The Russo-Ukrainian War
The Return of History
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4.6 • 27 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Compelling.… [E]rudite, objective and immensely readable.” —Ben Hall, Financial Times
An authoritative history of Europe’s largest military conflict since World War II, from the New York Times best-selling author of The Gates of Europe.
Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war—and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated.
Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, course, and the already apparent and possible future consequences. Though the current war began eight years before the all-out assault—on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament—the roots of this conflict can be traced back even earlier, to post-Soviet tensions and imperial collapse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a broad historical context and an examination of Ukraine and Russia’s ideas and cultures, as well as domestic and international politics, Plokhy reveals that while this new Cold War was not inevitable, it was predictable.
Ukraine, Plokhy argues, has remained central to Russia’s idea of itself even as Ukrainians have followed a radically different path. In a new international environment defined by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the disintegration of the post–Cold War international order, and a resurgence of populist nationalism, Ukraine is now more than ever the most volatile fault line between authoritarianism and democratic Europe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Imperial nostalgia and miscalculation precipitated the war in Ukraine, according to this wide-ranging study. Harvard historian Plokhy (Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front) spends the book's first half on the historical background of the 2022 Russian invasion, surveying Russia's domination of Ukraine from the Middle Ages through the Soviet era, recent wranglings over Ukraine's bids to join NATO and the European Union, and the course of the low-level war that followed Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and its support of Russian separatist militias in the Ukrainian Donbas. The book's second half recaps the present conflict from the initial attack on Kiev to Ukraine's counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson, covering major battles; the killings of civilians by Russian occupiers; the charismatic leadership of Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenski; Putin's poor military planning and delusional expectations, and more. Plokhy's narrative is lucid, well-crafted, and judicious—he's especially good on the complexities of the failed Minsk accords that sought to end the war in the Donbas—and vividly conveys the war's destruction through Ukrainians' firsthand experiences. ("It seems to be flying straight for your head," one woman recalls of an attacking Russian warplane; "not even into your head but right through it.") The result is an essential account of the conflict that manages to make sense of its obscure and tangled origins.
