Your book charts the current war, and the ways in which it’s informed by the past. How did the origin stories Russia tells about itself feed into this conflict?
History is written all over this war, starting with the way it was justified by Russian president, Vladimir Putin. In summer 2021, he published his article ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, pushing an argument that goes way back to the Kyivan Rus’ [the Slavic state that dominated north-eastern Europe from the 10th century, with its capital in Kyiv, and from which both Russia and Ukraine claim descent]. So when I was writing my book, it was important for me to start
