What Caused the Russia-Ukraine War? (And How Will It End?)

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine is the most important development in European politics since the end of the Cold War. Why did Vladimir Putin to go down that route? And how will the war end? Using the latest advances in international relations research, William Spaniel dives deep into the underlying causes of the war. Most media attention focuses on the substantive causes of the conflict: control of Ukrainian separatist regions, Russian territorial ambitions, and natural resource extraction. Missing from this discussion is why Ukraine and Russia could not reach a bargained resolution to those issues and avoid the death and destruction of the invasion. This book explores the most plausible problems with negotiating a settlement and how the war can solve them. In the process, it answers a number of deeper questions about the conflict. Is Vladimir Putin actually popular in Russia? Why has the United States pushed for "conditional" sanctions against Russia that will disappear after the war rather than maximize the punishment Putin suffers? How would a terminally-ill Putin affect the war? And should Ukraine worry that Putin will try this again in the future? William Spaniel is an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Political Science. Previously, he was a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Rochester.