Book excerpt: Deals with the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014, amid a civil war that followed the violent seizure of power by Ukrainian nationalists on 22 February of that year, leading to a NATO-Russia standoff.This is the first scholarly work on the Ukrainian civil war and the downing of MH17. It offers a contextual analysis that radically challenges the Western consensus that "Putin" was behind it all without making pertinent claims as to the perpetrators.It analyses the Western advance to the east after 1991 and investigates the Ukraine crisis in light of internal fault-lines, the formation of the BRICS bloc and US-EU rivalry over Russian energy links.Based on previously unpublished government and NATO documents as well as a wide array of sources, the book is written in an accessible style.