The first sentence of Serhii Plokhy’s introduction ought to earn him a point or two in this part of the world. It should also give a thoughtful reader pause, for several reasons.

He writes: “Ukrainians probably have just as much right to brag about their role in changing the world as Scots and other nationalities about which books have been written asserting their claim to have shaped the course of human history.”

It is flattering, if you like to wave flags and claim virtue by association, to be numbered in select company. It is a useful corrective to parochialism, too, for a Scot or a Ukrainian, to be reminded that “the course of human history” (no less) is not exclusively the business of those who are these days styled great powers. The achievements of a nation and those of a state are not one and the same. The great come and go. And nationhood, like statehood, can be recovered as well as lost.

Hence the reason to pause. Plokhy’s careful, engaging history is a series of stories about a spectral nation, one that has appeared and disappeared down the ages. Its rebirth in December 1991, when its people voted for independence – some parallels are not perfect – and put an end to the Soviet Union, has not banished every nightmare. The struggle for Ukraine’s future, one that commenced in earnest with the Maidan protests in 2013 and 2014, continues. Given the behaviour of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, no outcome is guaranteed.

The writer Neal Ascherson once offered a powerful image of Europe’s history. Imagine it, he suggested, as an endless series of overlaid maps. Lines that once seemed fixed, almost immutable, are long gone. The maps of today, source of so many contests and wars, might as well be this week’s rough sketches awaiting revision. Where now the Austro-Hungarian empire, where the Roman? Where were the lands of the fierce and powerful Scythians?

Plokhy can tell you: on the Pontic steppes of southern Ukraine, in the northern Black Sea region. They were divided, it seems, into horsemen and agriculturalists. The gold recovered from the burial mounds of their kings speaks of great wealth and status. Their creation myth suggests they regarded themselves as an indigenous people. But that was long ago, before maps were imagined. Plokhy’s book begins with no fewer than ten examples of the cartographer’s art. Who presumes that the most recent is the last?

The book’s title is more than a rhetorical flourish. Ukraine’s story is intertwined both with the history of the entity we call Europe, and with the idea of Europe. If nothing else, the story ought to remind any half-attentive reader that the United Kingdom’s present fixation with the footnotes of European law and trade relationships is myopic. Ukraine’s latest travails began two years ago, after all, when its people took to the streets to defend their right to be bound into the European Union family of nations. Imagine such a thing, if you can, in these parts.

For the Greeks, planting their first colonies, the lands we call Ukraine were at the edge of the world. Sentencing Ovid to exile and eventual death in a place called Tomis on the Black Sea in 8 AD, the Emperor Augustus had much the same map in his head. In modern parlance, the ruler was Eurocentric. He despatched the poet to the frontier, to the fringes of what was known, recognised and valued. Beyond lay barbarians.

How much has truly changed when “the west” watches while Vladimir Putin annexes Crimea? He deems it Russian, therefore his, not European. Ukraine itself is an argument over a very old question. Russia, too, has been perplexed by an issue of identity – perhaps the biggest such issue – since at least the time of Peter the Great. European or Slav? Putin, squeezing Ukraine, has made his choice, the Ukrainians another. Even now, in the twenty first century, history’s dusty theses have life and dangerous relevance.

That most Europeans are oblivious, incapable of finding Ukraine on any map and liable to consider the country just another piece of flotsam from the wreckage of the USSR, is ironic, of course. Our mental habit when “the east” is mentioned is to think vaguely of Russian-like survivals. The UK, a state that went to war for Poland’s sake not so long ago, should know better, yet even our squabbles over “Europe” avoid the obvious: what is it, exactly? Even an expanding EU has to be defined. Defined against what, in which terms? Ukraine forms part of the answer, an answer Putin rejects.

Ukraine has seen the empires come and go. It has served as a frontier time and again, not least as the frontier between Islam and Christianity. It has witnessed imperial decline and fall as though observing the tides of a sea: Roman, Ottoman, Hapsburg, Russian, Nazi, Soviet. In Ukraine, Christianity’s church of Rome has contended with Orthodoxy. In Ukraine, many generations of Jews have lived and sometimes thrived. In Ukraine, the Holocaust was as hellish as anywhere. No map has been left untouched for long.

Plokhy’s history leads him to some searching and profound questions. He concludes, for example, that Ukraine’s experiences as a country “located on the East-West divide” has helped to make it “a contact zone in which Ukrainians of different persuasions could learn to coexist”. For all that, differences brought into close contact have also created regional divisions, divisions being exploited in the present conflict.

As Plokhy puts it, “Ukraine has always been known, and lately it has been much praised, for the cultural hybridity of its society...” This sounds like the benign ideal, the foundation for the mutual tolerance recommended by all right-thinking people. Yet Ukraine’s current travails show the obverse of the coin: “... how much hybridity a nation can bear and still remain united in the face of a ‘hybrid war’ is one of the important questions now being decided in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.”

When the Vikings arrived in the tenth century and the notion of “Rus” was born, “hybridity” was not uppermost in their minds. We misunderstand both Ukraine and Putin, however, if we underestimate the extent to which identity and nationhood have ancient origins. In today’s conflict you can discern a thread running back to the Kyivan Rus, to the Hellenised “Rossiia”, to the claiming of a word – just a word – by old Muscovy when it was making an empire in the eighteenth century. Bluntly, Putin believes Ukraine is Russian; Ukraine says otherwise.

Plokhy’s brief guide straddles centuries with accomplished ease. The ignorant westerner will learn much. What he or she might also grasp, however, is the infinite complexity of nationhood, whether its history has been shaped by Ukrainians or by Scots. It is vastly more complicated than the caricatures of nationalism, for or against, ever allow.

As the old maps remind us, and as Ukraine should remind us today, these tales are never finished. If sense ever prevails, Plokhy’s fine book should find its way to Vladimir Putin’s desk, if only to show the imperialist that Ukraine itself is far from done, and will not be extinguished.

The Gates of Europe – A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Allen Lane, £25)

Ian Bell died on Thursday. Our thoughts are with his family and friends.