Ukraine, Russia, and the West: A Background Reading List
The invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops is continuing, and despite a meeting between Presidents Zelenskyy and Putin on February 28, it does not appear that any movement towards a pause or end of aggression is in sight.
These readings are from two groups: the first, non-governmental organizations and “think tanks” that monitor and analyze international relations and foreign policy; the second, scholars working in Western and Eastern European history.
While much of the material included here is now historical in light of the current situation, the context provided by them will help readers understand the enormous changes that have occurred in Ukraine, whether over one hundred, thirty or even three years.
As new reports become available, we will be adding them to this page. All material is free to read and download on JSTOR.
Research Reports
Philip G. Wasielewski, Seth G. Jones and Joseph S. Bermudez, Jr., Russia’s Gamble in Ukraine, Center for Strategic & International Studies, published January 2022
“If Moscow invades or otherwise escalates its actions in Ukraine and other areas, the United States and its Western partners need to be prepared to conduct extensive diplomatic, economic, military and information measures designed to protect NATO’s eastern flank and prevent Moscow from annexing any additional territory in Ukraine.” [Introduction, p.1]
Responding to Russia’s New Military Buildup Near Ukraine, International Crisis Group, published December 2021
“Moscow’s goal remains what it has long been: a Ukraine that is permanently in Russia’s sphere of influence. To the Kremlin, Ukraine is the front line in its continuing battle to block Western inroads into its neighborhood, which it sees as a threat to Russia itself. This goal underlies the political provisions that Russian negotiators insisted upon in the Minsk agreements.
[…]
The paradox, of course, is that the harder Russia presses to prevent Western actors from deepening their links with Kyiv, the stronger those ties become. As Moscow acts and postures ever more aggressively toward Kyiv, Ukraine sees ever fewer alternatives to closer relations with the West if it is to have any hope of security. For their part, Western states are drawn in by this dynamic, fearing that if Russia chisels away at Ukrainian sovereignty, not only Ukraine but European security as a whole could suffer dire consequences, with Russia potentially emboldened to embark on further aggression elsewhere.” [III. Russia’s Intentions, p.6]
Peace in Ukraine I:: A European War, International Crisis Group, published April 2020
“The war in Ukraine is a war in Europe. It is also a war about European security. Russia’s military intervention on its neighbour’s territory was undertaken in large part to guarantee that Ukraine did not align with Western economic and security institutions. Russia’s belief that such alignments would do it tremendous damage is rooted in its overall dissatisfaction with the European security order as it has evolved over the last three decades.” [Executive Summary, p.i]
Andrew Wilson, ed., What Does Ukraine Think?, European Council on Foreign Relations, published 2015
“The project to “rethink Ukraine” has been ongoing since the 1960s–1980s, when it was debated by intellectuals of the Ukrainian diaspora in North America, mostly historians who were born during World War I and left Ukraine after World War II, some escaping Hitler and most escaping Stalin.¹ They spent their formative years in Western Ukraine under Polish rule during the interwar years, but they did not succumb to the temptations of communism and fascism. Their intellectual guru was Viacheslav Lypynsky (1882–1931), one of the first critics of totalitarianism, in both its leftwing and rightwing varieties.” [3. Rethinking Ukraine, p. 34]
“However, in the early twenty-first century, mistrust in beliefs or convictions has become ubiquitous. Believing in something has become obsolete and old-fashioned. The spread of this kind of scepticism is no less dangerous than fanaticism: it undermines one of the most important human capacities, the capacity to distinguish between good and bad, and between better and worse. Total scepticism leads to indifference: if I do not believe in anything, then everything must be equally bad. Russian propaganda throughout the world plays on this mistrust as one of its key traps. Iran might be bad, but the United States is equally bad, it says. Totalitarianism is bad, but democracy is no good either. The annexation of Crimea was bad, but recognising Kosovo was bad too. “We are as bad as you are”, Russia says to the West.’ [7. Russia, zoopolitics and information bombs, p. 78]
Anders Åslund, Melinda Haring, William B. Taylor, John E. Herbst, Daniel Fried and Alexander Vershbow, Biden and Ukraine: A Strategy for the New Administration, Issue Brief from the Atlantic Council, published March 2021
“Ukraine’s success in its fight against Kremlin aggression is in the US national interest for at least three reasons: Russia’s war is against the West, not just Ukraine; the future of a rules-based international order depends on Russian withdrawal from Ukraine; and the United States has a moral commitment to both Ukraine’s fight for independence and democracy in general.” [US Interests in Ukraine, p.2]
Historians On Ukraine
Carl Gershman, A Fight for Democracy: Why Ukraine Matters, World Affairs, Vol. 177, No. 6 (March / April 2015), pp. 47-56
“The Maidan uprising was not only a momentous historical event but also a profoundly democratic one, with the protesters embracing a concept of citizenship involving individual responsibility to uphold democratic values and to serve the larger community.” [p.48]
“I suggest that Putin seeks nothing less than a different kind of world order from the one that followed the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, which he has called “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century.” That’s why he “[drove] a tank over the world order,” as the Economist put it last March after the invasion and annexation of Crimea. Putin is seeking to reverse the verdict of 1989, as the American writer George Weigel has said, which he considers to be an unjust and humiliating defeat for Russia.” [p.52]
Jacobus Delwaide, Identity and Geopolitics: Ukraine’s Grappling with Imperial Legacies, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol. 32/33, Part 1: ЖНИВА: Essays Presented in Honor of George G. Grabowicz on His Seventieth Birthday (2011–2014), pp. 179-207
Russian historic claims to Ukraine are not at all obvious. The term Kyivan Rus’ for the medieval (late ninth to mid-thirteenth century) realm centered on Kyiv “comes from imperial Russian historiography,” and had the function of distinguishing the Kyivan from the Muscovite period in the imperial Russian narrative. After World War II, the notion of an “Old Rus’ nationality” gained particular momentum in Soviet historiography: it “served, inter alia, to establish Russia’s claim to the historical legacy of Kyivan Rus’ and therefore survived the demise of Soviet historiography ” remaining “quite popular in Russia today..” [Kyiv and Muscovy, p.180]
Alexander J. Motyl, Deleting the Holodomor: Ukraine Unmakes Itself, World Affairs, Vol. 173, No. 3 (September/October 2010), pp. 25-33
“The first thing Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich did after his February 25 inauguration was delete the link to the Holodomor on the president’s official Web site. Yanukovich’s predecessor, Viktor Yushchenko, had made the Holodomor–the famine of 1932-33 produced by Joseph Stalin and responsible for the deaths of millions of Ukrainian peasants–into a national issue, promoting what Czech novelist Milan Kundera famously called “the struggle of memory over forgetting” as part of his attempt to move the country toward democracy.” [p.25]
“[T]he Holodomor’s “murder by starvation” remains the single greatest catastrophe endured by Ukraine during Soviet rule. Any attempt to reconstruct a national Ukrainian narrative must take a stand on a trauma of such proportions–especially since all Soviet historians, propagandists, and officials assiduously ignored the famine or dismissed it as an emigre delusion for decades.”[p.27]
Timothy Snyder, Integration and Disintegration: Europe, Ukraine, and the World, Slavic Review, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Winter 2015), pp. 695-707
“The aspirations of Ukrainians in 2013 and 2014, and in particular the desire for an association agreement with the EU, now come into clearer focus. The Yanukovych regime had the support of much of the population when its policy was to sign the association agreement and lost it when it yielded to Russian pressure not to sign. Citizens of Ukraine, perhaps more than anyone else, were in a position to appreciate the logic of European integration in its latest form. Ukraine has been near the center of several of the major integrative and disintegrative projects of the European twentieth century. It did not become a nation-state, despite a serious military effort, after World War I; instead, most of the lands of today’s Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union. It was the major German European colony of World War I and was meant to be the major German colony in World War II. No country was shaped more by the accumulating effect of the Nazi and Soviet projects of transformation.” [p.702]
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