War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

The war in Ukraine is the crescendo of a long struggle between Ukrainian nationalism and a Russian imperialism that denies its existence, according to this impassioned history. Russian journalist Zygar (All the Kremlin’s Men) recaps centuries of Ukrainian efforts to escape Russian domination, including 17th-century Cossack rebellions, 19th-century poet Taras Shevchenko’s jump-starting of Ukrainian-language literature, and far-right Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera’s anti-Soviet insurgency during WWII. Counterpointing this narrative is an examination of Russian writers and ideologues, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who mythologized a primeval unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples to justify Moscow’s rule over Kyiv. The book’s second half focuses on Ukraine’s history after independence in 1991, spotlighting the careers of rival presidents Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky and depicting the kaleidoscopic wrangling between oligarchic political factions, broadly divided between the Ukrainian-speaking west of the country and the Russian-speaking east, and shaped by the Kremlin’s meddling. Zygar gives a lucid, colorful account of this intricate history, especially of independent Ukraine’s often corrupt politics and relations with Moscow. The result is an illuminating analysis of the conflict’s deep roots in a symbiosis of cynical power plays and cultural delusions. (July)