Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States

Political Science professors Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel have written an easy to read and fact filled book that explains how two “brotherly Slavic nations” took radically different paths following the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia went down the road to autocracy, while Ukraine pursued the difficult turn towards the Europe and democracy. If you read only one book about the Russia-Ukraine war, this book by Popova and Shevel should be the one. I invite you to watch as they take us through the strained Ukrainian history with Russia from the Cossacks in the 17th century, the various Ukrainian bids for independence over the centuries, and on through to the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022 and today. You will learn about the re-written history of Ukraine by Putin and the Kremlin and see once and for all that Ukraine has never been an “invented state” or a “gift from Lenin” or anyone else, but has in fact, always had a culture, language and history separate but consistently suppressed…