When the Second World War ended in 1945, the Soviet Union emerged as one of the world's two superpowers, with an empire to hold, a rival to contain, and an army that had just fought its way to Berlin. In the eighty years since, Moscow has gone to war again and again — sometimes openly, sometimes in secret, sometimes through proxies. Russia, the Soviet Union's legal successor, inherited not only its nuclear arsenal and its UN Security Council seat, but also its wars.
This post surveys those conflicts: the interventions that held the Soviet empire together, the Cold War proxy wars, the disaster in Afghanistan, the wars of the Soviet collapse, and the wars of the Putin era. A note on method first. Casualty figures in this history are often contested, sometimes wildly so, and I have flagged the numbers that are disputed rather than presenting one side's count as settled fact. Where Moscow, Kyiv, or Western governments describe the same war differently, I say so.
1. Holding the Empire Together, 1953–1968
The Soviet Union's first postwar wars were not against foreign enemies. They were against its own allies.
East Germany, June 1953. A workers' uprising against increased production quotas spread across East Germany. Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin and other cities to crush it. Several hundred East Germans were killed, by most estimates, and thousands were arrested. It set the pattern: the empire would be held by force when persuasion failed.
Hungary, October–November 1956. The Hungarian uprising went further than any other. Under Imre Nagy, Hungary announced it would leave the Warsaw Pact and become neutral. Moscow first hesitated, then struck. On November 4, Soviet forces launched Operation Whirlwind against Budapest. Around 2,500 Hungarians and some 700 Soviet soldiers were killed. Nagy was arrested, later executed, and Hungary's brief bid for freedom was over. The West, absorbed in the Suez Crisis, did nothing.
Czechoslovakia, August 1968. Alexander Dubček's "socialism with a human face" — freer press, looser censorship, reform within communism — alarmed Moscow more than outright rebellion had. On the night of August 20–21, some 500,000 Warsaw Pact troops, overwhelmingly Soviet, invaded. Resistance was mostly nonviolent, but over 100 Czechs and Slovaks were killed. The invasion produced the Brezhnev Doctrine: the Soviet Union claimed the right to intervene in any socialist country where socialism was "threatened." In practice, it meant the empire's members could not leave.
These were not wars between states. They were a superpower policing its own sphere. But they were fought with tanks and artillery, they killed thousands, and they taught a generation of Eastern Europeans what Soviet "friendship" meant.
2. Fighting America Without Fighting America: Korea, Vietnam, and the Proxy Wars
The Cold War's central paradox was that its two superpowers almost never shot at each other directly — and yet Soviet personnel fought, bled, and died in America's wars.
Korea, 1950–1953. The Soviet Union did not send ground troops to Korea. It sent something more deniable: fighter pilots. Soviet airmen flew MiG-15s against American Sabres over "MiG Alley," wearing Chinese uniforms and forbidden to speak Russian on the radio. Moscow denied their presence for decades; it was only acknowledged after the Soviet Union fell. Several hundred Soviet airmen and support personnel died in the war, by Russian accounts.
Vietnam, 1965–1973. The Soviet role was larger and less secret. Thousands of Soviet military advisers and air-defense specialists served in North Vietnam, operating surface-to-air missile sites, training crews, and supplying the weaponry that made American bombing so costly. Soviet ships delivered the hardware; Soviet officers helped plan the air defense of Hanoi. The war was never officially a Soviet war, but Soviet hands were on the equipment that shot down American aircraft.
The Middle East, 1967–1973. Soviet advisers served with Egyptian and Syrian forces in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, and in 1970 Soviet air-defense units and pilots deployed to Egypt itself to blunt Israeli air strikes. As in Vietnam, the pattern was the same: Soviet weapons, Soviet training, and sometimes Soviet crews, but no declaration of war.
Africa: Angola and the Ogaden, 1975–1978. In Angola's civil war, Soviet advisers and massive arms shipments backed the MPLA government, while Cuban combat troops — flown and supplied with Soviet help — did much of the fighting. In the Ogaden War between Ethiopia and Somalia, Moscow switched sides mid-conflict, backing Ethiopia with advisers, arms, and Cuban troops against a Somali army it had previously armed. These were wars fought at arm's length, and they reveal a consistent Soviet preference: let allies do the dying where possible.
The Sino-Soviet border, 1969. The strangest conflict of all was between two communist powers. In March 1969, Soviet and Chinese troops fought over Zhenbao (Damansky) Island in the Ussuri River, and clashes spread along the long border. Dozens of Soviet soldiers and a larger, disputed number of Chinese soldiers were killed. The fighting pushed Beijing toward rapprochement with Washington — one of the great unintended consequences of the Cold War. Moscow and Beijing were not allies after 1969; they were armed rivals.
3. Afghanistan, 1979–1989: The War That Broke an Army
On Christmas Eve 1979, Soviet transport aircraft began landing at Kabul airport. Within days, Soviet special forces had stormed the presidential palace and killed President Hafizullah Amin. Moscow's plan was a quick intervention to stabilize a friendly regime. It became a ten-year war.
The Soviet 40th Army, at its peak around 115,000 strong, fought a guerrilla war against the mujahideen across some of the world's hardest terrain. The mujahideen were backed by the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia; from 1986, American Stinger missiles stripped Soviet helicopters of their dominance. The war settled into ambushes, garrison duty, and a slow bleed.
The Soviet Union withdrew the last of its troops on February 15, 1989, under Mikhail Gorbachev. The official Soviet death toll was 14,453, with tens of thousands wounded. Afghan deaths — soldiers and civilians — are estimated in the hundreds of thousands, with some estimates over a million. The war did not single-handedly destroy the Soviet Union, as is sometimes claimed; the empire's economic and political crisis had deeper roots. But it shattered the army's prestige, produced a generation of embittered veterans, and convinced many Soviet citizens that their government could neither win wars nor tell the truth about them. The "Afghan syndrome" haunted Soviet — and later Russian — decision-making for decades.
4. The Empire Falls Apart: Russia's Wars of the 1990s
When the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, Russia inherited its army, its weapons, and its unfinished business on its borders.
Transnistria, 1992. As Moldova moved toward independence, its Russian-speaking eastern strip broke away. The Soviet 14th Army, stationed there, effectively backed the separatists, and its commander, General Alexander Lebed, brokered a ceasefire that froze the conflict. Russian troops never left. Transnistria became the template for the "frozen conflict": a war stopped, never resolved.
Tajikistan, 1992–1997. Russia's 201st Motor Rifle Division and border guards were drawn into Tajikistan's civil war, backing the government against Islamist and regional opposition forces. Russian troops guarded the Afghan border and took casualties in a war that was barely reported in Moscow.
The First Chechen War, 1994–1996. Chechnya's declaration of independence met a Russian invasion in December 1994 that was planned as a swift police action and became a catastrophe. Russian forces reached Grozny and were mauled in street fighting; the city was then flattened by artillery and air power. The war killed tens of thousands of civilians — the exact figure is fiercely disputed — and thousands of Russian soldiers. The Khasavyurt Accord of 1996 ended the fighting without resolving Chechnya's status. It was Russia's first lost war, and it humiliated an army still living off Soviet stockpiles.
Dagestan and the road to the Second Chechen War, 1999. In August 1999, Chechen-based militants invaded Dagestan. Russia repelled them, and after apartment bombings in Russian cities that September — bombings Moscow blamed on Chechen terrorists, a claim some critics have disputed — Russia invaded Chechnya again.
5. The Putin Era: Georgia, Ukraine, Syria
The Second Chechen War, 1999–2009. Vladimir Putin, then prime minister, staked his rise on this war. Russian forces retook Grozny, this time by destroying it more thoroughly, and then pursued a policy of "Chechenization": handing power to loyal Chechens, above all the Kadyrov family. Akhmad Kadyrov, and after his assassination in 2004 his son Ramzan, ruled Chechnya with Moscow's money and blessing. The war officially ended in 2009, but its settlement — a loyal strongman ruling a republic in exchange for loyalty and subsidies — became a model for Russian rule elsewhere.
Georgia, August 2008. The Five-Day War began over South Ossetia, a Georgian breakaway region backed by Moscow. After Georgian forces shelled the South Ossetian capital, Russian troops, already positioned nearby, drove them out and pushed deep into Georgia proper before a ceasefire. Russia then recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states. It was Russia's first war against a foreign state since Afghanistan, and the first time since the Cold War that Moscow redrew a neighbour's borders by force.
Ukraine, 2014. When Ukraine's pro-Russian president was ousted in February 2014, Russia moved fast. Unmarked troops — the "little green men" — seized Crimea, which was then annexed after a referendum that Ukraine and most of the world rejected as illegitimate. In eastern Ukraine, Russian-backed separatists seized parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, and a war began that killed around 14,000 people before 2022, according to UN estimates. Moscow denied its regular troops were fighting there; evidence of their presence accumulated steadily. The Minsk agreements froze the fighting without settling it.
Syria, 2015–present. In September 2015, Russia intervened in Syria's civil war with an air campaign that saved the Assad government from collapse. Russian aircraft, special forces, and military police, along with the Wagner private military company, became central to the war. Syria was also a testing ground: new aircraft, missiles, and tactics were trialled there, and Russia secured permanent naval and air bases on the Mediterranean. It was Moscow's first major military intervention outside the former Soviet Union since Afghanistan — and a demonstration that Russia could project power far from its borders again.
Ukraine, 2022–present. On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the largest war in Europe since 1945. Moscow described its aims as the "demilitarization and denazification" of Ukraine and the protection of Russian speakers; Kyiv and Western governments described it as a war of conquest aimed at extinguishing Ukrainian independence. The initial drive on Kyiv failed, and the war became a grinding, high-intensity conflict of artillery, drones, and trenches. Casualty figures are enormously contested and remain unreliable on all sides. The war is still being fought, and its outcome will shape Europe for a generation.
See The Origins and Causes of the Ukraine-Russia War
6. Patterns: What Eighty Years of Warfighting Shows
Looked at together, these wars show both continuity and change.
The continuity is strategic. From Hungary in 1956 to Ukraine in 2022, Moscow has repeatedly used force to hold what it considers its security perimeter — the belt of states around Russia that it regards as a buffer against invasion. Russian leaders, shaped by a history of invasions from the west, have treated that buffer as existential. Their neighbours have usually experienced it as domination. Both descriptions can be true at once, and the tension between them is the story of the region.
The change is in how the wars are fought. The Soviet Union fought with mass conscript armies and heavy firepower. Modern Russia mixes regular forces with private military companies like Wagner, cyber operations, and information warfare. Western analysts often call this the "Gerasimov doctrine," after a 2013 article by General Valery Gerasimov. Scholars dispute the label: Gerasimov's article was largely describing Western methods, not announcing a Russian doctrine. But the blend of conventional and unconventional tools is real, and it has made Russian warfare harder to classify — and harder to answer.
There is also a recurring pattern of wars that were supposed to be short and became long: Afghanistan was meant to take months; Chechnya was meant to take weeks; the 2022 invasion was widely expected in Moscow to take days. Each time, the political objective outran the military plan. And each war solved the immediate problem while creating the next one: Hungary stayed in the pact but hated Moscow more; Afghanistan was left but the army came home broken; Chechnya was pacified but only by empowering a warlord; Crimea was taken but Ukraine was lost as a friendly neighbour.
Conclusion
The Soviet Union and Russia have been at war, in one form or another, for most of the period since 1945. The enemies changed — rebellious allies, American proxies, Islamist guerrillas, separatists, neighbouring states — but the underlying impulse did not: the conviction in Moscow that security requires control of the lands around it, and the willingness to pay in blood to keep that control.
The cost has been immense, and not only for Russia's opponents. These wars consumed a superpower's treasury, broke a conscript army twice, and left a trail of frozen conflicts that still poison the map of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The war in Ukraine is the latest chapter, not the first. Understanding how Moscow got there means understanding Budapest in 1956, Kabul in 1979, and Grozny in 1995 — because the people making decisions in the Kremlin today learned their history in those wars.
