To the Brink
Ian Proud

To the brink will be the first book to offer a searing polemic on how western sanctions against Russia laid the foundations for a full-blown war in Ukraine.

It will also be the only book on sanctions written by a former British diplomat who was directly involved in their development over a ten year period, and who personally authorised around half of all UK sanctions against Russia.  

From the onset of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, Britain’s leaders dismissed the idea of direct negotiation with Putin to moderate his concerns about the expansion of NATO.  For the next ten years, western powers actively encouraged Ukraine join yet were never willing to fight Russia to secure Ukrainian membership.  Rather, the west fell back on a single tool of containment; economic sanctions.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine became self-fulfilling and hundreds of billions of dollars in western military assistance were never enough to overturn the basic mathematics of a war that favoured Russia. With no one in the west willing to talk to Putin or sue for peace, the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war. 

This book combines narrative and analysis, highlighting how western foreign policy towards Russia became self-defeating and that, to secure a European future for Ukraine, a new approach is needed.