Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel are two highly regarded political scientists with expertise on the comparative politics of Eastern Europe. In this timely monograph, the authors provide an in-depth and balanced account of politics in Russia and Ukraine, focusing on the period since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. As the authors argue, the two countries began their post-communist development paths facing similar challenges, and their leaders followed similar (if not identical) strategies. However, as time passed, the Russian and Ukrainian polities moved in different directions. Russia succumbed to rigid authoritarianism, its economy limited by a concentration of wealth and a lack of diversification. By contrast, Ukraine moved into a more pluralistic and democratic direction. This greater openness owed in part to the economic and cultural diversity enjoyed by a country with a vast east–west diameter, bordering central Europe on one side and the mining/industrial centres near Russia on the other side. However, Popova and Shevel argue that Ukraine’s greater propensity for consensual decision making could be seen as early as 1994, when President Leonid Kravchuk stepped down without a fuss after losing an election to his successor Leonid Kuchma.

This work is remarkable for its evenhanded treatment of Russia and Ukraine as two separate, sovereign states. Although Russia and Ukraine were part of the same state for part of their history, Ukraine has its own distinct historical path. One of the reasons why it has been difficult to teach comparative post-Soviet politics is the difficulty finding suitable literature that gives countries such as Ukraine the detailed treatment they deserve, rather than as “add-ons” to books primarily about Russia. Russia and Ukraine is not strictly speaking a textbook; it will be appreciated by readers from the academic community, the policy communities and the general public. However, it will be invaluable as a reading for university courses in European and comparative politics. To non-specialists, Ukraine is often misunderstood; international relations scholars who approach the Russia–Ukraine war often lock their gaze on the aggressor, Russia. Polity Press is to be commended for seeing the contribution that Popova and Shevel’s study could make to our understanding of this part of the world, which is relatively unknown to much of the general public. Russia’s unjustified invasion of Ukraine has revealed just how much is at stake when a prolonged hot war erupts in Europe. And while some works on Russian and post-Soviet politics treat the democratic experiments of the 1990s and early 2000s as little more than a footnote, Popova and Shevel underscore that these periods were highly dynamic, with competing and contradictory trends.

To Russia’s rulers, Ukraine has long been perceived as valuable territory. It has a choice location, stretching from the Carpathian mountains in central Europe to the Black Sea in the south and bordering Russia in the east. Ukraine’s sovereign territory also includes the Crimean peninsula, favoured by vacationers and elites enjoying leisure. In Soviet times, Ukraine was regarded as the most strategically important territory separating the communist Motherland from the capitalist West. For Russian leaders, be they the Bolshevik Vladimir Ilyich Lenin or today’s autocrat Vladimir Putin, Ukraine has been an object of desire—to be possessed. The Ukrainian people, with their self-reliant ways and their habit of speaking their own language, confound leaders who are fixated on the control of territory.

To write a book such as this, which treats Russia and Ukraine as equally worthy of comparison as sovereign states, is a political act. The book’s existence in print demonstrates that the story of Ukrainians’ effort to establish their own historical path will continue to be told. While Russia continues today to threaten Ukraine’s independence, Popova and Shevel show that Ukraine is not trapped within a path-dependent association with Russia. Ukraine’s identity transcends whatever imperial conquests occurred in the past and whatever nonsense that Russian President Vladimir Putin pronounces.

This work reminds us that democracy is not about just elections and voting but also the peaceful process of leadership change, a principle severely tested on January 6, 2020 in the United States. As philosopher Karl Popper wrote: “In a democracy, the rulers—that is to say, the government—can be dismissed by the ruled without bloodshed.”Footnote ¹ Popova and Shevel emphasize that, unlike Russia, Ukraine has had leaders who were willing to step down peacefully after losing elections. Three presidents, Leonid Kravchuk, Viktor Yushchenko and Petro Poroshenko, were defeated in elections and accepted the result. Although Ukraine had very rocky transitions between presidents in 2004 and 2014 (respectively, the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan), so far no president has been able to cling to power by using force against the wishes of its people.

The work will be very helpful to those who want to learn more about the domestic politics within the two countries that are still at war as of 2024. While the authors provide a wealth of information on political processes and power relations within the two countries, the authors could have provided a fuller discussion of economic and particularly social policy, as these two realms provide insight into regime legitimacy. Both countries face governance challenges and legacies of clientelism but have handled them in different ways. Granted, comparing policy would be a difficult endeavour, given that Russia is a federal system (or at least calls itself one), while Ukraine is a unitary state. Still, some attention to government programs and citizen responses to them would have been a welcome addition to this book. One might gently encourage Popova and Shevel to co-write a second book on that subject.