On 24 February 2022, as Russian forces crossed into Ukraine, embassy staff shredded documents, cyberattacks disrupted communications and many in Moscow appeared to expect the Ukrainian state to collapse within days. That sense of confidence, and the scale of the miscalculation behind it, sits at the heart of Jonathan Haslam’s Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War against Ukraine, which draws on Haslam’s distinguished expertise in Russian foreign policy. A Fellow of the British Academy and Professor Emeritus at Cambridge, Haslam’s work combines diplomatic history and international thought. In Hubris, Haslam neither excuses Russian aggression in Ukraine nor softens Putin’s responsibility, but he argues that the road to war was shaped over decades by American strategy, Western institutional choices and the failure to build a European security order that could accommodate post-Soviet Russia without subordinating it.
Haslam traces the causes of war without reducing the story to moral simplifications, treating Putin as both a decision-maker and the product of a wider historical and strategic setting. As Haslam puts it, ‘One man is not an army,’ a line that shifts attention away from personality alone and towards structures, incentives, and accumulated grievances. It is also a deliberate challenge to Western self-exoneration. Yet this framing carries a risk. By stressing long-term historical and structural grievances, Haslam sometimes makes Russia’s turn to war seem more inevitable than it in fact was.
He also highlights the scale of Russia’s miscalculation, especially the gap between perceived power and battlefield reality. Haslam knits together the hours leading up to 24 February 2022, including evacuations by embassies, document burnings, cyber disruptions and Russian confidence in a quick collapse of the Ukrainian state. After documenting the events through the final hours of the day of the invasion, the book turns to the longer historical story, arguing that Putin’s decision cannot be understood without tracing the deterioration of Russia’s position in Europe after 1991.
To make that case, Haslam repeatedly returns to the language of humiliation, exclusion and loss that ran through post-Soviet Russian elite discourse, from Yeltsin’s warnings in the 1990s that NATO expansion would humiliate Russia to Putin’s later claims that the Soviet collapse had stranded millions of Russians outside their state. Haslam uses an often-cited claim that some 25 million ethnic Russians lost their Soviet identity after the Soviet collapse that created new states. This was experienced in Moscow as a loss of people, strategic depth, political influence and great-power status.
For Haslam, this sense of loss begins in the order-making politics of the 1990s. Although American leaders spoke the language of partnership, their policies reflected a lasting commitment to US primacy in Europe, leaving Russia feeling contained rather than integrated. The enlargement of NATO, which brought former Warsaw Pact and Eastern European states into the alliance after the Cold War, was welcomed across much of Central and Eastern Europe but increasingly seen in Moscow as strategic encroachment.
He is equally critical of European governments for failing to pursue a genuinely pan-European security structure and for ultimately deferring to Washington. To his credit, Haslam recognises that many European governments chose predictability over risk, even if that decision deepened Russian resentment. One reason for that choice was Russia’s unresolved post-Soviet identity crisis, which made durable reassurance and engagement far more difficult. Nonetheless, this account is thinner on intra-European politics and uneven threat perceptions. Poland and the Baltic states interpreted Russia through the lens of historical insecurity, whereas Germany and, at times, France voiced caution and diplomatic management.
A significant shift emerges as Haslam tracks NATO’s evolution from territorial defence to expeditionary warfare, especially in the Balkan zone. He argues that NATO’s 1999 air war against Yugoslavia, conducted without explicit UN Security Council approval, hardened Russian threat perceptions and reshaped how it interpreted NATO’s post-Cold War role. These interventions, he argues, confirmed Russian concern that NATO would become an instrument of the Western powers, rejecting the arguments that enlargement was benign. However, strategically, this intervention was an explicit demonstration of the alliance’s credibility in responding to humanitarian crises in post-Cold War Europe, at whatever cost to Russian displeasure.
Over time, the Kremlin’s fears of regime insecurity deepened as Western governments offered diplomatic, financial and rhetorical support to reform movements and protest politics in states that Russia still saw as central to its sphere of influence. By 2011, Haslam suggests, Putin no longer saw Western democracy promotion as idealism alone but as part of a broader strategy of pressure and encirclement. The Maidan uprising became the hinge between accumulated grievance and open confrontation. The mass protests in Kyiv in late 2013 and early 2014 began after President Viktor Yanukovych stepped back from an association agreement with the European Union in favour of closer ties with Russia. This move led to his removal and marked a decisive turning point in Ukraine’s post-Cold War trajectory.
Haslam is similarly sceptical of the Obama administration’s language of restraint. Although Obama was often associated with caution about deeper military entanglements, Haslam argues that rhetorical restraint did not amount to a serious redesign of the wider security order that Russia resented. Subsequently, Ukraine, too, looking westward, was interpreted as posing an existential threat to the Kremlin, despite Western assurances. A possible alternative reading could be that Russian leaders confused influence with control, leaving them unable to accept a sovereign Ukraine under any alignment. This is also the point at which Ukrainian agency deserves fuller attention, because Ukraine was not merely a site of great-power rivalry but an actor in its own right.
In response to these perceived insecurities, Russia treated Syria as a testing ground for how far it could push Western limits. Russia’s 2015 intervention in Syria, in support of Bashar al-Assad, allowed Moscow to reassert itself militarily in the Middle East. Putin learnt that force could change realities on the ground when Western responses were fragmented. Haslam believes that the confidence Russia gained laid the foundation for its Ukraine adventure. Russia learned that force could change the facts on the ground when Western responses were fragmented. The confidence Russia gained laid the foundation for its Ukraine adventure as part of a broader pattern of testing the limits. Later, under Trump, despite the rhetoric of deal-making and disengagement, the broader American security posture in Europe remained largely intact, and the earlier structural choices that shaped Russian resentment were never fundamentally reversed.
Another of the book’s stronger points lies in political economy, particularly its emphasis on how Europe’s dependence on Russian energy resources blunted deterrence and narrowed the room for manoeuvre after the invasion. This dilemma is one of the most convincing points of the book because it identifies structural constraints beyond the notions of insecurity and impunity. Even so, the war has made Russia’s future more uncertain rather than more secure with increasing military, economic, and diplomatic costs while narrowing strategic choices. Looking ahead, the war has also strengthened the case for a more coherent European defence posture, one less dependent on Washington and more rooted in European strategic responsibility.
Because Hubris is so heavily organised around the US-Russia dyad, Ukrainian agency sometimes recedes into the background. Despite Haslam’s acknowledgement of Ukrainian aspirations, the analytical weight strongly favours great-power interaction. The book might also have gone further in addressing the ideological dimension of modern Russian nationalism, which cannot be reduced simply to grievance, humiliation, or exclusion. Probing Russian narratives, Haslam also points to an uncomfortable truth about leadership: rulers who govern through repression and fear often take greater risks abroad because admitting mistakes at home becomes politically dangerous. His broader conclusion is that long policy mistakes on all sides created the conditions for war, but once war begins, it develops its own momentum and is hard to stop without an off-ramp that both sides can accept.
As a contribution to academia, Hubris will prove most valuable to scholars of international relations and diplomatic historians as well as policy practitioners concerned with European security. It insists on the longer history behind the war and warns of the unintended consequences that can grow if the rigid thinking in both camps persists. Haslam’s Hubris asks the reader to keep two truths in mind: that Russia is responsible for its war of conquest, and that Western policy choices laid the conditions under which such a war became conceivable. Whether one agrees with every part of the argument or not, Hubris forces a harder reckoning with the long consequences of post-Cold War order-making and the costs of strategic complacency.
Amjad Fraz is a Research Assistant at the Centre for Aerospace and Security Studies (CASS), Lahore. He can be reached at info@casslhr.com.