Getting Russia Right
Thomas Graham (Polity Press, Council on Foreign Relations, 2023), 259 pages, acknowledgments, preface, epilogue, notes, index.
After Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there has been no shortage of analysis of why Putin chose to invade and whether it could have been avoided. While Presidents George H.W. Bush and Boris Yelstin spoke of friendship and partnership, events over the last three decades—NATO expansion, Allied intervention in Kosovo, the global war on terrorism, color revolutions in former Soviet states—ultimately shifted the bilateral relationship to a different, and far more adversarial, path. In Getting Russia Right, Graham argues that it didn’t have to be this way.