The Russo-Ukrainian War [Paperback]

The Russo-Ukrainian War by Serhii Plokhy

The Russo-Ukrainian War by Serhii Plokhy examines the origins and development of Russia’s war against Ukraine, placing the full-scale invasion of 24 February 2022 within a much longer history. The book follows a conflict already underway from 2014 and asks how its escalation transformed assumptions about Europe’s political order. Plokhy connects the immediate shock of invasion with the historical ideas and political changes that helped make it possible.

The account reaches back through the collapse of the Russian Empire and the rise and dissolution of the Soviet Union. It also considers the development of democratic politics in independent Ukraine and the hostility that development provoked in Russia. This approach gives readers more than a chronology of military events. The book is concerned with how competing understandings of statehood, empire and political choice became part of a war over Ukraine’s future.

From imperial collapse to the invasion of Ukraine

A military invasion has causes that cannot be understood from a battlefield alone. Plokhy moves between decisions made by political leaders and events experienced on the ground, connecting different scales of the conflict. The attempt to seize Kyiv is considered alongside the wider order that developed after the Cold War. Readers can follow how a war directed against one country also exposed the fragility of assumptions held far beyond its borders.

Plokhy’s interpretation emphasizes the challenge posed by Ukrainian resistance to Vladimir Putin’s ambitions. He also examines the response of Western countries and the broader international divisions brought into view by the invasion. These are arguments about the conflict’s meaning as well as accounts of what happened. Keeping the historical framework in view helps a reader distinguish the book’s explanation of imperial ambition from a narrower narrative of individual battles or diplomatic exchanges.

A historical account of sovereignty, resistance and global consequences

This English Penguin paperback was published in 2023. It offers a historical account written in the early period of the full-scale war, with the focus and limits of that publication moment. It is suited to readers interested in modern Ukraine, Russian imperial history and the relationship between sovereignty and international power. The book can be approached after a broader history of Ukraine or read as a focused examination of the war’s background and initial course.

Buy this book if you want to connect the invasion with the longer processes that preceded it. The Russo-Ukrainian War asks why the conflict developed, how Ukraine’s political choices mattered and why resistance had consequences beyond the country itself. Plokhy’s historical perspective provides a way to organize those questions without reducing the war to an isolated event. The result invites readers to consider how ideas about the past can shape decisions whose effects are immediate, violent and international.