The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History

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. (May)