I am an award-winning historian, biographer, and political commentator. As a specialist in Soviet history, my books have been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Finnish, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.
The Russo-Ukrainian war is Putin’s war. Putin took the decision to invade Ukraine. He is the one who will decide how far the Russian army penetrates into Ukraine and how and when the war will end.
To understand the war’s causes, course, and consequences, we need to get inside Putin’s head. Philip Short’s is by far the best Putin biography. What impressed me most was Short’s dedication to avoiding stereotypes and telling Putin’s amazing story as truthfully as he could.
'Anyone wanting to learn more about Putin's personality, ideas, power...should read this outstanding biography' Ian Kershaw, author of Personality and Power
This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what is happening in Ukraine today.
Vladimir Putin has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm. He invades his neighbours, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia.
Yet many Russians continue to support him. Despite western sanctions, the majority have been living better than at…
The Ukraine crisis began in 2014 with the popular "Maidan" uprising that toppled the country’s pro-Russian president. Russia’s seizure of the Crimean peninsula was followed by civil war and the takeover by pro-Russian rebels of Eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
Sakwa focuses on the international factors that exacerbated internal splits within Ukraine. Crucially, the crisis might have been avoided altogether if the United States, EU, and NATO had found a way to incorporate Russia into the post-Cold War order in Europe that emerged after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
The unfolding crisis in Ukraine has brought the world to the brink of a new Cold War. As Russia and Ukraine tussle for Crimea and the eastern regions, relations between Putin and the West have reached an all-time low. How did we get here? Richard Sakwa here unpicks the context of conflicted Ukrainian identity and of Russo-Ukrainian relations and traces the path to the recent disturbances through the events which have forced Ukraine, a country internally divided between East and West, to choose between closer union with Europe or its historic ties with Russia. In providing the first full account…
Nicolai Petro uses classical Greek tragedy to analyse the internal Ukrainian divisions that eventually led to war with Russia. As Petro points out, Greek drama was a means of reconciliation as well as entertainment and was designed to foster civic dialogue about the roots of conflict situations and the dangers of disaster for all concerned.
Petro remains hopeful, if not optimistic, that all Ukrainians, freed from malevolent foreign influences, can ameliorate their deep differences about their country’s preferred identity and find a way to co-exist with each other.
The conflict in Ukraine has deep domestic roots. A third of the population, primarily in the East and South, regards its own Russian cultural identity as entirely compatible with a Ukrainian civic identity. The state's reluctance to recognize this ethnos as a legitimate part of the modern Ukrainian nation, has created a tragic cycle that entangles Ukrainian politics.
The Tragedy of Ukraine argues that in order to untangle the conflict within the Ukraine, it must be addressed on an emotional, as well as institutional level. It draws on Richard Ned Lebow's 'tragic vision of politics' and on classical Greek tragedy…
Political scientists Arel and Driscoll deal with the period between the Maidan revolt of 2014 and the 2022 invasion.
They point out that the Maidan events provoked a three-way split in Ukraine between pro-Western Ukrainians, pro-Russia Ukrainians, and those in the middle who wanted neither to join the Russian Federation nor to distance themselves from it. Most of these neutrals remained loyal to the Ukrainian nationalist government in Kyiv and continued to do so after the Russian invasion in February 2022.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has its roots in the events of 2013-2014. Russia cynically termed the seditionist conflict in Crimea and Eastern Donbas a 'civil war' in order to claim non-involvement. This flies in the face of evidence, but the authors argue that the social science literature on civil wars can be used help understand why no political solution was found between 2015 and 2022. The book explains how Russia, after seizing Crimea, was reacting to events it could not control and sent troops only to areas of Ukraine where it knew it would face little resistance…
Plokhy is a renowned Ukrainian-American historian who makes no secret of where his sympathies lie. His partisan, pro-Ukraine narrative of the war and its origins is vigorous and informative.
Of particular value is his highly illuminating account of the triangular relationship between Russia, Ukraine, and the United States in the run-up to the war.
Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war-and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated.
Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, course, and the already apparent and possible future consequences. Though the current war began eight years before the all-out assault-on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament-the…
Some reviewers took exception to my portrayal of Stalin as a serious intellectual as well as a brutal dictator, an idealist as well as a ruthless practitioner of realpolitik. But most reviews were very positive, including those by such august publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and The Spectator.
I have been to, and loved, North, Central, and especially East Africa for over fifty years. Only six times have I been to Africa on holiday; more often, perhaps twenty or more times, as a television producer. Working in Africa gains a perspective of reality that the glories of vacation do not. Each has its place, each its pitfalls like stalled plane rides with emergency landings in the bush or attacks by wildlife. But, in the end, the magic of the “otherness,” what an old friend called “primitava” captures one’s soul and changes your life.
Keen to rekindle their love of East African wildlife adventures after years of filming, extreme dangers, and rescues, producer Pero Baltazar, safari guide Mbuno Waliangulu, and Nancy Breiton, camerawoman, undertake a filming walking adventure north of Lake Rudolf, crossing from Kenya into Ethiopia along the Omo River, following a herd of elephant making their annual migration.
Stumbling onto an elephant poaching, the team become embroiled in true financing of terrorism for al Shabaab –ivory sales–and are determined to stop the slaughter at any cost. Ivory trade financing terrorism involves UN refugee camps with two hundred thousand displaced Somali persons, powerful…
A documentary team hiking through East Africa collides with a gang of deadly poachers, in this gripping adventure by the author of Kidnapped on Safari.
Years of filming, extreme dangers, and daring rescues have taken their toll on documentary producer Pero Baltazar and his team. To relax and reconnect with the East African wildlife they love, Pero organizes a walking safari for him, his camerawoman Nancy Breiton, and their elite guide Mbuno Waliangulu. Still, Pero has trouble truly disconnecting from work. When the team comes across a herd of elephants making their annual migration north of Lake Rudolf, Pero decides…
