Ukraine Crisis

The aftereffects of the February 2014 Uprising in Ukraine are still reverberating around the world. The consequences of the popular rebellion and Russian President Putin's attempt to strangle it remain uncertain. In this book, Andrew Wilson combines a spellbinding, on-the-scene account of the Kiev Uprising with a deeply informed analysis of what precipitated the events, what has developed in subsequent months, and why the story is far from over. Wilson situates Ukraine's February insurgence within Russia's expansionist ambitions throughout the previous decade. He reveals how President Putin's extravagant spending to develop soft power in all parts of Europe was aided by wishful thinking in the EU and American diplomatic inattention, and how Putin's agenda continues to be widely misunderstood in the West. The author then examines events in the wake of the Uprising-the military coup in Crimea, the election of President Petro Poroshenko, the Malaysia Airlines tragedy, rising tensions among all of Russia's neighbors, both friend and foe, and more. Ukraine Crisis provides an important, accurate record of events that unfolded in Ukraine in 2014.It also rings a clear warning that the unresolved problems of the region have implications well beyond Ukrainian borders.

Andrew Wilson is senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and reader in Ukrainian Studies at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, University College London. He has published widely on the politics of Eastern Europe, and his book The Ukrainians is now in its third edition. He lives in Oxford, UK.

"As Andrew Wilson points out in his vivid study of the Ukraine crisis, nobody could have predicted what happened next...This is a lively account of a crisis that poses fundamental challenges for the west and may not be over yet." - Luke Harding in The Guardian "...this excellent account of what led up to the February uprising and the annexing of Crimea, as well as the background to the shooting down of the Malaysian Airlines plane, is timely and scholarly, full of hard-to-contest facts." - Lesley McDowell in The Sunday Herald