Bøger af Taras Kuzio

The 2014 Russia-Ukraine conflict has transformed relations between Russia and the West into what many are calling a new cold war. The West has slowly come to understand that Russia's annexations and interventions, interference in elections, cyber warfare, disinformation, assassinations in Europe and support for anti-EU populists emerge from Vladimir Putin's belief that Russia is at war with the West.This book shows that the crisis has deep roots in Russia's inability to come to terms with an independent Ukrainian state, Moscow's view of the Orange and Euromaidan revolutions as Western conspiracies and, finally, its inability to understand that most Russian-speaking Ukrainians do not want to rejoin Russia. In Moscow's eyes, Ukraine is central to rebuilding a sphere of influence within the former Soviet space and to re-establishing Russia as a great power. The book shows that the wide range of 'hybrid' tactics that Russia has deployed show continuity with the actions of the Soviet-era security services.

The West has woken up to the uncomfortable fact that Russia has long believed it is at war with them, the most egregious example of which is Vladimir Putin's hacking of the US elections. For Western governments, used to believing in the post-Cold War peace dividend, it came as a shock to find the liberal international order is under threat from an aggressive Russia. The 'End of History - loudly proclaimed in 1991 - has been replaced by the 'Return of History.' Putin's War Against Ukraine came three years earlier when he launched an unprovoked war in the Donbas and annexed the Crimea. Putin's war against Ukraine has killed over 30, 000 civilians, Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and Russian proxies, forced a third of the population of the Donbas to flee, illegally nationalised Ukrainian state and private entities in the Crimea and the Donbas, destroyed huge areas of the infrastructure and economy of the Donbas, and created a black hole of crime and soft security threats to Europe. Putin's War Against Ukraine is the first book to focus on national identity as the root of the crisis through Russia's long-term refusal to view Ukrainians as a separate people and an unwillingness to recognise the sovereignty and borders of independent Ukraine. Written by Taras Kuzio, a leading authority on contemporary Ukraine, the book is a product of extensive fieldwork in Russian speaking eastern and southern Ukraine and the front lines of the Donbas combat zone. Putin's War Against Ukraine debunks myths surrounding the conflict and provides an incisive analysis for scholars, policy makers, and journalists as to why Vladimir Putin is at war with the West and Ukraine.

Western academics, experts, and journalists specializing in Eastern Europe, Russia and Eurasia have grappled with two fundamental analytical crises in connection with the 1991 disintegration of the USSR and Russiäs 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Both crises were brought about by a similar lack of understanding of Moscow¿s inability to view its neighbors, in particular Ukraine, as not possessing sovereignty and not treating them as independent states. Typically, they downplayed the historic and current role of Russian imperialism and nationalism.The book¿s contributors investigate how the Kremlin¿s recent turbo-charging of Russiäs information warfare, 24-hour TV, and social media activity has expanded on traditional pro-Russian sentiments among Western academics, experts, and journalists. The authors analyze the downplaying of Russian nationalism, misinterpretations of the 2014 crisis, sympathetic portrayals of Crimeäs occupation, and the use of the term ¿civil war¿ rather than ¿Russian-Ukrainian war¿ for the Donbas conflict in academia as well as the think tank world and media in the UK, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Japan, USA, and Canada.

A definitive contemporary political, economic, and cultural history from a leading international expert, this is the first single-volume work to survey and analyze Soviet and post-Soviet Ukrainian history since 1953 as the basis for understanding the nation today.

Ukraine played a key role in the dissolution of the former USSR, and its continued independence will have a decisive impact upon the transformation of Russia itself into either a new empire or Western democracy.

Ukraine under Kuchma is the first survey of recent developments in post-soviet Ukraine.

Exploring the post-Communist transition that has taken place in the Ukraine, this text covers: nation and state building; national identity and regionalism; politics and civil society; economic transition; and security policy.

This book explores the transformation of Soviet Ukraine into an independent state. It finds that state building is an integral part of the transition process, as much as democratization and the establishment of a market economy.

How has the Ukrainian state sought to build national identity over the past decade, and with what results? What obstructing cleavages exist, and what sorts of national identity might provide a solid foundation for building an overarching Ukrainian national identity?