Podcast: Putin’s War on Ukraine

New book interview with Samuel Ramani

Listen to my interview with Samuel Ramani for New Books in European Politics about Putin’s War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution (Hurst, 2023) on Apple or Spotify.

The past 14 months have done for Kremlinologists what the financial crisis did for economists.

Even as Vladimir Putin massed close to 200,000 troops on Ukraine's border in February 2022, “Russia hands" assured us it was a bluff. He'll probably do nothing, many said. But, if he does anything, he'll just advance to the Donetsk and Luhansk administrative borders. Any attempt to take Kyiv and western Ukraine could only end in failure and Putin's too clever for that, they said. Well, he wasn't. And, while the war is far from over, “Russia has strategically lost already”. So, why did he do it?

The two favourite explanations from strategic analysts - that Russia felt besieged by NATO's eastern expansion and Putin himself felt threatened by internal challengers - are mistaken, says Samuel Ramani. "The primary motivation for Putin's invasion of Ukraine was to overturn the 2014 Euro-Maidan revolution and its outcomes," he writes. "Putin's counterrevolutionary agenda stemmed from his desire to reassert Russia's hegemony over Ukraine and promote his brand of illiberalism within the post-Soviet space".

A tutor in politics and international relations at Oxford and an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, Samuel Ramani works at the intersection between Russian domestic politics, national identity and foreign policy-making. A frequent contributor to Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, Newsweek, the BBC, and CNN, Dr Ramani is a Twitter favourite.

For my Writer's Writers reading list, he chose Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia by Timothy Frye (Princeton University Press, 2021) and How to Fight a War by Mike Martin (Hurst, 2023).