The political scientist Karl Deutsch once said that a nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past. These two new accounts of the history of relations between Russia and Ukraine, and the nationalist distortions of that history, would seem to bear him out. Vladimir Putin’s historical arguments for the war against Ukraine are widely accepted by his fellow countrymen and women, prompting the Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar to argue, in War and Punishment, that this ‘imperialist’ history is ‘inherently addictive’ and ‘our disease’. But this is not a vice unique to Russians: the Australian historian Mark Edele points out, in Russia’s War Against Ukraine, that Ukrainian governments have also indulged in a ‘clumsy politics of memory’ by celebrating anti-Semitic, anti-Polish, and anti-Russian nationalists.

Nevertheless, in a crowded field, Putin stands out, having steeped himself in nationalist history to an extraordinary degree. When, in February 2022, President Emmanuel Macron flew to Moscow to try to dissuade him from invading Ukraine, he wound up on the receiving end of a five-hour history lecture. In his current book, Zygar, whose All the Kremlin’s Men (2017) was a study of the cohort surrounding the president, tells us that among the circle of associates Putin developed in the 1990s were the Soviet-era historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Valentin Kovalchuk. Soviet historiography stressed that the United States was a remorseless foe of Moscow and that Ukrainians were not a separate nation. The influence of these Cold War history warriors is a continuing one; Putin spent much of the Covid pandemic in isolation in a luxurious country retreat, closeted with one of Kovalchuk’s sons and wallowing in ‘anti-American conspiracy theory’.