Lucian Kim: Putin's Revenge

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in a bloody escalation of a conflict that had begun eight years earlier. What drove Vladimir Putin to launch Europe’s largest land war since World War II?

Lucian Kim—an on-the-ground reporter in the region for decades—offers a gripping, definitive account of Russia’s path to war, from Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Maidan uprising right up to the full-scale invasion. He examines the Kremlin’s motives, tracing Putin’s transformation from a seemingly pragmatic leader into an embittered tyrant who saw it as his historical mission to reconquer Ukraine. Kim places the war in the broader context of the Soviet Union’s collapse, arguing that it represents a clash between those who reject the Soviet past—like Volodymyr Zelensky and Alexei Navalny—and those who still identify with it. He debunks the Kremlin narrative that the West instigated the conflict, and he instead identifies the root causes of the war in the legacy of Russian imperialism and Putin’s dictatorial rule. At the same time, Kim is critical of the West’s empty promises to Ukraine, which made the country vulnerable to a revanchist Russia.

Putin’s Revenge features insight from Kim’s first-hand reporting on key moments, such as Russia’s occupation of Crimea and the beginning of the Russian-backed insurgency in eastern Ukraine. This book tells the story of the lead-up to the invasion with revelatory detail and fresh analysis, shedding new light on a conflict that has roiled the post–Cold War order.

This website is a collection of my journalistic work spanning 25 years. Here you will find reporting from North Korea, dispatches from pre-9/11 Afghanistan and commentary on what makes Vladimir Putin tick.

I have spent most of my life studying Russia and the countries that emerged from the Soviet empire. For my generation, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a defining historical moment that paved the way for the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the unification of Europe and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

I was born in Charleston, Illinois, in 1970. I earned a bachelor’s degree in geography and foreign languages from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, studied journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and graduated from the master’s program in nationalism studies at Central European University in Budapest. Besides English, I speak German, Russian and French.

I started my career in 1996 as Berlin correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, covering Germany, eastern Europeand Central Asia. In 2003, I moved to Moscow, where I became the business editor and a columnist for The Moscow Times. From 2006 to 2010, I covered Russian energy giant Gazprom and Putin’s government for Bloomberg News.

In 2011, I started a blog chronicling the Moscow protest movement. In subsequent years I blogged on my travels to Sochi and Chechnya, and covered the Ukraine conflict for news organizations such as BuzzFeed, Newsweek and Germany’s Zeit Online (hier klicken für Artikel auf Deutsch). At the same time I became a regular contributor to Slate and Reuters.

I worked as National Public Radio’s Moscow correspondent from 2016 to 2021. Subsequently I was a fellow at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, where I wrote my first book, , which is now available from Columbia University Press.

I currently work as a Ukraine analyst at International Crisis Group.

Please click here to view my CV.

About the Moderator

Michael Kimmage is Director of the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute. Prior to joining the Kennan Institute, Michael Kimmage was a professor of history at the Catholic University of America. From 2014 to 2017, he served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He has been a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and at the German Marshall Fund; and was on the advisory board of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. He publishes widely on international affairs and on U.S. policy toward Russia. His latest book, Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability, was published by Oxford University Press in March 2024. He is also the author of The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy, published by Basic Books in 2020, and The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism, published by Harvard University Press in 2009.

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