On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, giving rise to the deadliest conflict on European soil since the Second World War. How could this happen in twenty-first-century Europe? Why did Putin decide to escalate Russia’s war against Ukraine, a war which began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014?

In this timely book, Gwendolyn Sasse analyses the background to this war and examines the factors that led to Putin’s fateful decision. She retraces the history of Ukraine’s struggle for independence from Russia and shows how democratic developments in Ukraine had become a risk for Russia’s political system. She also shows that ambiguous Western policy towards Russia encouraged elites in the Kremlin to think that they had more room for action than they did. The result is a brilliant analysis of the background to the war, a concise account of the course of the war itself and a timely reflection on what its consequences will be – for Ukraine, for Russia and for the West.

Russia’s imperial past is key to understanding Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and his anti-Western obsessions. The renowned Eastern European historian Martin Schulze Wessel places the war in the long context of Russian westward expansion and describes how the expansion into Ukraine and the division of Poland since the 18th century established an aberration in Russian history that has been called a “curse of the Empire” continues to have an impact today. He shows how a fatal world of ideas could arise that still haunts the minds of the Moscow leadership in the 21st century. After 1945, Germany freed itself from its curse of empire and opened up to the West. This path still lies ahead for Russia. This book tells the closely intertwined history of Russia, Poland and Ukraine since Peter the Great in the context of international politics. It shows how the Russian incursions into Ukraine and the division of Poland produced path dependencies that are still a formative structural legacy today. This is not just about imperial claims to power, but also about an ideologically charged East-West conflict that emerged in the 19th century and in which Germany was on Russia’s side for a long time. What Germany achieved after 1945, Russia still has to do: turning away from the empire.

Chair: Timothy Garton Ash (St Antony’s College, Oxford)