The Russia and Eurasia Program at The Fletcher School held a conversation with Oxana Shevel, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at Tufts University, and Maria Popova, Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University, about their new book, Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States (2024). The event marked the two-year anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war.
The book examines the root causes of Russia’s war against Ukraine. It explains how Russia and Ukraine diverged politically beginning in 1991, ending up on a collision course. Russia slid back into authoritarianism and imperialism, while Ukraine consolidated a competitive political system and pro-European identity. As Ukraine built a democratic nation-state, Russia refused to accept it and came to see it as an “anti-Russia” project. After political and economic pressure proved ineffective and even counterproductive, Putin went to war to force Ukraine back into the fold of the “Russian world.” Ukraine resisted, determined to pursue European integration as a sovereign state. These irreconcilable goals, rather than geopolitical wrangling between Russia and the West over NATO expansion, are - the authors argue - essential to understanding Russia’s war on Ukraine.
7 окт 2024
