Angela Borozna’s The Sources of Russian Foreign Policy Assertiveness is an ambitious book that contains some strengths but many more weaknesses. Its main strength is its third chapter, entitled “Change and Continuity in Russian Strategic Culture,” which outlines seven of the “persistent” components of that culture such as the pursuit of great power status as well as four “new” ones such as information warfare. Borozna’s list of components is comprehensive and astute, covering what are very plausible means, ends, or determinants of Russia’s international behavior over the centuries.

However, Ch. 4, entitled “From Embracing the West to Mistrust (1991–2007),” quickly reveals this book’s fatal flaws. Borozna identifies NATO expansion, the Kosovo War, the US’s abrogation of the ABM Treaty, the Iraq War, and western support for the Color Revolutions as the sources of worsening relations between Russia and the west. As is obvious from this list, she displays great sympathy for Russia’s stated security concerns and no sympathy for (or even discussion of) those of any NATO or even other post-communist state. Chapter 5, entitled “Resurgent Russia (2008–2021),” extends the author’s criticisms to a new set of western policies: US plans to build missile defense installations in east central Europe, its development of offensive nuclear weaponry, the Arab Spring and “US support for ‘moderate rebels’ striving to overthrow ‘dictators’” (terms that should not require scare quotes), American military activities in Georgia, and the EU’s offer of an Association Agreement to Ukraine. Like the previous chapter, this one is very cavalier in its attribution of causality. In addition, it continues the author’s practice of reflexively treating any Russian complaint about western policy as an expression of authentic concern over a genuine security threat without providing any corresponding discussion of the military forces actually deployed by either side.

The section of Ch. 5 in which Borozna’s analyses most explicitly reflect the Russian state’s positions concerns the lead-up to and aftermath of Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity (a term that appears only once with small letters and quotation marks and is oddly attributed to western analysts and not to Ukrainians themselves). First, Borozna explains President Viktor Yanukovych’s reversal on signing the Association Agreement in November 2013 as the product of Russian “carrots” (in the form of loans and the sale of natural gas at subsidized prices) and fails to mention the various “sticks” (in the form of enhanced customs inspections and embargoes on imports) that Moscow had previously wielded (128). Second, Borozna accepts the Kremlin’s view that the deaths due to sniper fire on the Maidan in February 2014 resulted from a false flag operation conducted by far-right Ukrainian political forces (128). No evidence is provided in support of this interpretation, just a reference to a conference paper. Third and most egregiously, she portrays Russia’s annexation of Crimea primarily as the manifestation of grassroots anger and a procedurally sound popular referendum instead of the methodical military operation directed by Russia’s president that it in fact was (129–30).

The absurdity of such an interpretation could be demonstrated in many ways, but I will mention only two. First, just hours after the Ukrainian parliament voted to remove Yanukovych from office, Vladimir Putin convened an all-night meeting with four top security officials that concluded, as Putin himself recounts in the Kremlin-produced documentary “Crimea: The Way Home,” with the president informing his subordinates that “the latest developments in Ukraine force us to begin working on returning Crimea to Russia.” Second, the militia leader who carried out the armed takeover of the Crimean parliament just days later, Igor Girkin, reported the following on a television talk show: “I was in [the capital of Crimea] beginning on February 21.…unfortunately, I didn’t see any support from any organ of governmental power….It didn’t exist. The Crimean deputies were rounded up by our militias in order to corral them in the hall and make them [vote for the resolution to join Russia].”

To state the obvious, in 2014 the Russian Federation violated the territorial integrity of another sovereign state by means of military force, de jure expanded its borders, and started what has become the largest and most deadly war in Europe since 1945. In Borozna’s telling, however, Russia’s actions in Ukraine are blameless and both Washington and Kyiv are the malevolent actors (129 and 135–36). All of this has a very familiar echo in American politics at the moment. After calling Volodymyr Zelensky “a dictator without elections” in February of this year, Donald Trump proceeded to blame Ukraine for having “started” the war, to which Ukraine’s president responded by asserting that Trump “lives in [a Russian] disinformation space” and that he wished that “Trump’s team had more truth. Because none of this is having a positive effect on Ukraine.” Like so many of the members of the Trump administration, the author of The Sources of Russia’s Foreign Policy Assertiveness lives in a world substantially informed by Russian disinformation. And like President Zelensky, I too wish that this book had more truth because the main victims in post-communist Eurasia are Ukrainians—not Russians, as Borozna would have us believe.

Notwithstanding the many grievously mistaken interpretations that this book advances, a question worth asking is this: If we were to assume that the facts and interpretations undergirding its narrative are accurate, then would it represent a successful work of social science? That is, does this book achieve its central goal of providing a basis to improve the west’s (allegedly) poor track record of anticipating Moscow’s reactions to western policies by “bringing strategic culture into the analysis of foreign policy formation” (3–4)? In my view, the answer to that question is “no” due to the fact that the components of “Russian strategic culture” laid out in Ch. 3 are not utilized in any substantive manner in the book’s subsequent empirical chapters.

In conclusion, scholars always have an obligation to advance accurate understandings of empirical reality and, when needed, to combat lies and deceptions, but at a moment like the present—when the Russian Federation is pursuing the wholesale erasure of Ukrainian national identity through what Rory Finnin aptly calls a “genocidal war”—that obligation is heightened. Given all that is at stake, it might be beneficial for the editors at Palgrave Macmillan to look into why their review process failed to detect the extent to which Borozna’s analyses are divorced from reality. My recommendation to the readers of Slavic Review is that they peruse The Sources of Russia’s Foreign Policy Assertiveness only as an example of successful information warfare on the part of Moscow (ironically, one of the very components of Russian strategic culture that Borozna herself lists). Conversely, anyone interested in acquiring an accurate understanding of the sources of foreign policy under Putin should not waste their time reading this book.