Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability. By Michael Kimmage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. 296p.

Abstract

In Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability, Michael Kimmage (2024) asks how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine came to be. He focuses to a large extent on US-Russian relations between 2008 and 2022 and the key part that Ukraine has played herein, but also includes analyses of political and economic developments in Europe and China. The book consists of three parts: Open Questions (chapters 1-3, which primarily tackle US-Russian relations between 2008 and 2013 and the presidencies of Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev), Parting Ways (chapters 4-6: the Putin, Obama, and Trump years, 2013-2021) and Collision (chapters 7-9: the Zelensky and Biden years and the full-scale invasion, 2021-2023).