The Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, subsequent war in Eastern Ukraine, and economic sanctions imposed by the West transformed European politics. The conflict did not escalate to the levels originally feared but nor was either side able to bring it to a definitive conclusion. Ukraine suffered a loss of territory but was not forced into changing its policies away from the Westward course adopted as a result of the EuroMaidan uprising of February 2014. President Putin was left supporting a separatist enclave as Russia's economy suffered significant damage.
Ukraine and the Art of Strategy provides an account of the origins and course of the Russia-Ukraine conflict through the lens of strategy. Lawrence Freedman describes the development of President Putin's anxieties that former Soviet countries were being drawn towards the European Union, the effective pressure he put on President Yanokvych of Ukraine to turn away from the EU, and the resulting 'EuroMaidan Revolution' which led to Yanukovych fleeing. He explores the reluctance of Putin to use Russian forces to do more that consolidate the insurgency in Eastern Ukraine, the failure of the Minsk peace process, and the limits of the international response. Putin's strategic-making is kept in view at all times, including his use of 'information warfare' and attempts to influence the American election.
First published in 1981, Lawrence Freedman's The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy was immediately acclaimed as the standard work on the history of attempts to cope militarily and politically with the terrible destructive power of nuclear weapons. It has now been completely rewritten, drawing on a wide range of new research, and updated to take account of the period following the end of the cold war, and covering all nuclear powers.
In 1912, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, wrote a short story about a war fought from underwater submersibles that included the sinking of passenger ships. At the time, it was dismissed by the British generals and admirals of the day not because the idea of submarines was technically unfeasible, but because no one could imagine that any nation would be so depraved as to sink civilian merchant shipps. The future of war more often than not surprises us less because of some fantastic technical or engineering dimension but because of some human, political, or moral threshold that we had never imagined wanting to cross. As Lawrence Freedman shows, the future of war has a past and a present. Ideas of war, strategies for warfare and its practice, and organizing principles of war all have rich and varied origins which have shaped the minds of those who conceive the next war. Freedman shows how war can be studied systematically and empirically to provide a firm foundation for enlightened policy. The Future of War-which covers civil wars to as yet unknown nuclear conflicts, proxy wars (real) to the Cold War (not), fashionably small wars to the War to End All Wars (it didn't)-is filled with insight and fascinating nuggets of military history and culture from one of the most brilliant military and strategic historians of his generation.
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