Do all great books result from a provocation?  With family origins in Western Ukraine, Finkel shakes off a recent provocation (recommending a Russian student impersonating a Latin-American) and tells Ukraine’s story of genocidal warfare amidst the search for statehood and identity. Written with rare academic, passion and intellectual fervor, this is a page-turner. Where IR constructivists seek to explain Russian jingoism as ‘existential fears’, Finkel fleshes out the source of this ‘fear’ – political intent. For Russia, it was never about Europe or insecurity but about not allowing a separate Ukrainian land. In the post-1905 and pre-war Russian Empire, ‘Ukrainian identity was threatening because it implied the need for a different Russian state’ (p.45). Without Ukraine, the share of a common, imagined ethnie of grand-Russian imperialism would fall to a mere 45 percent of the empire’s population. When the Ukrainian ‘problem’ rose at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, there were ‘two prevailing Western attitudes towards Ukraine: ignorance and the adoption of a Russo-centric perspective’ (p. 99). Ukrainian regions were subsequently left for Sovietization, intentional starvation and war. Finkel does not shun a critical reading of Ukrainian nationalism of inter-war Europe. When Ukraine, after decades of Sovietization and the targeted, genocidal famine in the 1930s, rose to statehood in the early 1990s, it was a diverse state, with regional differences, and yet, for the first time, a pluralist state. ‘The vision of a European Galicia versus a thoroughly pro-Kremlin Donbas was a caricature’.  But the Kremlin did not need such a neighbor. The last chapters of the book describe the horrors unleashed in the 2022 full-scale invasion and leaves few doubts – the intent is to destroy, and rule. This argument is thoroughly convincing, as is also Finkel’s deep reflections of the psychology of Russian brutalist warfare, and the options for bringing the killings to an end. I strongly recommend this book.