The Russo-Ukrainian War by Serhii Plokhy review — the myths and madness behind Putin’s invasion
This year, I spent some time in the ruined city centre of Bakhmut, just a few hundred metres from the Russian army, listening to artillery go off all around me while I darted between burnt-out vehicles and shell craters trying to find a place to tweet. It struck me then that this was the last 12 months of the war in miniature: the return of 20th-century industrial conflict to 21st-century Europe — brutality and atavism in equal measure.
How we got here is the question that Serhii Plokhy, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, tries to answer in his important and magisterial book The Russo-Ukrainian War. He finds the answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, in a longue durée approach to things. As he tells us, wryly rephrasing Churchill, “Historians are the worst interpreters of current events except everyone else.”
The book opens with Plokhy in Vienna at the start of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. He could scarcely believe it. In the preceding weeks he watched Russian troops massing on the border and concluded it was a ploy. “I believed that the troop movement was part of Russian blackmail,” he writes. “My colleague argued that it could be for real.”
It was an egregious error, but one made by so many who had spent years reporting on, writing about and analysing Russia — including me — and we made it because, quite simply, Putin’s invasion made no sense, militarily or politically. It still doesn’t. But, mea culpa, I now understand that, equally simply, we underestimated the ability of madness and hubris to move history.
Or perhaps more correctly, we didn’t fully internalise the lessons of that history, and the madness and hubris that it created in the Kremlin. And this is what Plokhy does so magnificently. He sees “the roots of the current war . . . in the history of imperial collapse in the 19th and 20th centuries, which also produced the key ideas that have fuelled the current conflict”.
