Continuation War

Continuation War
Date 12 March 2021 – 21 September 2022 (1 year, 6 months, 10 days) Location Tsernova Drazhinskiya Ravka Territorial changes Drazhinskiya occupies the majority of the Tsernova region
Belligerents
Ravka Acrea Ossoria Auroa Supported by:	Drazhinskiya Supported by: Svinia
Units involved
Ravkan Armed Forces Acrean Armed Forces Ossorian Armed Forces Auroan Defence Forces	Drazhinskiyan Armed Forces
Casualties and losses
197,496 killed, 493,740 wounded 62,407 killed, 187,221 wounded 31,649 killed, 94,947 wounded 24,078 killed, 75,234 wounded	365,697 killed, 914,242 wounded

The Continuation War (Ravkan: Продовження війни, tr. Prodovzhennya vijny); Drazhinskiyan: Працяг вайны, tr. Pratsyag vajny) was an armed conflict fought between Ravka and Drazhinskiya between March 2021 and September 2022. The war's immediate cause lays in the aftermath of the the Treaty of Nice imposed on Drazhinskiya following the 2015 Midsummer War, during which Ravkan and Acrean forces occupied the majority of the border region of Tsernova; as part of the terms of the treaty, Drazhinskiya ceded most of Tsernova to Ravka. Though both Drazhinskiya and Ravka maintain longstanding claims Tsernova, largely on ethnopolitical grounds in spite of the historical ethnolinguistic diversity of the region, contention over Tsernova is widely regarded as an extension of the wider political and ideological enmity between the two. After its defeat in 2015, Drazhinskiya entered a period of political upheaval which saw the ruling Free Assembly coalition replaced by the popular National Union Conference. Although the NUC rose to power on a wave of support for its revanchist ideology, the possibility of another conflict in the near future was not seriously raised until tensions in the region sharply rose following the passage of the Zastavna Acts by the Ravkan parliament on 21 February, 2020. Also commonly referred to as the "Reclamation Acts", the laws began the official process of administratively and legally incorporating the Ravkan-occupied territories of Tsernova into Ravka proper. They elicited an extremely heated reaction in Drazhinskiya, inflaming the unresolved tensions between the two states. Offician Drazhin protests did little to dissuade the Ravkan government. Aggressive rhetoric and military posturing gradually increased as tensions between Drazhinskiya and its eastern neighbours worsened over the following year. The failure of the Ravkan government to respond to Drazhinskiyan concerns, as well as the revanchist undertones the NUC's political ideology was built on, are frequently credited as factors which made the eventual outbreak of conflict inevitable.

Drazhinskiya launched an invasion of Ravkan-occupied Tsernova in March 2021. The attack proper was preceded by several weeks of brief, frequently uneventful skirmishes as encounters between Drazhin and Ravkan forces increased with the military buildup along the border over January and February. The initial invasion was highly successful, and Drazhinskiyan forces achieved major victories in central Tsernova, though Drazhin forces in the north were initially stalled by Ravkan-Acrean forces in the urban buildup of the Bozuk and Makhovka metropolitan areas. Over the next couple months, Ravkan-Acrean forces gradually withdrew east, with Drazhin forces eventually occupying nearly all of central and southern Tsernova and managing to advance into Ravka before being exhausted. A brief Ravkan-Acrean counteroffensive in late summer reversed some of these gains and pushed the Drazhin out of Ravka, but by September major fighting petered out as both sides dug in in preparation for winter. Negotiations between Drazhin and Ravkan-Acrean diplomats for a peace agreement began in January with Górska acting as the mediating party; against this backdrop, Drazhinskiya launched multiple offensives over the winter but was unable to move the front. Larger movement did not resume until the next summer, when an of Ravkan-Acrean counteroffensive achieved a local breakthrough in northern Tsernova and retook most of the territory lost in that sector in the first months of the war. Fighting subsided with an armistice signed in Opoda, Górska in late September 2021, though negotiations for a lasting peace agreement are still ongoing.