When Russia occupied Crimea and parts of the Donbas in early 2014, Ukraine was a neutral state. Despite this neutrality, Russia violated numerous international agree­ments, including the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, the Budapest Memoran­dum, and the 1997 Treaty on Friendship with Ukraine, which explicitly recognized Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Exploiting Ukraine’s non-membership in NATO, Mos­cow launched a war unseen in Europe since the Second World War. Russia’s focus on NATO is not just misleading—it serves as a strategic distrac­tion from its revisionist aims: challenging the post-Cold War order and dismantling Ukraine as a sovereign nation. Central to the latter is Ukrainophobia, a deeply rooted ideological hostility towards Ukraine, embedded in Russian geopolitical chauvinism. This collected volume explores the socio-cultural foundations and political mani­festations of contemporary anti-Ukrainian sentiment within the Russian state and society. The volume’s contributors are Boris Bondarev, Dmitry Dubrovskiy, Yuri Dzhibladze, Alexander Etkind, Andreas Heinemann-Grüder, Andrey Kalikh, Martin Kragh, Sergei Lebedev, Alexey Levinson, Anton Shekhovtsov, Andreas Umland, and Andrew Wilson.



This edited volume examines the ideological roots of Russia’s war against Ukraine, challenging claims that NATO expansion caused the conflict.



Dr. Anton Shekhovtsov is Visiting Professor at the Department of International Relations of the Central European University, Associated Researcher at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna, and Director of the Centre for Democratic Integrity in Vienna. He holds a PhD from University College London (UCL) and is the author of New Radical Right-Wing Parties in European Democracies (ibidem 2011), Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir (Routledge 2017), and Russian Political Warfare (ibidem 2023). Shekhovtsov has also published numerous op-eds in international media including EUobserver, Die Zeit, Le Monde, Prospect, Dagens Nyheter, and El Mundo, as well as academic articles in, among others, Journal of Democracy, Russian Politics and Law, Europe-Asia Studies, Nationalities Papers, Patterns of Prejudice, The Russian Review, and Osteuropa.