The Russo-Ukrainian War

"Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, books have gradually been coming out about the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II. The Russo-Ukrainian War is by Serhii Plokhy, a Ukrainian historian at Harvard who looks to history to understand the conflict, seeing it as an “old-fashioned imperial war” with its roots in the 19th and 20th centuries. As he notes in the preface, “I take a longue durée approach to understanding the current war. I decline the temptation to identify the date of February, 2022, as its beginning, no matter the shock and drama of the all-out Russian assault on Ukraine, for the simple reason that the war began eight years earlier, on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament.” Also out recently is The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia by Jade McGlynn, a researcher at King’s College London, who looks at how the Russian propaganda machine weaponizes history to achieve its ends. This is a fascinating work of research, more academic in tone (it cites references in the text). It makes you think not only about Russia, but how every government wanting to solidify its power uses history to its own ends and what that means. If you like spy books, there’s a new history of the intelligence war between Russia and the West (but very much focused on understanding the current conflict): Spies by Calder Walton. On war in general, there’s a new volume on a subject that’s always popular on Five Books : military strategy . The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age is a collection of essays from a variety of leading scholars in the field, edited by Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins SAIS. Also out are new books on the West’s devastating exit from Afghanistan . August in Kabul by journalist Andrew Quilty tells the story by someone who was there (and indeed flew back to Kabul just as those who could were fleeing)."