Episode 5 – US-Russian Relations and the War against Ukraine

During his election campaign, Donald J. Trump promised to end Russia’s war against Ukraine within 24 hours. Ever since, pundits and scholars have debated the success rate of such an endeavor and, more generally, the implications of Trump 2.0 for Ukraine’s future. Yet to assess such scenarios, it is necessary to look back at the path that led Russia to war and how its relations with both the US, Ukraine, and the EU evolved in the past decades. This episode looks at this complicated history with Professor Michael Kimmage whose book Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability was published in 2024 to critical and scholarly acclaim.The read that Putin has of the U.S. is less Trump focused in 2019, 2020, 2021, when he is making the decision about the invasion. I think it's more about polarization in the U.S., that the U.S. is just not working very well. It's not very cohesive. It doesn't stick by its decisions: it invades Afghanistan and then it withdraws, and it invades Iraq and doesn't achieve its mission. Contempt - that's the word I would use about Putin and the United States: contempt. It's not fear of the United States, it's contempt that he has. – Michael KimmageMichael Kimmage has a truly transatlantic perspective on US-Russian relations: with a doctorate from Harvard and Bachelor degrees from both Oberlin College and Oxford University, he has spent several years teaching and doing research in Europe, for instance at LMU and Vilnius University. He was a professor of history at the Catholic University of America from 2005 until the end of 2024, and he will now start as the director of Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute. From 2014 until 2017, he served in the US State Department. He has written several books and his analysis is frequently published in, among many, Foreign Affairs.And here are Michael Kimmage’s reading recommendations:Margaret MacMillan: Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the WorldRichard Pipes: The Russian Revolution (also available in German)Serhii Plokhy: The Russo-Ukrainian War and The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine