Recommended reading
Anatol Lieven, Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry. And here is a short essay of his on Ukraine today.
Orlando Figes, A Crimean War.
Vassily Aksyonov, The Island of Crimea, discussed here: “Written in 1979, Vassily Aksyonov’s “The Island of Crimea” imagines an alternative history (abetted by alternative geography—the Crimea is a peninsula) wherein the Russian civil war ends with the tsarist forces able to hold onto this southern scrap of the old empire. “