Review: Ukraine's Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022, by Dominique Arel and Jesses Driscoll, and The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution, by Nicolai N. Petro. De Gruyter

Both these books deal with the prelude to the Russia-Ukraine war. Their authors employ different approaches and styles of political science analysis, but reach broadly the same conclusion: the key to understanding the current conflagration is not geopolitics, but the longstanding clash between competing Ukrainian national-political identities—a clash that took a violent turn during the Maidan protests of 2014 and then developed into a civil war situation—a domestic conflict that was intensified by Russian and Western interference and then internationalised by Putin's invasion of the country in February 2022.