Russia vs Ukraine War Started | Live Crisis, Conflict, Tension

Months-long tensions between Russia and neighbouring Ukraine have ignited into a full-blown invasion, with Russian President Vladimir Putin authorising a military operation in eastern Ukraine on Thursday (Feb 24).
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Mr Putin said he had authorised a special military operation in breakaway areas of eastern Ukraine and clashes between Russian and Ukrainian forces were only a matter of time.

Russia has been building up its military presence along the Ukrainian border over the past several months to exert pressure on the country and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Ukraine, a nation slightly smaller than Myanmar with about 43 million people, wants to join NATO, a military alliance of 30 countries in Europe and North America, but Russia is concerned that any such move would tip the global power balance against it.

Ukraine was part of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, headquartered in Moscow, which collapsed in 1991 with the fall of the Berlin wall that divided the former West Germany and East Germany, which was a Soviet state.

The Soviet Union engaged in a decades-long "Cold War" with the West that has some echoes in the current stand-off.

Russia wants a written guarantee that Ukraine, now an independent nation keen to ally itself with the European Union (EU), will not be allowed into NATO. It also wants the alliance's deployments in Eastern Europe to be pulled.