Every week brings grim and dramatic news from the war in Ukraine: Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilian convoys; Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons; captured towns liberated by Ukrainian forces; young Russian men fleeing the draft. Yet it is no accident that Europe’s most destructive conflict since the second world war is taking place on Ukrainian soil. After the cold war, most of central and eastern Europe, including the three Baltic states that had broken free from the Soviet Union, were brought into Nato and the EU. But Ukraine remained a place of uncertain allegiance, neither in western alliance structures, nor aligned with Moscow, nor officially neutral.
In Russia, a truculent, grievance-filled nationalism under Putin and an authoritarian style of rule contrasted with a lively, if imperfect democracy in Ukraine and a society learning to be proud of its national culture and statehood. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea and military intervention in Donbas in 2014, Ukraine’s leaders came with increasing determination to see their country’s future in the western family of nations. For its part, the Kremlin and its ultranationalist supporters viewed such aspirations as a US-inspired plot to degrade Russia’s identity, interests and prestige, bringing closer a showdown between Russian and western civilisation.