Russia invades Ukraine
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — Russian invasion of Ukraine (freely licensed)
On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the largest attack on a European country since World War II.
Announcing what he called a “special military operation,” President Vladimir Putin sent troops in from the north, east, and south, with missile strikes hitting cities across the country, including the capital, Kyiv.
Putin’s stated aims — the “demilitarisation and denazification” of Ukraine, and baseless claims that its government were neo-Nazis committing genocide — were rejected internationally as pretexts.
President Volodymyr Zelensky declared martial law and refused to flee, and Ukrainian forces halted the assault on Kyiv, forcing Russia to withdraw from the north by April.
The invasion triggered Europe’s largest refugee crisis since 1945, with millions fleeing abroad, while Western nations imposed sweeping sanctions and sent weapons; on 2 March, 141 UN member states voted to condemn the invasion and demand a withdrawal.
Ukraine later mounted counteroffensives, retaking much of the Kharkiv region in September and the city of Kherson in November, even as Russia declared the annexation of four Ukrainian regions on 30 September.
The cost-of-living and energy crisis
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — 2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage (freely licensed)
The war sent energy and food prices soaring, driving inflation to multi-decade highs across much of the world.
Price rises in the United States peaked above 9.1% in June — roughly a 40-year high — while UK inflation reached 11.1% in October.
Central banks, including the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, raised interest rates sharply in an effort to bring prices back under control.
Europe faced a severe energy crisis: Russia, which had supplied around 40% of the continent’s natural gas, cut deliveries, and suspended its Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Germany indefinitely from early September.
On 26 September, three of the four pipes making up the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were ruptured by underwater explosions in what investigators and NATO described as deliberate sabotage; those responsible were not identified.
Across many wealthy nations, households faced sharply higher heating and food bills heading into winter.
The Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (freely licensed)
On 24 June 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the federal constitutional right to abortion that had stood for nearly 50 years.
The ruling came in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case centred on a Mississippi law banning most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by the court’s other conservatives, with the three liberal justices dissenting; the vote was 5-4 on fully overturning Roe.
An early draft of the opinion had leaked in May, an almost unprecedented breach that triggered nationwide protests and an internal investigation.
The decision returned the question of abortion to individual states, and within months around 18 states had banned or severely restricted the procedure.
It set off protests across the country and became a defining issue in that November’s midterm elections.
The assassination of Shinzo Abe
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — Assassination of Shinzo Abe (freely licensed)
On 8 July 2022, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was shot and killed while delivering a campaign speech outside a train station in the city of Nara.
Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, was struck from behind at close range by a man wielding a homemade gun. He was airlifted to hospital, where he was pronounced dead; he was 67.
The suspect, 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, was arrested at the scene and told investigators he had targeted Abe over a grudge against the Unification Church, to which Abe had political ties and to which Yamagami’s mother had donated sums that bankrupted the family.
The killing shocked Japan, a country with strict gun laws and very little political violence, and was the first assassination of a former Japanese premier since the 1930s.
It drew intense scrutiny of ties between the church and Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party, and Abe was honoured with a state funeral on 27 September.
The James Webb Space Telescope’s first images
Featured image: NASA — Webb’s first deep field (public domain)
On 11 July 2022, US President Joe Biden unveiled the first image from the James Webb Space Telescope: the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe taken to that point.
The full set of first full-colour images and data followed on 12 July, released by NASA alongside its partners, the European and Canadian space agencies.
The images included the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 — known as “Webb’s First Deep Field” — the “Cosmic Cliffs” of the Carina Nebula, the Southern Ring Nebula, the galaxy grouping Stephan’s Quintet, and evidence of water in the atmosphere of the distant exoplanet WASP-96b.
Webb, which launched on 25 December 2021, is the largest and most powerful space telescope ever built, at a cost of around $10 billion.
Observing chiefly in infrared, it is designed to capture light from the earliest galaxies, formed not long after the Big Bang.
The deep-field image covered a patch of sky roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, yet revealed thousands of galaxies.
Britain’s revolving door at Number 10
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — Liz Truss (freely licensed)
The United Kingdom went through three prime ministers in a matter of months.
Boris Johnson announced his resignation on 7 July 2022 after around 60 members of his government quit in protest over a series of scandals.
Liz Truss won the Conservative leadership contest to replace him and became prime minister on 6 September, appointed by Queen Elizabeth II at Balmoral just two days before the Queen’s death.
On 23 September, Truss’s chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announced a “mini-budget” of large, unfunded tax cuts that sent the pound and UK government bond markets into turmoil, forcing an emergency intervention by the Bank of England.
Most of the measures were quickly reversed, and Truss resigned on 20 October after just 44 days — the shortest tenure of any prime minister in British history.
Rishi Sunak, a former chancellor, succeeded her on 25 October, becoming the UK’s first British-Asian prime minister.
Pakistan’s catastrophic floods
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — 2022 Pakistan floods (freely licensed)
Between June and October 2022, catastrophic flooding submerged roughly one-third of Pakistan.
The disaster stemmed from record monsoon rains — several times the normal levels in some provinces — worsened by seasonal runoff from melting glaciers.
More than 1,700 people were killed, and over two million homes were damaged or destroyed. An estimated 33 million people, about one in seven Pakistanis, were affected, and around eight million were displaced.
The UN Secretary-General described the deluge as a “monsoon on steroids,” and total damages and economic losses were later estimated at more than $30 billion.
The catastrophe intensified calls for wealthy, high-emitting nations to help pay for climate-related “loss and damage” in developing countries, a demand that shaped that year’s COP27 climate summit in Egypt.
The death of Queen Elizabeth II
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — Elizabeth II (freely licensed)
On 8 September 2022, Queen Elizabeth II died at Balmoral Castle in Scotland at the age of 96.
Her reign of 70 years and 214 days was the longest of any British monarch, spanning 15 UK prime ministers and 14 US presidents.
She had celebrated her Platinum Jubilee, marking 70 years on the throne, in June, and had appointed her final prime minister, Liz Truss, just two days before her death.
She was immediately succeeded by her eldest son, who became King Charles III.
Her death set in motion long-planned arrangements known as Operation London Bridge, and hundreds of thousands of people queued, some for many hours, to see her lying in state in London.
Her state funeral was held at Westminster Abbey on 19 September, attended by world leaders and watched by a vast global television audience.
Iran’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — Mahsa Amini protests (freely licensed)
In September 2022, protests erupted across Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini, also known as Jina, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman.
Amini had been arrested by Iran’s morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly, and she died in custody on 16 September; witnesses said she had been beaten, which the authorities denied.
Her death sparked a nationwide uprising under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom,” with women publicly removing and burning their headscarves.
The protests grew into one of the most serious challenges to Iran’s clerical rulers in years, spreading across the country and to Iranian communities around the world.
Security forces responded with force, firing live ammunition, metal pellets, and tear gas; hundreds of protesters were killed and thousands more detained.
By December, Iran had begun carrying out executions of people convicted in connection with the unrest.
Elon Musk buys Twitter
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — Acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk (freely licensed)
On 27 October 2022, Elon Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, taking one of the world’s most influential social media platforms private.
Musk, then the world’s richest person, had made his takeover offer in April at $54.20 a share, before attempting to back out, which prompted Twitter to sue to force the deal through.
On taking control, he immediately fired the company’s top executives, and marked his arrival by walking into its headquarters carrying a sink.
In the weeks that followed he laid off around half of Twitter’s workforce and overhauled its account-verification system.
Musk, who described himself as a “free speech absolutist,” said he wanted the platform to serve as a digital town square. The company was later renamed X.
The Qatar World Cup
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — 2022 FIFA World Cup (freely licensed)
The 2022 FIFA World Cup was held in Qatar from 20 November to 18 December, the first ever staged in the Arab world.
Unusually, it took place in November and December rather than the northern summer, to avoid Qatar’s extreme heat.
The build-up was dominated by controversy over Qatar’s treatment of the migrant workers who built its stadiums and over its record on LGBTQ+ rights.
On the pitch there were major upsets: Saudi Arabia beat the eventual champions Argentina in the group stage, and Morocco became the first African and Arab nation to reach a World Cup semifinal.
The final, on 18 December at Lusail Stadium, saw Argentina beat France 4-2 on penalties after a dramatic 3-3 draw, with Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé — who scored a hat-trick — trading goals.
It was Argentina’s third World Cup title and Messi’s first; he was named the tournament’s best player, while Mbappé won the Golden Boot as top scorer.
China’s zero-COVID protests
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — 2022 COVID-19 protests in China (freely licensed)
In late November 2022, rare and widespread protests broke out across China against the government’s strict “zero-COVID” policy of lockdowns and mass testing.
The unrest was triggered by a fire in an apartment building in Ürümqi on 24 November that killed ten people; many blamed prolonged lockdown measures for hampering the rescue.
Demonstrators in cities including Shanghai and Beijing held up blank sheets of white paper as a symbol of censorship, and some took the rare step of calling for President Xi Jinping to step down.
It was one of the boldest displays of public dissent seen in China in decades.
Within weeks, the government abruptly abandoned most of its zero-COVID restrictions, beginning on 7 December, ending nearly three years of some of the world’s tightest pandemic controls.
The sudden reopening was followed by a large wave of infections across the country.