Hubris: The Origins of Russia's War Against Ukraine by Jonathan Haslam, Bloomsbury
2025. 368 pp RRP: paperback £10.99; hardback £27.99; eBook £8.79.
The war in Ukraine started in February 2022 and has been raging for nearly four years.
It is the biggest conflict fought in Europe since World War Two by far. It has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives – both civilians and combatants.
Jonathan Haslam is a widely respected history professor. In his latest, highly acclaimed book he attempts to explain what led to the Russian intervention.
He notes that on 9 February 1990 – at the end of the Cold War – the US Secretary of State, the emollient James Baker, assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO's jurisdiction or forces would "not move one inch eastwards”. Yet in 1999 Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic all joined NATO. It was the first wave of post-Cold War enlargement. NATO itself called it a "historic moment”. And then in 2004 the "big bang" enlargement brought in seven more countries. This included the Baltic states – the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. All this further deepened Russia's sense that it was gradually being isolated and encircled.
Then in 2008 NATO made known plans to accelerate entry for two other ex-Soviet states, Georgia and Ukraine. Plus there was evidence of US involvement in Ukraine's "Maidan Uprising" which began in November 2013 and which saw the toppling of the pro-Russian president Victor Yanukovych. Allegations persist that it was a CIA engineered coup.
In any case the Kremlin retaliated by annexing the breakaway autonomous Crimean republic that had left Ukraine to join the Russian Federation and by, as the author says "fomenting a war in the Donbas region of Ukraine".
Which brings us up to the current day. The Russo-Ukrainian war is not exclusively, or even mainly, about Putin's territorial ambitions. Haslam shows that it is much more complicated than this and that the origins lie on the other side of the Atlantic. It is an interesting perspective and a fascinating read.
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