Ramani, Samuel (2023), ISBN: 9781787388512, HURST.

The book discusses the reason why Putin started the war based on domestic factors rather than systematic factors. It states that Putin wants to unify Russians based on common principles which inspired the military actions Russia took over the last decades. 

“This book argues that Putin’s policy of global counter-revolution is driven not by systemic factors, such as preventing NATO expansion, but domestic ones: the desire to unite Russians around common principles and consolidate his personal brand of authoritarianism. This objective has inspired military interventions in Crimea, Donbas and Syria, and now all-out war against Kyiv.”

https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/putins-war-on-ukraine/

Katchanovski, Ivan (2022)

“This study examines the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022 and the origins of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the political transition during the Maidan in Ukraine in 2014. This transition of power contributed to the civil war in Donbas, Russian military interventions in Crimea and Donbas, the Russian annexation of Crimea and an international conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the West and Russia. This conflict escalated when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The research question is as follows: What is the nature of the Russia-Ukraine war and the political transition in Ukraine during the Maidan? This issue produced divergent narratives of this war and the Maidan in scholarly studies, the media, and governments. This paper uses political science theories of wars, mass protests, coups, revolutions, and regime changes and empirical analysis of various evidence to examine the nature of the Russia-Ukraine war and the political transition during the Maidan.”

https://doi.org/10.33774/apsa-2022-4bn8w