2022
year
2022 (MMXXII) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, the 2022nd year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 22nd year of the 3rd millennium and the 21st century, and the 3rd year of the 2020s decade.
The year began with another wave in the COVID-19 pandemic, with Omicron spreading rapidly and becoming the dominant variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus worldwide. Due to a decrease in COVID-19 cases and deaths, 2022 saw the removal of most COVID restrictions and the reopening of international borders in the vast majority of countries, while the global rollout of COVID-19 vaccines continued. The global economic recovery from the pandemic continued, though many countries experienced a three-year inflation surge; in response, many central banks raised their interest rates to landmark levels. The world population reached eight billion people in 2022. The year also witnessed numerous natural disasters, including two devastating Atlantic hurricanes (Fiona and Ian), and the most powerful volcano eruption of the century so far. The later part of the year also saw the first public release of ChatGPT by OpenAI starting an arms race in artificial intelligence which increased in intensity into 2023, as well as the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
2022 was also dominated by wars and armed conflicts. While escalations into the internal conflict in Myanmar and the Tigray War dominated the heightening of tensions within their regions and each caused over 10,000 deaths, 2022 was most notable for the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II. The invasion caused the displacement of 15.7 million Ukrainians (8 million internally displaced persons and 7.7 million refugees), and led to international condemnations and sanctions and nuclear threats, the withdrawal of hundreds of companies from Russia, and the exclusion of Russia from major sporting events.
Conflicts
The Russo-Ukrainian war escalated after Russian president Vladimir Putin announced a "special military operation", stating that it was to support the Russian-backed breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, whose paramilitary forces had been fighting Ukraine in the Donbas conflict since 2014.
Events
January
January 1
France takes over the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, after the Slovenian presidency.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “2022” as year. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as year. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q49625. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2022, 2023 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “2022” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.