What prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine? Is it a part of a wider battle with the West—no matter “West” means nowadays? And the way does Russia battle this battle? Are the technique and techniques novel, or are they rooted within the Soviet and tsarist previous? And maybe most significantly, why did so few of our supposed specialists see this coming? This isn’t an instructional query for worldwide relations theorists. Greater than one million Ukrainian and Russian navy casualties—to not point out the killed, maimed, traumatized, and bereaved civilians—are the worth of Europe’s greatest safety coverage failure for the reason that Nineteen Thirties.
Solutions to those questions will form the world for the approaching years, but they’re contentious. Realist worldwide relations theorists corresponding to John Mearsheimer insist that Russia has no grand design; it’s simply responding to provocations, mainly NATO enlargement. A raft of international coverage bigwigs, corresponding to Sir Tony Brenton, a former British ambassador to Moscow, insist that the battle is proscribed to Ukraine and that Russia has no intention of attacking NATO. Even those that concede that Russia is conducting some sort of offensive in Europe and North America—with a dirty-tricks cocktail together with election interference, drones, sabotage, assassinations, and different mischief—disagree on whether or not this a brand new sort of warfare and what Moscow hopes to realize.
Fortunately for these with time on their arms, a crop of recent books, starting from the tutorial to the extremely private, affords solutions on all fronts. I’ve learn them so that you just don’t need to.
My Russia: What I Noticed Contained in the Kremlin, Jill Dougherty, Lyons Press, 368 pp., $32.95, April 2025
Essentially the most readable is My Russia: What I Noticed Contained in the Kremlin by the veteran CNN correspondent Jill Dougherty, whose profession highlights (or lowlights) embody being kissed—towards her will and to her shock—by Putin. The ebook’s narrative arc begins along with her teenage infatuation with Russia’s language and tradition, and ends with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when she hurriedly left the nation that had been her residence and lodestar for many years. Dougherty’s journalistic memoir options vivid pen-portraits of decision-makers, vignettes from her reporting (crime, terrorism, catastrophe, corruption), and occasional glimpses into her private historical past, all towards the backdrop of the logistical and bureaucratic challenges of working life in Moscow. For these eager to stand up to hurry on Russia’s post-Soviet historical past, she is an attractive information.
Commendably, Dougherty doesn’t rewrite historical past to make herself look sensible. Additionally to her credit score, she has been one of many few veteran Russia correspondents to acknowledge frankly that her fascinated by the nation had been mistaken. Regardless of her revulsion at Russia’s darkish aspect, she genuinely believed within the nation’s future, beloved a lot of what she encountered, and hoped that mild would conquer darkness. However she affords a pithy and unsentimental information to Putin’s conduct and worldview. He’s each arsonist and firefighter, she writes, stoking conflicts in an effort to then supply Russia as “peacekeeper” even because it retains items of the nations concerned. In Putin’s view, the West—that means United States-led alliances of huge industrialized nations—is duplicitous, menacing, however weaker than it appears; Russia was weak, however now it’s robust, and underneath his management, it will possibly triumph. The hallmark of his coverage is resentment on the collapse of the Soviet Union and on the humiliation that adopted. Neurotic insecurity, Dougherty concludes, is ingrained in Russia at present. The unspoken inference is that battle with the West and its pursuit via sub-threshold warfare is baked into the Kremlin’s worldview.
The Chauvinist Risk: Russia’s Struggle and the West’s Response, Sabine Fischer, Polity, 220 pp., $25, January 2026
Equally readable, although much less private, is Sabine Fischer’s polemical The Chauvinist Risk: Russia’s Struggle and the West’s Response. Fischer attracts on feminist concept to depict Russia as a sort of geopolitical wife-beater. Coming from somebody rooted within the scandalously indulgent German mainstream strategy to Russia, her forthright criticism of the Putin regime’s authoritarianism and imperialism is putting. Fischer was an everyday presence on the Kremlin-sponsored Valdai Dialogue Membership—named after the situation of Putin’s non-public dacha—even after Russia’s preliminary invasion of Ukraine in 2014. However her conclusion is apposite and highly effective. Overlook america; it’s Europe that should defend itself, support Ukraine, and defeat Russian imperialism, she argues. If solely extra Germans had stated that earlier.
Critics might discover a tinge of Orientalism in Fischer’s ebook. She begins along with her first go to, to St. Petersburg in January 1992. The view from the airport bus was obscured with heavy sleet: a metaphor, she writes, for Russia’s future. “No person may have foreseen the place they might find yourself.” This strategy dangers exoticizing Russia; we’re solely a step away from Fyodor Tyutchev’s hackneyed warning that “Russia can’t be identified by the thoughts / Nor measured by the frequent mile: / Her standing is exclusive, with out sort – / Russia can solely be believed in,” or Winston Churchill’s dictum that Russia is an unforecastable “riddle, wrapped in a thriller, inside an enigma.”
In truth, for individuals who have been prepared to look and pay attention, the continuity between the previous Soviet Union and the brand new, supposedly democratic Russia was already clear within the early Nineteen Nineties. Bruce Clark, later a distinguished Economist journalist, wrote a blistering ebook revealed in 1995 referred to as An Empire’s New Garments: The Finish of Russia’s Liberal Dream. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, together with different former inmates of the Soviet imperial jail, repeatedly warned the remainder of Europe that Russia’s darkish coronary heart was nonetheless beating. Fischer, like Dougherty, was a part of a journalistic and analytic consensus that for too lengthy ignored such warnings.
Russia In opposition to Ukraine: Russian Political Mythology and the Struggle on Ukrainian Identification, ed. Anton Shekhovtsov, Centre for Democratic Integrity, 117 pp., 2025
A ebook about these failures stays to be written. However the startling and central function Ukraine performs in Russia’s neurotic nationalism is pithily outlined in Russia In opposition to Ukraine: Russian Political Mythology and the Struggle on Ukrainian Identification, edited by Anton Shekhovtsov, a Ukrainian dwelling in Austria, and revealed as a free digital ebook by the Vienna-based Centre for Democratic Integrity. It begins with an essay by Galia Ackerman, the doyenne of French Kremlin-watchers, titled “The Deep Roots of Russian Ukrainophobia.” This highlights the obsessive curiosity proven by Nikolai Patrushev, a detailed Putin confidant, in Ukraine’s supposedly intrinsic Nazism (sure, it is not sensible). The Vienna-based Russian historian Alexander Etkind writes on the meaningless however sinister “Z” image, and the British scholar Andrew Wilson explores the mental origins of Russia’s negation of Ukraine’s existence. These embody the concepts of German thinker Carl Schmitt (these days having fun with a brand new fan base amongst some U.S. conservatives) and the cult-like managerialism of the Soviet-era “methodologists.” Do you know that the Russian nationwide id is a “Hegelian absolute,” outlined by plans on the heart, not realities on the periphery? You do now.
This isn’t simply Ukraine’s drawback. Russia believes it’s at battle with the West, no matter these on the receiving finish might give it some thought. Regardless of escalating assaults on infrastructure, airspace violations, and different stunts, public opinion in most of Europe is ignorant about each the extent of Russia’s hostility and the way in which it’s manifested, with cyberattacks, sabotage, propaganda, subversion, and different techniques.
Reassessing Russia’s Safety Coverage, Nurlan Aliyev, Routledge, 298 pp., $56.99, Might 2025
The paradox right here is that Russia is a lot weaker than the nations it tries to confront—at the least as long as they work collectively. With an economic system roughly the dimensions of Italy’s, Russia is unquestionably at most a nuisance, not a risk, proper? The Warsaw-based scholar Nurlan Aliyev unpacks this properly in his glorious new ebook, Reassessing Russia’s Safety Coverage. Asymmetry fuels Russia’s paranoia: Its rulers see it as a “besieged fortress.” It additionally dictates their response. Russia can not defeat its adversaries in an all-out confrontation. However within the eyes of its rulers, it should battle them, or face defeat at their arms. So Russia makes use of different approaches to catch them off stability, divide and weaken them.
Aliyev outlines the roots of this considering, going again to the gifted tsarist officer Evgeny Messner, who fought for the shedding Whites in Russia’s post-1917 civil battle and ended up in Argentina. The Nazi-sympathizing Messner’s books on “wrestle via riot” made little affect after they have been revealed in exile within the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties. “Guerilla [warfare] and insurgency, unrest and limitless terror, destruction of the foundations and beliefs of societies, and assaults on the consciousness of the inhabitants would be the battlefields,” Aliyev writes of Messner’s “mutiny warfare” prediction, “and the strains between peace and battle will likely be completely blurred.” That feels like a guide for the so-called hybrid warfare Russia is waging on NATO nations proper now.
Non-Army Warfare: A Struggle of Our Time, eds. Oscar Jonsson and Ilmari Kaihko, Routledge, 236 pp., $150, August 2025
A must-read ebook right here is Non-Army Warfare: A Struggle of Our Time, edited by Oscar Jonsson and Ilmari Kaikho, each of the Swedish Defence College. It ranges via the completely different dimensions of nonkinetic warfare, together with the weaponized use of the authorized system (lawfare), exploitation of diaspora ties, and technological competitors. This sort of battle stretches our fascinated by classes corresponding to battle and peace, and combatant and noncombatant. A very thought-provoking essay by Jan Angstrom, additionally of the Swedish Defence College, appears on the that means of defeat and victory on this sphere. It argues that the decisive consider the long term will not be the harm you do to your opponent, however the compromises you make at residence. Put crudely, don’t battle Putinism by Putinizing your personal society.
A lot for techniques. However what about technique? It was once stated that Putin was an efficient opportunist however that his regime lacked each ideology and technique. These contentions look more and more laborious to maintain. Two new books take a look at Russia’s navy and strategic tradition, every highlighting its continuity with the tsarist and Soviet eras. Andrew Monaghan, of the Royal United Providers Institute in London, begins Blitzkrieg and the Russian Artwork of Struggle by lambasting others for his or her lazy and error-strewn strategy. “All through the 2010s, officers and observers persistently misinterpreted Russian concept and observe although a mix of wishful considering, soundbites and buzzwords,” he writes. They ignored, he says, intent, historical past and tradition; conflated grand technique and navy technique; posed the fallacious questions and bought the fallacious solutions.
Blitzkrieg and the Russian Artwork of Struggle, Andrew Monaghan, Manchester College Press, 348 pp., $21.29, July 2025
This critique can be extra highly effective if Monaghan defined particularly which of his rivals he’s criticizing. However he’s proper that Western analysts largely failed to know Russia’s flip in direction of navy aggression (first in Georgia in 2008, then in Ukraine, initially in 2014 after which with the full-blown invasion of 2022). Additionally they wildly overestimated the probability of Russian victory. Some argued—in International Coverage, no much less—that it was pointless even to ship any weapons to Ukraine. Following Russia’s disastrous setbacks at the beginning of the battle, the evaluation flipped to the opposite excessive: Russia’s hidebound, corrupt navy would crumble, revolt, and collapse. The present typical knowledge, that Ukraine is slowly shedding a battle of attrition, is more likely to be equally inaccurate.
Monaghan argues that Russia doesn’t see battle as a purely navy phenomenon however as only one dimension in a “wider sociopolitical battle.” Democracies might outsource protection to their militaries; Russia doesn’t. Russia’s navy considering contains each lightning battle (the Blitzkrieg of the ebook’s title) and, if that fails to realize a fast victory, the exhaustion of the adversary via attrition. Outsiders might even see Russia’s battle in Ukraine, having switched from the primary to the second, as a horrible error. That view may make sense in Western eyes, however it isn’t shared by these making choices in Russia.
Russia’s battle technique, Monaghan notes, simply envisions the battle in Ukraine escalating right into a regional or wider battle. This might contain the full-scale mobilization of Russia’s complete financial and navy sources, one thing not seen since Stalin’s time.
Russian Army Thought: The Evolution of Technique Because the Crimean Struggle, Gudrun Persson, Georgetown College Press, 240 pp. $32.95, November 2025
The most important query stays Russian decision-making. What actually occurs inside that black field within the Kremlin? Right here the Swedish professional Gudrun Persson affords some ideas in her definitive Russian Army Thought: The Evolution of Technique Because the Crimean Struggle. Outsiders have a tendency wrongly to imagine that Russia’s coverage evolves in response to exterior conduct; the parable that Putin’s battle on Ukraine is the required results of NATO enlargement is a chief instance of this. Persson argues that this “action-reaction” paradigm is insufficient to clarify both Soviet or Russian conduct. As an alternative, Russia acts on what it perceives to be its personal pursuits and on its intelligence-based predictions. It mirrors exterior conduct with out essentially understanding it. “Russia at present complains concerning the West, after which does what it perceives the West is doing, utilizing strategies of their very own invention,” she writes.
Like different authors, Persson highlights the asymmetrical considering on the coronary heart Russia’s strategy to worldwide battle and its full-spectrum strategy, with echoes of the Soviet interval: “Nearly each a part of society is more and more seen as a battlefield that spans every thing from nuclear weapons to historical past, tradition and science.”
Don’t really feel daunted by this studying record. Russia’s battle gained’t be over anytime quickly.
