Analysis: The ripples of the war Russia says isn't a war

LONDON (AP) — It's not a war, Vladimir Putin said then — and says now. It's a “special military operation.” In most every sense of the term, though, Russia's war in Ukraine is precisely that.

And when a nation is at war, even if it claims it is not, the reverberations back home — the place where the conflict was first conceived — can be far-reaching.

Eight months after Russia launched a war in February expecting a lightning victory against neighboring Ukraine, an independent nation from which it already annexed Crimea in 2014, tens of thousands of people have been killed in Ukraine. Millions are displaced from their homes. A brutal winter approaches. Nuclear fears are spiking. And the Kremlin is now using killer drones to degrade Ukraine's power supply, plunging more hundreds of thousands into darkness.

Four more regions of Ukraine have been illegally annexed in the last month, though they are far from fully under Russian control, and Putin declared martial law in them on Wednesday.