As of writing this, the date is 11/12/2025.

The illegal expansionist Russian invasion of Ukraine has now reached its 11th year, with the firing shot taking place all the way back in 2014, with the unlawful annexation of Crimea and the Donbas Region, followed by several years of empty threats from Russia, whilst occupied Ukrainians suffered under Russian rule. 

Ukraine’s forces, while still strong in spirit, are beginning to be pushed back by invading Russian troops, due to several factors.

North Korean troops have been deployed, in aid of Russia, to assist in the illegal expansionist invasion. The Kremlin has previously brought in Russian mercenaries and Syrian fighters to bulk up its numbers against defending Ukrainian forces, along with troops pulled from Russian-occupied lands, including South Ossetia, Transnistria, and Abkhazia. It is currently recruiting fighters from Iran.

America’s support for Ukraine has recently faltered, with President Trump supporting a peace plan that was all but engineered by the Kremlin, including capping the size of the Ukrainian military and preventing Ukraine from joining NATO, with the recognition of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk by Ukraine as ‘de facto Russian’; following the unveiling of this ‘peace plan’, Ukraine, understandably, rejected it, seeking a new plan that would not involve ceding territory to an invading country.

I read a lot of posts and articles from people who try to dissect the reasoning behind Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.

Some conclude that it is simply a geopolitical squabble between two post-Soviet states. Others suppose that NATO and/or the EU must have “provoked” Russia into invading a completely separate nation that is not formally a member of either international organisation, despite both organisations allowing nations to join or leave as they please; see Brexit for the EU and the most recent threats of US departure from NATO.

However, I propose a much simpler, albeit darker, reason for Russia’s invasion. And that reason is ruscism, a term that encapsulates the ideology of Russian imperialism rooted in a history of expansionism, chauvinism, and a belief in Russian superiority, which fuels aggressive actions like the invasion of Ukraine.

Ruscism, or ‘Russian fascism’, was first identified during the First Chechen War when Dzhokhar Dudayev described it as: ‘a variety of hatred ideology which is based on Great Russian Chauvinism, spiritlessness and immorality.’

That phrase, “extreme cruelty”, comes up a lot whenever Russia is involved. 

In the First Chechen War alone, there was the indiscriminate bombing of Shali, a Chechen town, with the use of cluster bombs focused on targeting markets, gas stations, hospitals, a Muslim cemetery, schools and collective farms. There was also the Samashki Massacre, during which “Zachistka” took place. “Zachistka” is a Russian euphemism for “mopping up” in relation to killing civilians inside occupied enemy territories.

The UNCHR reported that over 100 people, mainly civilians, were murdered by Russian troops in Samashki, noting that soldiers “deliberately and arbitrarily attacked civilians and civilian dwellings”, by way of shooting, using flame throwers and throwing grenades into basements where mostly women, elderly people and children were hiding.

In the Second Chechen War, while both sides committed war crimes, Human Rights Watch noted that the majority of deaths of civilians were caused by Russian forces, ranging from the refusal to create safe evacuation corridors to ignoring the Geneva Convention, to looting from civilians’ homes before murdering said civilians. Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who the Kremlin murdered for shining a light on Russian war crimes in Chechnya, documented in her book “A Dirty War” the atrocities she both came across and was told about by survivors, including finding a school essay by a Chechen child which reads:

I do not know if Putin has a heart. But if he did, he would not have started such a war. Putin thinks human life is worth fifty kopecks. He is deeply mistaken. I’d like Putin to know that we are also human beings.

Fast forward to today, to the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. And what do we see? The use of prohibited chemical weapons by the Russian army has occurred approximately 465 times. Nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children have been abducted from Russian-occupied territories. More than one million people have been deported from Ukraine to Russia by Russian forces. The UN has reported numerous cases of civilians being “arbitrarily detained and subjected to enforced disappearances“. Amnesty International has stated that Russian troops had “shown a blatant disregard for civilian lives by using ballistic missiles and other explosive weapons with wide-area effect in densely-populated areas”. These don’t even begin to cover the scope of atrocities committed by Russian troops in Ukraine, ranging from mass graves to sexual violence and the forced conscription of Ukrainians in Russian-occupied areas.