JRL NEWSWATCH: “Serhii Plokhy’s new book traces Vladimir Putin’s road to war” – The Economist

“The Ukrainian historian shows how the Kremlin’s bloody campaign has backfired.”

“The Russo-Ukrainian War. By Serhii Plokhy. W.W. Norton; 400 pages … [a] useful account of the origins and early progress of Russia’s war against Ukraine … very much worth reading ….”

“…[T]he first six chapters  [lay] out an excellent survey of unresolved regional tensions, going all the way back to the Kyivan Rus of the late ninth century, but focusing on the 20th. These issues, and … Putin’s inability to deal with them peacefully, drove the first phase of the current conflict: the [2014] seizure of Crimea and the eastern Donbas …. The same unresolved questions in the minds of Russian nationalists produced the invasion on February 24th 2022. … [Additionally] Russia went into this war, indeed into the whole period since … post-cold-war enthusiasm for the West began to fade, with the hope of creating a multipolar world. Instead, the author writes, ‘the conflict presaged a return to the bipolar world of the cold war, now centred not on Washington and Moscow, but on Washington and Beijing.’ A well-done chapter sketches … what looks like the terrible failure of [] Putin’s China policy … plac[ing] Russia firmly in a submissive posture. … [A]s for Ukraine … [w]hen [Putin] was first elected president in 2000, Ukraine was deeply divided between … Russia-facing and Europe-oriented elements. [Putin] has united [Ukraine] in [its] loathing for him and Russia itself. [] Putin’s real legacy will be to have destroyed for ever the dream of an imperial restoration.”

Click here for: “Serhii Plokhy’s new book traces Vladimir Putin’s road to war; The Ukrainian historian shows how the Kremlin’s bloody campaign has backfired” – The Economist