It’s an achievement for Adrian Karatnycky to analyse over three decades of Ukrainian independence and six presidents in 306 pages. Part analysis and part memoir, the author showcases his long-term connection to Ukraine. 

The author writes that Ukraine has experienced competition between Ukrainian and pro-Russian identities, with the former grounded in a Ukrainian ethno-cultural core while the latter viewed Ukrainians as part of a pan-Russian people. Karatnycky provides a good understanding of Russian-Ukrainian relations, with Russia always showing a “troubling ambivalence” and “outright hostility” towards independent Ukraine. Russia launched irridentist claims against Crimea as early as May 1992. From 2012, when Vladimir Putin returned to the Russian presidency with an imperial nationalist agenda, a collision course seemed inevitable with Ukraine’s post-Euromaidan Revolution leaders. Putin’s July 2021 long essay drawing on Alexander Solzhenisyn’s “neo-imperialist views,” which denied the existence of Ukrainians, provided the ideological program for Russia’s full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022.

Ukraine’s first and second presidents Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma are described as poor leaders in comparison to the “great American statesmen” George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. They look better; Washington and Jefferson were both slave owners and presidents of a country where only white, property-owning male protestants could vote.

Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma had little knowledge of economics and Ukrainian history and culture, were suspicious of outsiders, and unclear about whether Ukraine belonged to Russian-led Eurasia or the West. Their economic policies created a rapacious class of oligarchs. The energy sector, meanwhile, was rife with corruption and were a major source of Russian influence in Ukraine. “Kuchma bears moral responsibility” for the murder of journalist Georgi Gongadze in 2020, writes the author, which created the political crisis called “Kuchmagate.” Karatnycky believes the murder, unveiled by recordings made in the president’s office by a security officer, was part of a Russian conspiracy to unseat Kuchma.

The chapter on President Viktor Yushchenko credits him with supporting identity policies which began under his predecessor, Kuchma. Ukrainian language instruction in education increased more under Kuchma than Yushchenko. Describing the Holodomor (murder famine), which killed 4-5 million Ukrainians in 1933 in Joseph Stalin’s USSR, as a genocide began under Kuchma who sent Deputy Minister Dmytro Tabachnyk on the 70th anniversary in 2003 globetrotting to convince world leaders.

Yulia Tymoshenko is described as a firebrand populist for supporting the re-nationalisation of oligarch assets and putting “bandits in jail,” a policy which Yushchenko supported in the Orange Revolution but backed away from after being elected. Karatnycky writes that Yushchenko did not imprison his opponents, but this ignores the fact that it was he who launched the criminal investigation of Tymoshenko in 2009 which culminated in Yanukovych imprisoning her two years later. Yushchenko’s presidency was not a “step forward in Ukraine’s march to Europe” as he didn’t support an orange coalition following the 2006 elections, leading to the cancellation of President George W. Bush’s visit to Ukraine and, with the return of Yanukovych, Ukraine not receiving a MAP (Membership Action Plan) at the Riga summit of NATO in November of that year.

Judging by Karatnycky’s many optimistic op-eds published in 2010-2011, and his chapter on Yanukovych, he bought into the myth of Yanukovych having changed. Karatnycky writes that Yanukovych was not as pro-Russian in the second round of the 2010 elections and made inroads with Ukrainian speaking voters. In fact, Yanukovych won the 2010 elections by a bare three percent majority in only ten Russian speaking regions. From Spring 2010, Yanukovych implemented a range of policies at the behest of Russia that included elevating the Russian language (the Party of Regions did not have a constitutional majority in parliament to change the constitution to make it a state language), describing the 1933 famine as all-Soviet and no longer a genocide against Ukrainians, and extending Russia’s lease of Sevastopol as the Black Sea Fleet base.

Karatnycky is also insufficiently critical of the oligarchs. Donetsk oligarch Rinat Akhmetov’s criminal biography in the 1980s and first half of the 1990s, his involvement in the assassinations of oligarchs Akhat Bragin and Yevhen Shcherban in 1995-1996, and Akhmetov and Yanukovych’s mutually beneficial corrupt alliance from 1996-2014 are ignored. Like Yanukovych, Akhmetov is wrongly portrayed as a new person after the 2010 elections, interested in “macroeconomic stability” and “predictable property relations.” Akhmetov hired leading Washington law firm Akin Gump to threaten Western journalists and academics who wrote about his criminal past; the law firm threatened the University of Toronto Press forcing them to cancel a book contract with this author.

In fact, Akhmetov is one of three people (the other two being Yanukovych’s son Sasha and gas tycoon Dmytro Firtash) who benefitted financially from massive corruption under Yanukovych. Yanukovych failed to introduce a foreign agent’s law like that in Russia, but adopted what was dubbed a “dictatorship law” in January 2014 instead. With two opposition leaders imprisoned (Tymoshenko and Yuriy Lutsenko), it is not the case that the opposition “operated largely unhindered” under Yanukovych.

Petro Poroshenko was elected in May 2014, and came to reject “all things Russian” following the the Euromaidan Revolution and, in response to Russia’s military aggression, has been credited by Karatnycky as building a “patriotic state.” After 2014, Ukraine banned electronic, print, and social media from Russia, initiated de-communisation, adopted legislation enhancing the Ukrainian language in the media and education, increased state support for Ukrainian culture and the arts, and received autocephaly for the Orthodox Church of Ukraine from the Patriarch of Constantinople. Poroshenko also re-built Ukraine’s army. The collapse of pro-Russian political forces enabled the creation of a large pro-Western coalition and the “most reformist tenure” of any president. Nevertheless, punishing officials for corruption was a “policy Poroshenko appeared to resist.”

Poroshenko’s conflict with Igor Kolomoysky opened the door for the rise of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose TV show “Servant of the People” began to air on the oligarch’s TV channel in October 2015. Karatnycky’s two chapters on Zelenskyy are insightful and a good counter to recent books that have idealised him. The first chapter describes a president with no reform program, detached from Ukrainian identity politics, leading an ideologically amorphous Servant of the People party which won a large majority in pre-term elections in 2019, and naïve about Russia and its war against Ukraine in the Donbas. Zelenskyy’s democratic credentials were damaged by his 20 “Frivolous, politically motivated criminal investigations” against Poroshenko, including a charge of treason.

The second chapter is critical of Zelenskyy for ignoring US intelligence warnings from October 2021 of a pending Russian invasion, nepotistic appointments of his friends into strategically important positions, such as Ivan Bakanov as head of the SBU (who lacked qualifications), and not preparing the military for war.

Karatnycky is also critical of the US and Europe who, like the Kremlin, believed Russia would quickly defeat Ukraine and only supplied weapons to fight a guerrilla war. President Joe Biden’s “weakness and resolve” was evident in his lifting of US sanctions on Nord Stream II and chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Western supplies of heavier military equipment were only sent to Ukraine after Russia withdrew from the Kyiv region in late March 2022.

Zelenskyy has excelled in using his media background to lobby Western governments to provide military and economic support. He has been frustrated at the US and Germany for drip feeding military aid out of fear of “escalation,” and at other governments for sending small volumes of equipment from limited stockpiles that had declined since the Cold War had ended. Ukraine is provided with enough military support to not be defeated, but also insufficient to win; in fact, the US has never stated its goal as Russia’s defeat.

A 2nd edition of Karatnycky’s book should no longer use the term “nationalist” to describe centre-right forces in Ukraine; after all, we would not describe Australian Liberals, US Republicans, and European conservatives and Christian Democrats as “nationalists.” Karatnycky has provided a comprehensive and detailed study of three decades of Ukrainian politics which will become a go to book for scholars, journalists, and policymakers. Karatnycky concludes with “The battle for its [Ukraine’s] identity and unity has been won,” though the military campaign is ongoing. Indeed, we will continue to watch this space.

This is a review of Adrian Karatnycky’s Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to The War With Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024). ISBN: 9780300269468

Taras Kuzio is a professor of political science at the National University Kyiv-Mohyla Academy of Kyiv, Ukraine. His books ‘Russian Disinformation and Western Scholarship’ and ‘Fascism and Genocide. Russia’s War Against Ukrainians’ are recently published by Columbia University Press.

This review article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.