Since the launch of the full-scale war by Russia on Ukraine in February 2022, there have been a plethora of books attempting to explain the war. Overall, these analyses have fallen on two sides. There are those that vilify the West as the nefarious power behind Ukraine, who ignored Russian pleas and pushed their security architecture up to Russia’s borders, forcing Moscow to act. The other side of the coin investigates Putin and Russia, laying the causes of the war squarely at the Kremlin.

It is the latter avenue that Russia’s War on Ukraine: The Four Roots of Putin’s Invasion takes. As would be expected by a book by Taras Kuzio, it is a forceful and argumentative monograph that analyses the reasons behind the war. The contention that the book is challenging is not to denigrate it; it is a no-holds-barred account of the war that lays the blame solely at the feet of the Kremlin and packs no punches. The authors even have time to take aim at Western academia and the “orientalist paradigm” (p. 2), which led the academy to largely fail to account for Ukraine and concentrate fully on analyzing Russia. Certainly, the academic focus has always been on Russia, and this has led to misreading—and misunderstanding—Ukraine and Russia. The authors are correct to raise this, although it would be better to suggest how academia can rectify such problems.

The book sets out the causes of the war, finding that there are four reasons why the Kremlin launched the full-scale invasion in 2022. Each of the four sections of the book deals with one of the root causes. The first root cause is imperial nationalism and the Kremlin’s continued perception that Ukraine is part of the triune Russian nation of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Kuzio and Wawrzonek rightly contend that the notion of three peoples constituting a single Russian nation has pervaded all governments of modern Russia and has antecedents in the Tsarist and Soviet eras. It is a view shared by the Russian Orthodox Church as well.

After an in-depth analysis of Russian imperialism and the place of Ukraine in this project, the monograph turns to the second point, nostalgia. Having set the scene with imperial nationalism, the nostalgia section delivers a deeper investigation of how imperialism combines with Russian messianism to provide the psyche of modern Russian views on Ukraine’s position with Russia. The Great Patriotic War narrative has been the key story the Kremlin has used to legitimate itself with Russians. This has led to an increasingly militaristic discourse in Russia that paints Ukraine as beset by Nazis, with Russia needing to act as a liberator, as in 1945 against Nazism. This fits into another aspect of this nostalgia, the Russian World, where Russia is a defender of ethnic Russians against a nefarious West with Ukraine little more than a Western satrap.

From there, the next section assesses the divergence between Ukraine and Russia, with one chapter focusing on identity and the next chapter on political systems. Over time, as Ukraine became more confident in its independence, it drifted away from Russia, quite rightly establishing Ukrainian state narrative, symbols, and interpretations of history. Increasingly, this independent stance, particularly the interpretation of Ukrainian history, came up against the Russian narrative and the Russian perspective on the Soviet Union. For Putin, who seemingly perceives himself as a history buff, such interpretations from Ukraine were anathema, and needed to be stamped out. The divergence of political systems to democracy, albeit a weak one in Ukraine on the one hand, and autocracy in Russia on the other, is another root cause of the war.

Yet the reason why is never really spelt out in the book. Kuzio and Wawrzonek argue that Ukraine became a democratic and European country, whereas Russia—and Belarus—remained authoritarian and Soviet. The contention is that Ukrainians “viewed the Russian army as occupiers, not liberators” (p. 289). While this is true of what occurred, it is not explanatory of why this was a root cause of the war. McFaul and Person contended in another work that Ukraine as a democracy was worrying for the Kremlin. In essence, and with a little authorial exaggeration here, the Kremlin claimed Ukrainians were Russians and that Russians cannot do democracy. Thus, a democratic Ukraine was worrying for Putin, highlighting that “Russians” could do democracy. This is the democratic peace argument that a democracy next door to Russia—especially one with strong ties to Russia—could be detrimental to the survival chances of the personalist autocracy in Russia. This argument is implicitly made in the book, but it needed to be made explicit as the reader is left to guess the relevance.

The final section on the international dimension as a root cause of the war is unclear as to why it is specifically a root cause. Much of what appears in this section is a repeat of what was already mentioned in the book. Messianism and imperialism were points mentioned in early sections of the book, and it is unclear why they appear again. The anti-colonialism narrative is not a cause of the war but part of the Kremlin’s narrative after the invasion happened. The next chapter on xenophobia, principally anti-Westernism, is seemingly the fourth root cause of the war. This begs the question why it is included in a section on the international dimension with a chapter on messianism, imperialism, and anti-capitalism, with much of this already covered in the rest of the book. The chapter on xenophobia (chapter 9) could be its own section and chapter 8 done away with.

The final critique of the book is the assertion throughout of a cult of Stalinism in Russia under Putin. While there have been more statues of Stalin recently consecrated in Russia, this is not the same as a cult. Russia has a cult, and it is a cult of Putin. The Russian regime is a personalist autocracy centered on Putin as the cult figure. It is not, as Kuzio and Wawrzonek contend (p. 143), “a Stalinist dictatorship,” with Stalinism “becoming a state ideology.” The argument goes further, arguing that the Putinist system has an imperial ideology, anti-westernism, the leader cult, and efficient repressive tools, but this does not mean that the Putinist system is an “exact reincarnation of Stalinism” (p. 143). Putin has an imperial ideology, sees the West as nefarious, and Russia is a repressive state, but this is not the same as being Stalinist. The authorities do not, as Kuzio and Wawrzonek contend, have “absolute supremacy…over the individual in all matters” (p. 143). The Putinist system is not totalitarian. Rather, it is a personalist autocracy centered on one person, Putin. As such, there is a cult, but it’s a cult of Putin, not Stalin. The Kremlin may use narratives from the Soviet Union and copy certain Stalinist tropes, but it is imitation, rather than any concerted effort to recreate Stalinism in Russia. The Kremlin has been a master over the years of developing narratives to justify the autocracy in Russia, none of them necessarily coherent or linked. Having criticized others for not defining terms (p. 223), Kuzio and Wawrzonek do the same by equating the Putinist system with that of Stalin.

Many of the arguments in the book are walking on old ground that has been addressed by other researchers already. This does not detract from the book. As to be expected from a book written (in part) by Kuzio, it is argumentative, provocative, and beguiling in its argument. The book is an excellent addition to the literature, giving a detailed justification of the war and emphasizing that Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has domestic antecedents in Russia, rather than being a case of Western interference that forced Russia to act. The book is an excellent source for undergraduate and graduate students to better understand the reasons for Putin’s launch of the full-scale war on Ukraine.