Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine by Eugene Finkel

Russia's 2022 war in Ukraine is the largest conflict in Europe since World War II, making understanding its origins all the more urgent. Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine is a timely addition to the growing scholarship on the historical roots of the war (including Arel, Kimmage, McGlynn, Plokhy, Shevel, and Popova, among others). Since the start of the war, much scholarship has debated whether it is Putin's war or Russia's war. Drawing on a deep analysis of centuries of Russia–Ukraine relations, the book concludes that it is unquestionably Russia's war—a continuation of Russia's century-long, imperial-nationalist effort to subordinate Ukraine, rather than the result of a specific historical moment or a single leader's ambitions. Across its 300 pages, the book shows how Russian elites and societal groups—including pro-Western liberals from Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky—consistently dismissed Ukrainian sovereignty and cultural identity (77, 84, 162–163). The grim pattern of Russian violence against Ukrainians, vividly shown by Russian troops since 2022, is also hardly new; the author traces similar behavior back at least to Russian soldiers during the occupation of Austro-Hungarian Galicia in World War I (63–64, 236–257).