A review of a new book: “The Russo-Ukraiinan War” by Serhi Plokhy (2023)
On 22 February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine, intending to occupy the country and install a puppet regime in a matter of weeks if not days. This book was written between March 2022 and February 2023, so it covers the holding of Kyiv by the Ukrainians, the recovery of the territory originally occupied by Russia in the north, and the establishment of a kind of stalemate between the two forces in the east and the south. I read the book in August 2023, by which time the Ukrainians had launched a long-awaited counter-offensive which is currently making only gradual and slow progress.Plokhy was brought up in Ukraine and had an academic career there until, in the mid 1990s, he moved to Canada. Since 2007, he has been a professor of history at Harvard University. So he is not entirely neutral – who can be in what he calls “the first ‘good war'” since 1939-45? – but he is immensely knowledgeable and insightful and he has written a really informative and readable analysis that is thoroughly commended.
The first half of the 300 pages of main text (there are almost 60 more pages of notes) provides a very short history of the region followed by an extensive account of the build up to the 2022 invasion. The second half of the book describes the conduct of the war in each of the theatres and reviews the position of all the major actors (including Turkey and China).
This has been a war of surprises: that the Russians did not succeed in taking over Ukraine in short order; that the Ukrainians put up such a quick and effective resistance; that NATO adopted such a unified approach and moved so rapidly to impose unprecedented sanctions on Russia and supply ever-more numerous and sophisticated arms to Ukraine. What now? Plokhy makes no attempt to forecast when or how the war will end.
Instead he asserts: “Russia’s aggression against Ukraine produced a nineteenth-century war fought with twentieth-century tactics and twenty-first-century weaponry.” What does he mean by this? “Its ideological underpinnings came from the visions of territorial expansion that characterized the Russian imperial era; its strategy was borrowed by the Kremlin from Word War II and postwar-era manuals of the Soviet Army; and its key features were not only precision-guided missiles but also intelligence-gathering satellites and cyber warfare used to different degrees by both sides.”
Plokhy is clear that “the Ukrainian nation will emerge from this war more united and certain of its identity than at any other point in its modern history.” Perceptively he suggests that: “China now has the best chance of any country to emerge as a key beneficiary of the current war and the enmity between Russia and the West that the conflict has created.” In his view: “Instead of the multipolar world that Russia was hoping for, the conflict presaged a return to the bipolar world of the Cold War, now centred not on Washington and Moscow but on Washington and Beijing.”