Welcome to Global Insider’s new Friday feature: The Conversation. Each week a POLITICO journalist will share an interview with a global thinker, politician, power player or personality. Editor-in-Chief Matthew Kaminski is starting us off with a discussion with a prominent historian about the roots of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Serhii Plokhii holds an endowed chair in Ukrainian history at Harvard named after Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a founding father of the idea of an independent Ukraine who lived at the turn of the previous century. The birth and struggles of an actual independent Ukraine over the past 30 years have made Plokhii’s once-obscure subject a matter of great general interest. And like his Yale colleague Timothy Snyder, Plokhii has written about the region for a broader audience, producing notable books on Yalta, the Chernobyl accident, the collapse of the USSR and, in the wake of the 2014 Maidan uprising in Kyiv, a new history of modern Ukraine.

The Russian attack on Ukraine last February led Plokhii to write a book on the present called, “The Russo-Ukrainian War” (due out from Norton in May). He is avowedly “not a journalist, I can’t do that,” but says he realized that in talking about this conflict his mind found many answers in the past. His work is a “history in the moment.” This moment, he adds, is “a turning point in the history of international relations,” and of course “in the history of both Russia and Ukraine.”

We spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, where Plokhii was a notable presence at various Ukrainian events, and followed up by Zoom from his home in Cambridge, Mass., this week. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The subtitle of your new book is “The Return of History.” Let’s start with what history means for Vladimir Putin. How can it explain his obsession with Ukraine, going back to the very beginning of his time in the Kremlin starting in 2000?

I think that obsession comes from the era that Putin was part of, and that’s the decline and the fall of communism and of the Soviet Union. And as the result of that, the fall of the great power and superpower status of Russia. That’s something that certainly was unexpected by Putin’s generation. They came into life in the 1970s, when America was losing the war in Vietnam and Soviet influence in the Third World was on the rise.

After the Soviet collapse, the Putin generation turned in a superficial way to religion and in a no less superficial way to history to understand what went wrong and how to fix it. What they found turning toward religion, and then history was a Russian imperial religion and Russian imperial history.

[Putin’s] idea about Russians and Ukrainians being one and the same people comes from the same texts and same sources as his ideas about the greatness of Russia. Putin’s thinking is very, very imperialistic, not just in terms of going somewhere and acquiring territories but also the way he imagines the Russian nation.

But he isn’t the first to use military force. Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, invaded Chechnya in 1993 and sent “peacekeepers” into minor conflicts around the periphery.

What you see with Putin, which is new, which was not the case under Yeltsin, is the use of military force outside of the borders of the Russian Federation: first in Georgia in 2008 and then with the annexation of Crimea and [invasion of] the Donbas in 2014. And that’s because the sources of that war, at least psychologically, historically, are different than the Chechen war, despite the fact that Russian military tactics and atrocities are very similar.

The Georgian war and the Ukrainian wars are about reestablishing Russian control of the post-Soviet space. The goal is really to emerge as an alternative center of power to the U.S., the European Union and China.

For any autocrat, the survival of the regime is the top priority. Even with his anger over the “color revolutions” in Kyrgyzstan and Georgia, there was a unique threat that Putin saw in Ukraine, an eastern Slavic country with the same religion, similar language and lots of shared history. Ukraine at the beginning of its independence journey was not defining itself against Russia. I always thought that Putin saw Ukraine's path toward the West more clearly than many Ukrainians saw themselves at the time.

Putin actually believes in some things that he’s saying publicly. And one of those things is his belief that Russians and Ukrainians are one and the same people. So if you believe that this one in the same people, then part of this people choosing the democratic path, orienting towards toward Europe, is a real threat to you — not to Russia — but certainly a real threat to your regime, which is based on anything but democratic ideas and democratic principles.

Putin was right to see it as a threat and it was a threat bigger than Ukraine joining NATO or NATO moving to the borders of Russia, how it is now about to move to in Finland.

What are the scenarios for Ukraine right now?

We don’t know when the war will end. But there are a couple of things that are already clear.

Ukraine will stay an independent state. And when I say independent, not conditional independence limited by Russia.

The high probability is that Ukraine will be integrated into Western structures. Ukraine today is more integrated in NATO than any other country that is a member of NATO. Because Ukrainians can actually use every weapon every major country makes, while the armies in each individual NATO countries can use only their weapons.

What remains unclear is of course where the borders will be of that independent Ukraine.

Place President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukrainian and world history.

Let’s start with maybe the most obvious: He’s the only Jewish president anywhere in the world outside Israel. And he is the president of the country that historically has been viewed as a hotbed of antisemitism. That’s quite historic in its own right. And Zelenskyy was not parachuted from somewhere. There were two Jewish prime ministers before him. There was a Jewish speaker of the parliament. All of them they were elected.

On the world scene, Zelenskyy became the closest we have ever had to Churchill, a flagbearer of democracy and a symbol of courage and resistance to unprovoked aggression.

The outlook for Russia is uncertain as well — and yet certainly dark. The 1991 hope that Russia would one day become part of the world’s leading industrial powers — a member of the G-8 — is dead, seemingly for a long, long time. When was Russia last this isolated from Europe and the world? Is its emerging pariah status wholly unique?

What we see now is the disassociation with the West, and trade is an important part of that story. This is really the end of the of the era that started not just with the fall of the Berlin Wall; it started in the early 1970s with the first oil and gas deals between West Germany and Russia.

But before then there were long periods of isolation. Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia was completely isolated, having no allies in the League of Nations. For a long period of time after World War II during the Cold War, the only allies that the Soviet Union had were the “allies” that they occupied and controlled. So there was more isolation in the 20th century, from the West in particular.

Russia is in the process of rethinking and reimagining itself as a non-imperial state. What that means is that Russians now — for the first time ever — have to live in a state where they actually constitute the majority, where they have very clearly defined minorities. It will be a very, very difficult process, and Russia is not unique in that regard. It’s not like France left its colonies without war. It’s not like there was no wars in the wake of the disintegration of the Portuguese empire, or Spaniards didn’t fight for their imperial possessions.

But one thing that we know now is that there will be no miracle of the sort that we imagined back in 1991 — that there will be a great democratic leader emerging on the white horse and changing Russia’s destiny. Their transformation will be a long and often painful one.