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“He starts in the late the 1980s and goes up to when the book was published in 2019, so when the war had already started, and the first stage of the war had passed. His argument is basically twofold. Firstly, that the roots of this story are in the history of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and how it fell apart. His other big argument is that the war became almost inevitable because of a different political track chosen by Ukraine and Russia, in particular the issue of nation-building and the creation and consolidation of state in Ukraine. Ukraine becomes a democratic state; Russia moves in an authoritarian direction…He is a political scientist, and the book is very well organized and well written. It explains a lot about the two countries and their political development, the choices that were made in both cases, and how those choices eventually led to this clash, the current confrontation.” Read more...
The best books on Ukraine and Russia
Serhii Plokhy, Historian
