Gerard Toal tackles what a generation of Russian foreign policy students may consider conventional wisdom. First, the claim that Russia’s foreign policy towards its neighbouring states echoes the regime’s imperialist assertion that in turn aims to maintain a sphere of influence in its near abroad. Second, Russia’s foreign policy is ‘a self-styled realist counter story to what it frames as a dominant legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems in the United States and elsewhere’ (p. 21). This book begins with the question ‘why does Russia invade its neighbours?’ In addressing this, Toal takes the conceptual framework of critical geopolitics, which is based on the notion of a geopolitical field. If geopolitics in its classical definition stresses the importance of geographical and geostrategic constellations under which states exercise their objectives, critical geopolitics considers how states ‘produce spaces, places, territories and landscapes, environments and social agents’ (p. 9). Spatial dynamics of a geopolitical field are conceptually linked to geopolitical culture, defined as ‘how states see the world, how they spatialize it and strategize about the fundamental tasks of the state, security, modernization, the self-preservation of identity’ (p. 10). The last conceptual building block is geopolitical conditions, or ‘how technologies transform the way in which geopolitics is experienced, understood, and practiced’ (p. 13).

In Chapter Two, Toal presents the historical context by looking at the collapse of the Soviet Union, later examining the making of Russian geopolitical culture and three prevailing competing geopolitical visions of Westernizing Russia: Imperial Russia and Strong Russia and the later Putin’s revanchist agenda. Chapter Three focuses on the specificity of the Caucasus in the geopolitical imaginaries of the United States and Russia. Why, when and how did Georgia become so pivotal for Russian and American geopolitical imaginaries? this chapter asks. Chapter Four is an engaging saga of Russian-Georgian relationships, which led to the 2008 war. Toal first regards South Osetia as a contested space in the Georgian national imaginary and its positioning in Georgian nationalist discourse and polity from the collapse of the Soviet Union until 2008 war. He later addresses the perennial question, ‘who started the August 2008 war?’, placing a greater share of blame on Georgian President Saakashvili.

Chapter Five reflects upon operational tactics of the August war by analysing five phases of the war: the Georgian offensive, the Russian-Ossetian counter-attack, the Russian ground invasion of Georgia, the ceasefire and cessation of hostilities and the slow withdrawal of Russian troops from their positions. This chapter further analyses the different storylines that Georgians, Russians and Americans presented to the world about the war. Toal applies the conceptual framework of affective geopolitics to the experience of the outbreak of war, when leaders’ personal emotions were significant to how events unfolded.

Chapter Six focuses on geopolitical aspects of Russia’s Ukrainian invasion. It examines the causes of Russia’s invasion of Crimea to further argue that structural changes in Putin’s foreign policy towards Ukraine and fluid contingent circumstances were causal factors. By scrutinizing the road to Crimean annexation, Toal shows the “fundamental divide... between the US and Russia over the sources of political instability in the world (p. 210)” as reflected in divergent visions of world order. The chapter further discusses how the myth of getting Crimea back played out in Russian politics and media to practically creating legitimacy, and how the storyline of mythic threats of saving compatriots from genocide echoed a similar narrative of the 2008 war over South Osetia.

Chapter Seven asks how the war in eastern Ukraine began. Three major explanations are given: considerable opposition within the power structures towards Euromaidan, activities of pro-Russian networks and proxies on the ground, and the motivations of rebel fighters. The chapter discusses how the project Novorossiya emerged and was activated and legitimized as a revisionist geopolitical imaginary of Kremlin ideologues.

In the last chapter, Toal challenges three geopolitical frames that describe the U.S. geopolitical imaginary as thin (superficial) as opposed to thick geopolitics, which is informed by knowledge of the context (people, places). From his account, one learns that it is ‘simpleminded to blame [the evolution of Russian revanchism] solely on innate Russian state aggression or overdetermined logics of reimperialization’ (p. 298). On the contrary, Russia’s policies were ‘developed’ and ‘shaped’ by ‘… neighbouring nationalizing state-political dynamics (especially “colored revolutions”) and “reckless driving” by states who have become confident in U.S. commitment to them’ (p. 299).

There are at least three points of concern one wishes this book had addressed. First, willingly or not, by predominantly focusing on the Russian geopolitical field, geopolitical culture and geopolitical condition, Toal ignores Georgian and Ukrainian visions of geopolitics, part of which is their freedom to choose military alliances and allies. Second, an equal weight is not given to the case study of Ukraine. One would wish to see more of how the idea of the ‘Russian world’ advocated by the Russian Orthodox Church and supported by the Kremlin and an ongoing clash between the two competing Orthodox churches of Ukraine (Kyivan and Muscovite patriarchates) played out prior to the two last Maidan Revolutions, as well as the ways in which the Russian world affected the processes in eastern Ukraine and Crimea. Third, it becomes difficult to differentiate factual information from the geopolitical narrative or the voice of the author. For example, ex nihilo, Toal assumes that the Georgian government’s collaboration with U.S. mercenary companies was ‘to game-plan military offensive operations against its separatist regions’ (p.145), which was in line with President Saakashvili’s idea of ‘getting Georgia back’. One wonders from where these claims arise? (Experience on the ground? Conversation with Saakashvili or with DC-based diplomats? A Russian vision of geopolitics?) One can show compelling amounts of evidence (e.g., intercepted calls, maps, intelligence reports) of the Russian troops’ presence on the Georgian territory of Abkhazia long before the August war (in April 2008) as well as the Russian military invasion of Georgian territory on August 7th¹1. Toal claims that Russia invaded Georgia on August 8th, which aligns with the Kremlin’s version of the story that portrays Georgia’s response to Russian invasion as an aggression against South Osetia.View all notes in response to what Georgia’s military operation started. The chronology of Russian military tactics until August 7th is an extremely important piece of information for understanding 2008 war. The evidence presented in the works of Svante Cornell, Frederick Starr, Johanna Popjanevski, Niklas Nilsson, Andrei Illarionov, Ronald Asmus among others can in this regard challenge Toal’s narrative of who, when and why the war started.