Michael Kimmage is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and a Non-resident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he handled the Ukraine/Russia portfolio. He is the author of The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism and The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy. He writes regularly for Foreign Affairs, the New Republic, and other publications.

• Acknowledgements


• Introduction


• Part I: Open Questions, 2008-2013


• Chapter One: Yes We Can


• Chapter Two: The Allure of a Modern Russia


• Chapter Three: The Dilemma of a Modern Russia


• Part II: Parting Ways, 2013-2021


• Chapter Four: Revolution Comes to Kyiv


• Chapter Five: War in Ukraine, Round 1


• Chapter Six: Russia, Russia, Russia


• Part III: Collision, 2021-2023


• Chapter Seven: The Search for Guardrails


• Chapter Eight: Removing the Guardrails


• Chapter Nine: War in Ukraine, Round 2


• Conclusion


• Notes


• References


• Index

In Collisions, Michael Kimmage, a historian and former State Department official who focused on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, offers a wide-angle, historically informed account of the origins of the current Russia-Ukraine war. Tracing the development of Ukraine and Russia's fractious relationship back to the end of the Cold War, Kimmage takes readers through the central events that led to Vladimir Putin seizing a large portion of Ukraine--the Crimea--in 2014 and, eight years later, initiating arguably the most intensive military conflict of the entire post-World War II era. Kimmage also captures how the current war has amounted to a new age of global instability, transforming multiple great powers and dramatically altering the path of globalization itself.