The russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, launched by the Kremlin after months of rising tensions, quickly generated a flood of casualties and several million refugees, as well as bringing the senseless destruction of cities and towns. A negotiated peace may yet bring it to an end. But amid the continued bombardment of Ukrainian cities by Russian artillery and the ramping up of Western military aid to Ukraine, the possibility remains that the war will continue. With that, the odds of a wider conflagration involving several nuclear-armed states would shorten alarmingly. While it is not yet clear how the war will unfold, the world stands at the threshold of a troubled new period. What follows is an attempt to sketch out the historical matrix from which the present conflict developed, and to identify the possible scenarios that lie ahead.

The Kremlin bears the responsibility for unleashing this war, and regardless of the outcome will carry a heavy moral burden for the destruction it has already caused. Amid a broad surge of sympathy for Ukraine and condemnation of Putin—briefly expressed in Russia too, by a burst of spontaneous anti-war demonstrations—the drive by the us and its allies to punish and ostracize the current regime has gathered pace. But justifiable outrage and the immediate demands of solidarity with Ukrainians should not be allowed to shut out larger questions of historical responsibility. As the most powerful bloc in a decades-long geopolitical contest over Ukraine, the us and its nato allies necessarily played a role in shaping the context for the invasion, just as inter-imperial rivalries in the Belle Epoque set the stage for the descent into war in August 1914. Any analysis that confines itself to Russia’s actions alone, or that looks no further than the inside of Putin’s head, is at best a one-sided delusion, and at worst wilfully distorts the facts.

A clear understanding requires us to keep in view three interwoven strands of analysis: firstly, Ukraine’s own internal development and priorities since 1991; second, the advance of nato and the eu into the strategic vacuum left in Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War; and third, Russia’s trajectory from post-Soviet decline to national reassertion. The clashes and confluences of these three dynamics produced the broader context in which Russia then committed its act of aggression.

The war of 2022 is at once the expression and the outcome of longer-term dynamics that have placed Ukraine at the centre of rival geopolitical and geo-economic projects: on the one hand a Western-driven tandem of nato and the eu, seeking to extend the us’s strategic dominion and to fold Ukraine into the eu’s liberal capitalist architecture; on the other Russian attempts to re-establish a sphere of influence in its ‘near abroad’. The balance of power—military, economic, ideological—between these two projects has been lopsided, to say the least. For much of the 1990s and 2000s, one of them was able to advance unopposed while the other remained little more than a compensatory fantasy, amid Russia’s post-Soviet disarray. Yet since the mid-2000s, with Russia’s economy revived by natural-resource revenues, these two rival projects have been on a collision course, their fundamental incompatibility increasingly plain.

Since gaining sovereignty in 1991, Ukraine has undergone simultaneous, accelerated processes of state-formation and nation-building, all while attempting to advance its own interests, autonomous of both the West and Russia. But having tried to balance between Russia and the West in the 1990s and early 2000s, it was thereafter faced with a zero-sum choice. Since 2014—after the annexation of Crimea and especially the ongoing war in the Donbas—the confrontation of the two projects has only intensified, producing a kind of tectonic shearing that has reshaped the Ukrainian polity, its leaders tilting the country firmly in a westward direction even as its eastern territories remained mired in a Russian-sponsored separatist conflict. Putin’s invasion of 2022 was designed to shatter this pre-existing political and strategic pattern, to then reshape it to Moscow’s specifications. Yet it may only confirm the underlying historical trend, in which Russia’s post-Soviet neighbours accelerate away from it, producing precisely the fortified ring of pro-Western states Russian policy has spent years trying to forestall.

The consolidation of a fervently pro-Western Ukrainian polity, its stance defined in large measure by the need to resist Russian hostility, is all the more stunning a historical outcome given the country’s plural inheritance and its considerable degree of closeness with Russia. In its territorial composition, culture and demographic profile, the Ukraine that gained independence with the disintegration of the ussr was quite different from, say, the Baltic States, whose territorial outlines had been established after the First World War, and which remained culturally distinct from the rest of the Union. Ukraine’s modern-day boundaries, stretching from the historical heartland of Ukrainian nationalism in the west to that of Soviet industrial modernity in the east—from the Baroque cupolas of Lviv to the Constructivist Palace of Industry in Kharkiv—are the legacy of both imperial and Soviet pasts.footnote¹ It was the Bolsheviks who, in the wake of the Civil War, defined the contours of the Ukrainian ssr in 1922, bringing together Kyiv and the core of medieval Rus’ with steppe lands originally conquered by the Romanov Empire in the eighteenth century and the industrializing Donbas. At the beginning and end of the Second World War, further Ukrainian-speaking provinces in the west that had been Hapsburg and then Polish lands were added. In 1954, Crimea—from 1921 an autonomous unit within the Russian component of the ussr, its entire Crimean Tatar population deported en masse in 1944—was transferred to the Ukrainian ssr.

Early Soviet policies, in line with Leninist principles on self-determination, had encouraged the use of the Ukrainian language and ‘indigenization’ of state structures; the 1920s also brought a literary and cultural flowering, as nationalist networks previously separated by imperial borders received state sanction. But at the end of the decade, Moscow reversed course and adopted a punitive approach; Ukraine’s nationalist intelligentsia was decimated.footnote² Thereafter, though the ruling echelons of Communist Ukraine would be Ukrainians, the room for expression of even a sovietized Ukrainian national identity narrowed considerably. Demographically, while Russian protestations that Ukrainians are their ‘brother people’ have always been both patronizing and self-serving, since tsarist times there has been considerable migration and intermarriage between the two, at all levels of society. If the industrialization of the Ukrainian east involved an influx of Russian-speakers, conversely the colonization of Siberia’s agrarian frontier was to a significant extent carried out by Ukrainian peasants. Anatol Lieven has likened Ukrainians’ role in the Russian empire to that of the Scots rather than the Irish—except that, in the legal and economic domains, it was ‘impossible to tell who were the “colonizers” and who were the “colonized”.’footnote³ In this Ukraine differed from the Central Asian and Caucasian Soviet republics, where something closer to a colonial relationship obtained. Across the ussr, Russian had in most cases been the language of high politics, education and social advancement—the medium of Soviet modernization, as Lieven put itfootnote⁴—and the bilingualism expected of non-Russians was rarely reciprocated. Here, too, Ukraine differed: by the end of the Soviet era most of Ukraine was genuinely bilingual, with Russian the lingua franca or mother tongue in several of the major cities, and people in Kyiv and the central provinces speaking dialects that merged the two.