In Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability, Michael Kimmage (2024) asks how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine came to be. He focuses to a large extent on US–Russian relations between 2008 and 2022 and the key part that Ukraine has played herein, but also includes analyses of political and economic developments in Europe and China. The book consists of three parts: Open Questions (chapters 1–3, which primarily tackle US–Russian relations between 2008 and 2013 and the presidencies of Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev), Parting Ways (chapters 4–6: the Putin, Obama, and Trump years, 2013–2021), and Collision (chapters 7–9: the Zelensky and Biden years and the full-scale invasion, 2021–2023).

The core thesis that Kimmage puts forward is that the Russian–Ukrainian war was by no means inevitable but instead a confluence of four intersecting necessary (but not independently sufficient) causes. The first is Russia’s desire to control Ukraine, which, for centuries, it has seen as its vassal state (or non-state, as the case may be). The second is Ukraine’s precarious situation as an economic and geopolitical power, a precarity, which Putin substantially overestimated in the leadup to the 2022 invasion. The third is the West’s lazy attitude toward Ukraine after 1991 and especially after the Euromaidan revolution of 2014, promising at times too much (full integration with NATO and the EU) but often far too little (e.g., neglecting to comprehensively reform Ukraine’s military capabilities after Euromaidan). And finally, there is Russia’s attitude toward the US, which it never expected to be capable of mounting any kind of resistance to Russian ambitions in Ukraine. The war, in Kimmage’s words, was a “bet on American decline.”

Collisions sets the starting point of Russia’s march to war in 2008, with the rise to power of Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev and the specter of the global financial crisis looming large over Russian-American relations. Neither man, Kimmage notes, had an appetite for confrontation. During his re-election campaign in 2012, Obama was caught on a hot mic telling Medvedev that after the election he would have “more flexibility” on missile defense and other matters, a gaffe for which he was heavily criticized by his Republican rivals; in stark contrast with today’s political realities, Obama was seen as too friendly to Russia and naïve to its geopolitical ambitions.

Kimmage here departs from many other students of modern Russia, who often see Medvedev’s 2008–2012 presidency as a quirk of (now abolished) Russian presidential term limits, forcing Putin to temporarily and symbolically step aside (Jadwiga Rogoża, In Putin’s Shadow: Dmitry Medvedev’s Presidency, 2011). Instead, Kimmage sees the period of Obama’s first term and Medvedev’s time in power as the key to understanding Russia’s war: it was a period of substantial optimism (chapter 1), but also of missed opportunities around democratization and international cooperation (chapters 2 and 3). Medvedev’s presidency was marked with expectations on both sides that Russia would finally let go of its “backwardness” (chapter 2) and face the “allure of modernity” head on. However, Kimmage rejects the notion, popular at the time among some Western scholars, that Russia’s turn toward authoritarianism was “inhibited” (Richard Sakwa, The Crisis of Russian Democracy, 2010) or that it could somehow have been prevented. In chapter 3, he argues convincingly that Medvedev’s time in the Kremlin was not at all a brief repose from Russia’s Putinist trajectory from an injured autocracy with democratic elements to a paranoid dictatorship. After all, Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 in direct response to the latter’s ambition to join NATO (Mark Galeotti, Russia’s Five-Day War: The Invasion of Georgia, August 2008, 2023), and it was Putin, not China’s Hu Jintao or Xi Jinping, who ended up becoming Obama’s biggest geopolitical rival.

Unlike scholars such as Serhii Plokhy (The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union, 2015), who sees Ukraine as a long-standing central node in world politics, Kimmage argues that the country rose to global prominence in 2014, when the Euromaidan revolution drove Russian-Western relations to a head (chapter 4). It is here that the book, which at times (e.g., in chapter 3) acknowledges the complex web of Russian-Ukrainian historical entanglements, shows a modest overestimation of the importance of Russian-American sabre-rattling and an underappreciation of emerging dynamics within Ukraine itself. While it is certainly correct that Russia’s decision-making has long occurred with one eye firmly on Washington (Mary E. Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, 2021), Ukraine has also exerted a substantial degree of influence on the world stage, often driving decision-making rather than being led along by the world’s major powers. Plokhy (The Last Empire, 2015) argues that it was Ukraine, not the US, which held the keys to the Soviet Union’s collapse, and both the 1991 Revolution on Granite and the 2004 Orange Revolution were seminal events in the shaping of post-Cold War Europe (Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: The Story of How a People Became a Nation, 2022).

One of the more profound discussions in the book is the differential interpretation of the 2014 Crimea annexation and the Donbas War by Russia and the West. The latter, Kimmage argues, did everything it could to attempt to restore the pre-2014 status quo, whereas Russia saw these events as a fundamental break with the past. Western leaders from George H. W. Bush to Obama and Angela Merkel believed in democracy as an ideologically neutral pursuit, and therefore that its interruption within Ukraine by Russia could be resolved through skillful diplomatic intervention. This was a gross miscalculation, as Russia’s actions post-Maidan constituted a disposal of the rules of engagement of international politics. Kimmage dismantles the myth of separatist sentiments in Donbas as a driving force behind the declarations of “independence” by the so-called “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, neither of which had anything to do with the will of the people (Quentin Buckholz, “The Dogs That Didn’t Bark: Elite Preferences and the Failure of Separatism in Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk,” Problems of Post-Communism, 1–10, 2017; Nikolai Mitrokhin, “Transfer of Dictatorship: ‘State Building’ in Russia’s ‘People’s Republics’,” Osteuropa, 67(3–4), 2017; Jacob Hauter, Civil War? Interstate War? Hybrid War? Dimensions and Interpretations of the Donbas Conflict in 2014–2020, 2021). Where the Crimea occupation had a clear military strategy behind it, the escalation of the Donbas War was the result of a series of ad-hoc decisions by Putin, without ideological considerations beyond the desire to prevent the unacceptable, namely a Ukrainian military victory over the Donbas insurgents (Andrew Wilson, “The Donbas in 2014: Explaining Civil Conflict Perhaps, but not Civil War,” Europe-Asia Studies, 68(4), 2016). Putin, Kimmage notes, believed that he had “lost” Ukraine to the Americans and would henceforth do anything to prevent this supposed secession from succeeding.

Less prominent is a discussion about how Russia’s insurgency impacted how Ukrainians felt about themselves and their relationship with Russia and, in turn, how these developments were interpreted by the Russian leadership. A substantial body of research shows that both the Euromaidan revolution and the 2022 invasion served as a catalyst for (civic) Ukrainian national identity (Elizaveta Gaufmann, “World War II 2.0: Digital Memory of Fascism in Russia in the Aftermath of Euromaidan in Ukraine,” Journal of Regional Security, 10(1), 2015; Volodymyr Kulyk, “National Identity in Ukraine: Impact of Euromaidan and the War,” Europe-Asia Studies, 68(4), 2016; Yara Kyrychenko et al., “Social Identity Correlates of Social Media Engagement before and after the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine,” Nature Communications, 15(8127), 2024), and it is likely that Putin and others in the Kremlin fundamentally misunderstood this fact. Instead, they chose to believe that Russian speakers in Ukraine are Ukrainian in name only, and that the Ukrainian nation-state is a long-standing myth.

The final part of Collisions covers the Trump and Biden presidencies and how Putin’s emerging belief in America’s declining presence on the world stage, combined with Volodymyr Zelensky’s election as president of Ukraine and the perceived need to force a “resolution” to the Donbas stalemate, led to the ill-fated decision to invade. It also covers Russia’s substantial failures on the battlefield: its underestimation of Ukraine’s military reforms and the ill-conceived notion that the invading Russian forces would be met with a warm welcome by the locals, as opposed to the fierce resistance they encountered. Here, too, Collisions is sharp in its analysis of Putin’s view of America and its leadership and detailed in its breakdown of the failures of Russian decision-making.

The conclusion to the book points out an uncomfortable truth: that there is no immediate way back to peace in Europe, even if the war reaches an end. And for all the talk about being a nation in decline, the war has allowed America to reassert itself as a dominant military force, in spite of its now near-forgotten failures in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. But let us not forget about Ukraine’s own post-2014 reformation. After all, for all the Western support, it was mostly the Ukrainians themselves who reformed their military, their politics, and even their sense of identity to be able to withstand the Russian onslaught.