A synchronous account of the war in Ukraine, then, would begin on February 24, 2022, with the invasion, and in 2014, with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its intervention in eastern Ukraine. It would take in Ukraine’s tumultuous post-Soviet transition, the movement in Maidan, and the 2008 NATO summit in Romania, when George W. Bush pressed for NATO expansion in Ukraine and Georgia — and also NATO’s absorption of the Visegrád Group and intervention in Yugoslavia.