Background

History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea - is out today! It begins and ends with Russian troops on the border of Ukraine and examines how autocrats manipulate history to stay in power, and in Putin's case, start wars.

Worth remembering

Putin views Ukraine’s ambition to leave his sphere of influence as both a strategic loss and a personal and national humiliation. In his speech on Monday, Putin literally said Ukraine has no claim to independence, but is instead an integral part of Russia — its people are “connected with us by blood, family ties.” Which is why Putin’s onslaught against Ukraine’s freely elected government feels like the geopolitical equivalent of a Disgrace.

Ukraine was right in the center of the violent chaos following the Russian Revolution 1917. After declaring independence the Ukrainian People's Republic was invaded multiple times as the Russian Civil War, the Polish-Soviet War, the Ukrainian-Polish War and the Soviet-Ukrainian War all raged across the country. The Communist victory in the Russian Civil War meant that the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became a founding member of the USSR.

David Remnick and the historian Steve Kotkin discuss Vladimir Putin and how authoritarian regimes are pushed into misguided foreign wars.

How did the two countries, once tied together by the Soviet Union, get to this point?

Russia has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on the orders of Russian president Vladimir Putin. To make sense of the current conflict we must understand the history of the relationship between the two inextricably linked countries, which dates to at least the 9th century

Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

Russia–Ukraine relations

Stephen #Kotkin is a professor of history at Princeton and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of nine works of history, including the first two volumes of his planned three-volume history of Russian power and Joseph Stalin, Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 and Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941.