Putin and Ukraine: from historical roots to intentions and contingencies of the 2022 conflict

This thesis investigates the historical and political roots of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Its central research question is whether the subordination of Ukrainian sovereignty was an explicit, coherent objective of Vladimir Putin's foreign policy from the very outset of his presidency, or whether the resort to force, first in 2014, then in 2022, represented a strategic turn driven by contingent factors, including the failure of the Yanukovych presidency, the shock of Euromaidan, the perception of Western weakness, and the informational closure of an increasingly authoritarian, vertically structured system of power. To address this question, the thesis is structured in two parts. The first (Chapters 1–2) offers a comparative historical account of Russia and Ukraine from Kyivan Rus to the collapse of the Soviet Union, tracing the medieval foundations of both nations, their incorporation into the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, and the cultural, linguistic, and religious dynamics that shaped their relationship over time. This account establishes the historical narrative that Putin later draws on, in far more instrumental form, to deny Ukrainian statehood. The second part (Chapters 3–6) turns to the Putin era. Chapter 3 examines Putin's political ascent and the worldview underpinning his approach to Ukraine. Chapter 4 traces Russo-Ukrainian relations from the 1990s through the Orange Revolution, showing that the grievance narrative around NATO enlargement, later central to the 2022 justification, was already a defining feature of Russian foreign policy discourse in the early 2000s. Chapter 5 examines 2014 as a turning point, arguing that Euromaidan radicalised the confrontation while the annexation of Crimea itself followed a rapid and premeditated logic, conducted under a humanitarian pretext. Chapter 6 follows the escalatory trajectory from 2014 to the 2022 invasion within the wider context of NATO-EU enlargement, and closes by proposing a distinction between a long-settled disposition toward denying Ukrainian sovereignty and a specific, executable plan for realising it by force: while the war's protracted and costly trajectory suggests the latter was far less prepared than often assumed, the evidence indicates that believes and opinions about Ukraine remained remarkably consistent throughout Putin's terms.