What I Learned from Reading Sergii Plokhy's The Russo-Ukrainian War

A few thoughts after reading Serhii Plosky's latest work of contemporary history

Photo by Margarita Marushevska on Unsplash

Earlier this week, wearing my hat as co-director of the Fletcher School’s Russia and Eurasia program, I had the good fortune to hear historian Serhii Plokhy discuss his latest book, The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History, which came in May of this year.

If there’s anyone who is qualified to write contemporary history of this sort, it is Plokhy. He is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. He has researched and written widely on a range of topics, but his sweet spot is the intellectual, cultural, and international history of Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on Ukraine. He is the author or co-author of a whole lotta books, including The Origins of the Slavic Nations, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, and Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe. He’s won numerous awards, including the Ballie Gifford Prize, the Lionel Gelber Prize, and the Shevchenko National Prize.

Clocking in at 300 pages, Plokhy’s The Russo-Ukrainian War tells the tale well. He aptly describes the conflict as a “a nineteenth-century war fought with twentieth-century tactics and twenty-first-century weaponry.” Plokhy successfully places the 2022 phase of the Russo-Ukrainian War in historical context. Indeed, the entire first half of this book takes place prior to Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimea. It serves as a pointed rebuke of Vladimir Putin’s potted history of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, as well as any IR scholars who might be sympathetic towards Putin’s framing of the conflict.

Here are my takeaways after reading The Russo-Ukrainian War and listening to Plokhy’s talk:

1. NATO expansion plays, at best, a minor role in causing the war. To be sure, neither Yeltsin nor Putin were thrilled about NATO expanding up to Russia’s borders. The 2008 Bucharest Summit proved to be a disastrous lose-lose outcome for Russia, NATO and Ukraine. Plokhy reminds readers, however, that in 1994 Ukraine was the first country in the Commonwealth of Independent States to join the NATO Partnership for Peace program. This did not stop Russia and Ukraine from signing the 1997 Friendship Treaty, in which Russia recognized Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Between that and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum there should have been no doubt that Russia went back on its own commitments and violated international law in 2014 when it annexed the Crimea. Furthermore, Russia helped to trigger the 20134 Maidan protests — not because of NATO, but because of Ukraine’s desire for closer integration with the European Union.