so forth, just won’t function. But if you have other ways of conducting verification, the principle that you do nothing contrary to the purposes of the treaty could actually get you a long way.

Ellen Ioanes

I wonder if now, especially given the threat we might be seeing from Russia as well as, in a more positive light, the progress on the Iran deal — that could mean that there is appetite once again, on more of an international scale to try and deal with arms control in a real, sincere way.

Joshua Pollack

There’s certainly an appetite in Europe. The Germans are putting a lot of resources into it. They’re funding a lot of new think tank activities. I think it’s really quite telling that IISS [International Institute for Strategic Studies] — it’s a think tank based in London that has had a Washington office, among other things, for many years. They were established to deal with some of these military and security issues, especially weapons, but not exclusively. Their nonproliferation program is no longer based in London or DC. It’s based in Berlin now, because the German government was willing to put up some money to establish a new office for them there. And they decided that’s where they may go.

[And] there’s a newly expanded center on these things in Hamburg. We’ve just seen a lot of investment in Germany in particular, but I’m also seeing, you know, there’s a growing center on these issues at the University of Oslo. Norwegians are getting into it. The Norwegians were the original supporters of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into effect last year. So a very anti- nuclear treaty that none of the countries that actually have the bomb are willing to go near, but I think it expresses the impatience of many other countries with those countries over their refusal to get serious about arms reduction, disarmament.

The Norwegians in the end did not join that treaty — the more conservative government came in, and they backed away from their support for that endeavor. But we are seeing in general a resurgence in European interest, and I think that will only increase in view of current events.

Ellen Ioanes

So given that, we might be seeing the beginning of a little bit more of a global appetite to deal with this and a real impetus to do it. What would it take to decommission nuclear weapons on a large scale, not just strategic but tactical?

Joshua Pollack

It’s been done before; the implementation of the INF Treaty involved the disposal of a large category of nuclear missiles. In fact, if you go to the Air and Space Museum downtown [in DC], you can see a couple of missiles there commemorating the INF Treaty, one American and one Soviet. They’re not actual missiles, just training models. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States got involved in what was called the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, where we sent a lot of experts and provided a lot of money to places like Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and Kazakhstan and the other post-Soviet republics, to help them with securing nuclear forces and disposing of a lot of outdated missiles, even a couple of missile submarines.

But in recent years, Putin has wound down those sorts of activities, even though it was free money. It was sort of humiliating, I think, for him to have the Americans in the Russian missile and nuclear complexes — well, missile, certainly, I don’t know about nuclear — poking around and overseeing the cutting up of old missiles. It just did not rub him the right way. Of course, even before that, the Bush administration nearly ended those activities. Because Don Rumsfeld and Condi Rice didn’t see why we should pay for any of that, even though it involves missiles that are aimed at our country. It was shocking to some of us that they would talk that way. Nevertheless, it did survive that moment; it was Putin who in the end closed it all down. But it served its purpose.

So there is experience with that. But I think the scope of it matters. You talked about global interest. I really think it is not global, I really think it is regional. It is the Europeans above all, because they can see that, once again, they are the ones whose countries would be the battlefields. Even though there are barely any NATO nuclear weapons left in Europe, just a couple hundred on a handful of bases. Not anything remotely like it was during the Cold War when it was well over 100 sites, and thousands of weapons. Now, it’s maybe 200 weapons.

Ellen Ioanes

Some of them, like the ones in Turkey, they don’t even have bombers to use them. They’re just kind of sitting there.

Joshua Pollack

Right, they are symbolic of a commitment that, in many ways, is past its expiration date. It’s just politically difficult to remove this last remnant of what was once called tactical or theater nuclear weapons in Europe. Ever since the big, anti- nuclear protests of the 1980s, NATO governments are not really wanting to talk about where they are deployed and when they would be used. But on the other hand, they also don’t want to change anything that might imply a shift, or diminishment of American commitment, that would bring the topic back into the public view. They just don’t like to explain their positions on these issues to their publics, who don’t want to talk about it anymore.

So change is really not high on anyone’s agenda. The last big change we had was in the first Bush administration, when most of the weapons in Europe were removed, and all the weapons were taken off attack submarines and surface ships. Basically, our current arrangement was established. So we’ve only seen marginal changes since then. If there was to be a revival in Europe, I would suggest that it would have to do with something along the lines of a revival of the INF treaty, but perhaps on a multilateral basis.

The INF treaty, or Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces [Treaty] — actually was not about nuclear forces per se, it was about missiles regardless of what they carried. Today, now that missiles are much more accurate, conventional missiles are a much bigger problem than they used to be. So the precise conventional missiles that are in the hands of not only the United States and Russia, but many other European countries, countries in Western Europe — this is a problem for the Russians. The Finns, who are right next to St.  Petersburg, have long-range, air-launched cruise missiles from the United States. The Poles have the same missiles; the Germans and the Swedes have built their own versions. This is an uncomfortable situation for the Russians, increasingly. And I think that when, if cooler heads prevail, once this episode is over — it may take awhile — there’s reason to think that there could be interest in a multilateral understanding.

In East Asia, we just don’t see the same phenomenon. The South Korean public, for example, is increasingly enamored of the idea of returning US nuclear weapons to South Korea, because they also left at the end of the Cold War. And the former Japanese prime minister, [Shinzo] Abe, keeps on raising the idea of bringing American nuclear weapons into Japan, which is something the present prime minister, [Fumio] Kishida, who is from Hiroshima, is absolutely opposed to, and would be against long-standing practice in Japan.

But what we see is, in that part of the world, I think things are moving in the opposite direction. There’s sort of a fascination with nuclear weapons, because of the North Koreans, because of the Chinese build-up, even — there’s just this feeling that, “Oh, we can’t let them get away with this, we have to counter it somehow.”

But that’s not what nuclear weapons do. They don’t effectively counter other nuclear weapons. It’s not like they’re planes or tanks. They don’t fight each other on the border and keep an invading army out. They’re useful for breaking deep into someone else’s country and there’s really no complete defense against them, except for the threat of retaliation. So it’s just a very different mindset, and one that I think many people have never fully internalized. Thinking about nuclear weapons, there’s a tendency to treat them as if they were just big, conventional weapons, which they’re not.

Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images
Ukrainian soldiers collect unexploded shells after fighting with Russians in Kyiv on February 26, according to Ukrainian service personnel at the scene.
A bombed and blackened three-story building surrounded by rubble. Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images
A school located near the center of Kharkiv, shown on February 28, destroyed in fighting with Russian forces.

Christina Animashaun/Vox

A pre-invasion map of Ukraine and surrounding countries, including areas already annexed by Russia.

Putin’s attempt to redraw the map of Europe risks becoming the most devastating conflict on the continent since World War II. Already, it is causing an astounding humanitarian crisis: Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians have died, and more than 1.5 million people have fled the violence so far, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, making it the fastest-growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.

The battle for Ukraine began in the early morning hours, local time, on February 24, when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched what he called a “special military operation” into the country of about 40 million. He claimed the Russian military seeks “demilitarization and denazification” but not occupation; attacks shortly followed from multiple fronts and targeted toward multiple cities.

Ukraine’s resistance has complicated Russia’s efforts to seize the country. Russian forces have not made the progress they likely thought they would at the start of the campaign. The Russian military’s early strategy has perplexed some experts and observers. But the more protracted this war becomes, the more catastrophic it will be. 

    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-

cdn.com/thumbor/7GSPd_HZ8uECn0do4rY5AeTj6b8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23268404/AP22055415418705.jpg" /> Emilio Morenatti/AP

A woman sits in the middle of a crowd as she waits for a train to leave Kyiv on February 24.

Emilio Morenatti/AP

A woman holds her baby inside a bus as they leave Kyiv on February 24.

Emilio Morenatti/AP

People rush through a subway to get a train to leave Kyiv on February 24.

Emilio Morenatti/AP

A crowd of people struggles to get on a bus as they try to leave Kyiv on February 24.

The United States and its allies in Europe and the United Kingdom imposed the toughest financial sanctions ever on Russia after the first incursion, and have only built on these penalties since. On February 26, the United States and European countries agreed to block some Russian banks from SWIFT, a global messaging system, which will essentially prevent those institutions from doing any global transactions, a punishment that allies had previously hesitated to pursue. Already, Russia’s economy is reeling from the impact of these penalties.

This sustained international pressure, and Ukraine’s resistance, may still not be enough to force Russia to end its military campaign. That leaves Ukraine — and the world — in a perilous and unpredictable moment.

Putin’s war on Ukraine, explained

Ukraine is under siege

After months of Putin building up tens of thousands of troops near the Ukrainian border and a series of failed diplomatic talks, Russia is now waging a full-out war on Ukraine.

Tensions escalated quickly when, on February 21, Putin delivered an hour-long combative speech that essentially denied Ukrainian statehood. He recognized the independence of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine where Moscow has backed a separatist rebellion since 2014 and sent so-called peacekeeping forces into the region. As experts said, that was likely just the beginning, setting the stage for a much larger conflict.

Days later, that larger conflict materialized. On February 24, Putin announced he was launching an assault “to defend people who for eight years are suffering persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime,” a reference to a false claim about the government in Ukraine. He demanded Ukraine lay down its weapons or be “responsible for bloodshed.”

Soon after Putin’s speech, reports emerged of explosions around cities, including Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and the capital Kyiv. The Ukrainian foreign minister called it “a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.” By the afternoon in Ukraine, Russian troops and tanks had entered the country on three fronts: from Belarus in the north, from the east of Ukraine, and from the south.

Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
Black smoke rises from a military airport in Chuguyev near Kharkiv, Ukraine, on February 24.

The Russian military has targeted critical infrastructure, like airports, with airstrikes and has launched more than 400 missiles, as of March 1. As a senior US defense official said on February 26, “There’s no doubt in our mind that civilian infrastructure and civilian areas are being hit as a result of these barrages.”

The main battlefronts are in Kyiv’s outskirts; in southern Ukraine, including the major city of Mariupol; and in eastern Ukraine around Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city.

NEW #Ukraine Conflict Update; Click the link to read the latest assessment from @TheStudyofWar and @criticalthreats https://t.co/0Hb0nLSebU pic.twitter.com/RINKbJsJIM

— ISW (@TheStudyofWar) March 4, 2022

“They had maximal war aims,” Michael Kofman, research director in the Russia studies program at CNA, said in an interview posted on Twitter on February 25. “They had a military operation that’s now in progress, first to try to achieve regime change, encircle the capital, and try to overthrow the Ukrainian government, and then a much larger set of pincer movements to encircle and envelope Ukrainian forces. Try to do this quickly and force surrender of isolated pockets.”

But the Russian army has not been able to completely roll over Ukrainian forces, and some analysts have suggested Moscow may have been surprised at Ukraine’s resistance. Pentagon officials said that, as of March 4, Russia has committed about 92 percent of its combat power so far. Ukraine’s airspace remains contested.

Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at RAND Corporation, told a panel of reporters on February 28 that Russia’s military performance has been odd. “In other words, some of the things that I would have expected — like the air force taking a major role — have not happened.”

“Seems to me there was a lot of war optimism and a sense that the [Ukrainian] government would fall with just a little push,” Charap continued. “And that didn’t happen. I wouldn’t read too much into that about the ultimate course of the war, though. This is still a situation where the deck unfortunately is stacked against the Ukrainians, despite their bravery.”

Efrem Lukatsky/AP

Members of the Ukrainian civil defense prepare Molotov cocktails in a yard in Kyiv, Ukraine, on February 27.

Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Civilian volunteers check their guns at a Territorial Defense unit registration office on February 26 in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Mykola Tys/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Volunteers weave camouflage nets while setting up a defense position for the Ukrainian military in a building in Kyiv as they anticipated an attack on the city from the Russian army.

Putin himself has called on the Ukrainian army to “take power into their own hands and overthrow” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a sign that Putin remains focused on regime change. “According to the available intelligence, the enemy marked me as a target No. 1 and my family as the target No. 2,” said Zelenskyy, speaking on the night of February 24.

Efforts to stop the fighting have so far failed. On February 28, high-level officials from Russia and Ukraine met at the Ukraine-Belarus border, and again on March 3. Russia has continued to insist that a ceasefire requires “demilitarization” and neutrality for Ukraine, but Ukraine has only continued to push for more military aid and ascension into Western bodies like the EU, even signing an EU membership application amid the fighting.

Both Ukraine and Russia have suggested they will hold another round of talks in coming days. Across conflicts, there is usually a severe escalation in fighting before ceasefires, as everyone attempts to maximize their leverage. “I think that they want to inflict maximum damage to pressure the Ukrainian government to seek some sort of ceasefire that is effectively a surrender,” said Margarita Konaev, associate director of analysis and research fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Ukrainian Presidency/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, center, displays the country’s application for membership in the European Union in Kyiv, Ukraine, on February 28.

The toll of this young conflict is growing. The UN has said that, as of March 6, more than 350 civilians have been confirmed killed and hundreds more have been wounded; Ukraine’s emergency services puts the civilian death toll at 2,000 people as of March 2. Ukrainian officials have said about 11,000 Russian troops have been killed in the fighting, as of March 6, but American and European estimates of Russian casualties have been substantially lower. The Russian government has reported nearly 500 soldier deaths. Experts said all these statistics should be treated with a great deal of caution because of the fog of war and the incentives both Russia and Ukraine have to push a particular narrative.

Ukrainian officials have also accused Russia of war crimes after reports of a shelling of an orphanage and kindergarten outside of Kyiv. Across Ukraine, thousands of civilians of all ages are enlisting to fight. Ukrainian officials called on residents to “make Molotov cocktails” to defend against the invasion. More than 1.5 million Ukrainians have fled to neighboring countries like Poland since the conflict began, according to a United Nations estimate.

Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
Children being treated at a pediatric hospital in Kyiv have been moved to the basement of the hospital, which is being used as a bomb shelter, on February 28.

The roots of the current crisis grew from the breakup of the Soviet Union

Russia’s invasion contravenes security agreements the Soviet Union made upon its breakup in the early ’90s. At the time, Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, had the third-largest atomic arsenal in the world. The US and Russia worked with Ukraine to denuclearize the country, and in a series of diplomatic agreements, Kyiv gave its hundreds of nuclear warheads back to Russia in exchange for security assurances that protected it from a potential Russian attack.

But the very premise of a post-Soviet Europe is helping to fuel today’s conflict. Putin has been fixated on reclaiming some semblance of empire, lost with the fall of the Soviet Union. Ukraine is central to this vision. Putin has said Ukrainians and Russians “were one people — a single whole,” or at least would be if not for the meddling from outside forces (as in, the West) that has created a “wall” between the two.

Last year, Russia presented the US with a list of demands, some of which were nonstarters for the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Putin demanded that NATO stop its eastward expansion and deny membership to Ukraine, and also made other demands for “security guarantees” around NATO.

The prospect of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO has antagonized Putin at least since President George W. Bush expressed support for the idea in 2008. “That was a real mistake,” Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 was ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton, told Vox in January. “It drove the Russians nuts. It created expectations in Ukraine and Georgia, which then were never met. And so that just made that whole issue of enlargement a complicated one.”

Chris McGrath/Getty Images

A resident checks on a damaged room of her apartment in a residential block hit by an early-morning missile strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, on February 25.
Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Ukrainian firefighters arrive to rescue civilians after an airstrike hit an apartment complex in Chuhuiv, Ukraine, on February 24. 
    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TziEuMTP02RGR3184Gu-

cVQOIn0=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23278218/GettyImages_1238745447.jpg" />

  <cite>Pierre Crom/Getty Images</cite>
  <figcaption>A child swings outside a residential building damaged by
a missile strike in Kyiv on February 25, 2022.

Ukraine is the fourth- largest recipient of military funding from the US, and the intelligence cooperation between the two countries has deepened in response to threats from Russia. But Ukraine isn’t joining NATO in the near future, and President Joe Biden has said as much. Still, Moscow’s demand was largely seen as a nonstarter by the West, as NATO’s open-door policy says sovereign countries can choose their own security alliances.

Though Putin has continued to tout the threat of NATO, his speech on February 21 showed that his obsession with Ukraine goes far beyond that. He does not see the government in Ukraine as legitimate.

“Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space,” he said, per the Kremlin’s official translation. “Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians.”

The two countries do have historical and cultural ties, but as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained, Putin’s “basic claim — that there is no historical Ukrainian nation worthy of present-day sovereignty — is demonstrably false.”

As experts noted, it is difficult to square Putin’s speech — plus a 2021 essay he penned and other statements he’s made — with any realistic diplomatic outcome to avert conflict. It was, essentially, a confession that this wasn’t really about NATO, said Dan Baer, the acting director of the Europe program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “It was about that he doesn’t think Ukraine has a right to exist as a free country,” he said before Putin’s escalation on the night of February 23.

Sergei Guneyev/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images
Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Russia, on February 27.

This is the culmination of eight years of tensions

This isn’t the first time Russia has attacked Ukraine. In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, invaded eastern Ukraine, and backed Russian separatists in the eastern Donbas region. That conflict has killed more than 14,000 people to date.

Russia’s assault grew out of mass protests in Ukraine that toppled the country’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, which began over his abandonment of a trade agreement with the European Union. US diplomats visited the demonstrations, in symbolic gestures that further agitated Putin.

President Barack Obama, hesitant to escalate tensions with Russia any further, was slow to mobilize a diplomatic response in Europe and did not immediately provide Ukrainians with offensive weapons.

“A lot of us were really appalled that not more was done for the violation of that [post-Soviet] agreement,” said Ian Kelly, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to Georgia from 2015 to 2018. “It just basically showed that if you have nuclear weapons” — as Russia does — “you’re inoculated against strong measures by the international community.”

Since then, corruption has persisted in the Ukrainian government, and the country ranks in the bottom third of the watchdog group Transparency International’s index.

Ukraine’s far-right presence has grown and become somewhat normalized, and there are government-aligned fascist militias in the country. But Moscow has drawn out those issues to advance false claims about genocide and other attacks on civilians as a way to legitimize the separatist movement in eastern Ukraine and to create a pretext for invasion. In his prerecorded speech shared on the eve of the bombardment of Ukraine, Putin said he sought the “denazification” of Ukraine.

To be clear: The Ukrainian government is not a Nazi regime and has not been co-opted by the far right. Zelenskyy is Jewish; he speaks proudly of how his Jewish grandfather fought against Hitler’s army.

Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images
Ukrainian soldiers prepare to repel an attack in Ukraine’s Luhansk region on February 24.

Yet, days earlier, Putin used these sorts of claims as part of his explanation for recognizing as independent the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic, the two territories in eastern Ukraine where he has backed separatists since 2014. “Announcing the decisions taken today, I am confident in the support of the citizens of Russia. Of all the patriotic forces of the country,” Putin said before moving troops into the regions for “peacekeeping” purposes.

At the time, most experts Vox spoke to said that looked like the beginning, not the end, of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine.

“In Russia, [it] provides the political-legal basis for the formal introduction of Russian forces, which they’ve already decided to do,” Kofman, of CNA, told Vox on February 21. “Secondarily, it provides the legal local basis for Russian use of force in defense of these independent republics’ Russian citizens there. It’s basically political theater.”

It set “the stage for the next steps,” he added. Those next steps are now clear.

How the rest of the world is responding

The United States and its allies around the world have condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and have since announced increasingly tough sanctions, intended to completely isolate Russia from the international community and inflict real economic costs.

Biden announced on the afternoon of February 24 that the United States would impose sanctions on Russian financial institutions, including cutting off Russia’s largest banks from the US financial system, and on Russian elites in Putin’s inner circle. America will also implement export controls on certain technologies. The United Kingdom and Europe added their own sanctions, imposing the “massive” penalties the West had been warning Putin about.

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
People demonstrate in support of Ukraine outside the residence of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in London on February 25. 
    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-

cdn.com/thumbor/TBcqsmONfWmjKKnCTF4kFMctiHY=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23278438/GettyImages_1373115738.jpg" /> Sean Gallup/Getty Images

  <figcaption>Tens of thousands of people gather in Tiergarten Park in Berlin, Germany,  on February 27 to protest
against the ongoing war in Ukraine.

The US and its allies have only amped up the pressure since then. On February 25, the EU and US imposed sanctions on Putin himself. On February 26, the US and European countries announced an agreement to cut some (but not all) Russian banks off from SWIFT, the global messaging system that enables most international transactions, which will make it very difficult for Russia to make transactions beyond its borders. (Japan also signed on to SWIFT actions on February 27.) The US and its allies have said they will target Russia’s central bank, specifically its foreign reserves that Moscow needs to help support its currency. The US has continued to add penalties, including joining other countries in closing US airspace to Russian aircraft, and sanctioning more than a dozen oligarchs.

The United States has said it will not involve troops in any Ukrainian conflict, though more US military aid to Ukraine is on its way and the US has shored up its presence on NATO’s eastern flank. On February 24, the Pentagon said it would send 7,000 additional troops to Germany, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on February 26 that he was authorizing “up to $350 million” in additional military aid to Ukraine, including “further lethal defensive assistance to help Ukraine address the armored, airborne, and other threats it is now facing.”

Such aid, according to a February 26 tweet by State Department spokesperson Ned Price, will be provided “immediately” and include “anti-tank and air defense capabilities.” Other European and NATO countries are also stepping up their assistance, including Germany, which reversed a long-standing policy of not sending lethal aid to conflict zones.

Russia knows that the US and its partners do not want to commit themselves militarily, and, as Putin launched his invasion, he offered an ominous warning as he touted Russia’s nuclear arsenal: “There should be no doubt that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country.” On February 27, Putin escalated that threat by putting the country’s nuclear deterrent forces on high alert.

Maciej Luczniewski/NurPhoto via Getty Images
American soldiers at the Polish-Ukrainian border near Arlamow, Poland, on February 24.

NATO has vowed to protect its members from any Russian aggression. On February 25, NATO announced that it was activating part of its NATO Response Force — a 40,000-troop unit modernized after the 2014 Crimea invasion — to protect allies on NATO’s eastern flank. “We are now deploying the NATO Response Force for the first time in a collective defense context. We speak about thousands of troops. We speak about air and maritime capabilities,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said.

Yet these are largely defensive measures, which means most of the punishment against Russia will come in the form of economic sanctions. Still, the West is starting to shift from an original hesitancy to impose the most severe costs on Russia over fears of what it might mean for Europe, the US, and the rest of the global economy — and what Russia might do to retaliate.

They’re not all the way there, however. For example, even the SWIFT action is expected to leave some carve-outs so Russia can still export gas to Europe. The tougher the sanctions on Russia, the harder it will hit the US and especially European economies, so leaders are still trying to soften the impact. But the fallout from these punishments — along with other measures, like the EU and United States barring Russia from their airspace — is being felt in Russia, as the ruble crashes and analysts warn of a deep recession.

Satellite image (c) 2022 Maxar Technologies/DigitalGlobe/Getty Images
Maxar satellite imagery shows a large Russian military convoy moving toward Antonov Airport in Hostomel, Ukraine, near Kyiv, on February 28.

A way out of this war is difficult to contemplate as bombs are falling on Ukraine, but the US and its allies are going to have to do careful diplomacy to isolate and put pressure on Russia in the long term — and create incentives for Moscow to stop its assault on Ukraine. The US and its allies are also likely going to have to decide how much they want, or can, support Ukraine as it battles Russia.

“The real question, I think, is going to come down to what extent the West can and will try to support and supply a long-term insurgency against Russia,” said Paul D’Anieri, an expert on Eastern European and post-Soviet politics at the University of California Riverside. “And what level of success does Russia have in fighting back against? Unfortunately, it seems like the best strategy for peace right now is when enough Russians die, that the Russians decide it’s not worth it anymore.”

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