I'm working on a case study for a class about European economic policy, and I am focusing on the Ukrainian government's ongoing effort to rebuild the country's agricultural sector. As part of the paper, I am doing a historical analysis of the country's sociopolitical relationship with Russia. I've done some research, but most of the sources I can find (in English) are government reports from undermanned wings of agencies with limited funding that are nothing more than economic projections. I'm trying to get a better feel for what the historic relationship between Russia and Ukraine is. I know about the Crimean conflict and the Holodomor, and my Ukrainian grandfather despised Russia, but other than that, I'm not learning much. Have Russo-Ukrainian relations always been as bad as they currently are? What were things like in the Stalin-era Soviet Union? Is this a sociopolitical conflict that goes even further back than that? Last, are there are any good sources (in English) where I can find some good information?
Not surprisingly, you're pulling at a lot of different threads here with regards to the Russian-Ukrainian relationship, so it naturally it is a bit hard to wrap one's head around it. Different historical eras often had different issues. For example, the historiography on the Stalin era U-R relationship is dominated both by issues of nationality in the USSR (eg Terry Martn's Affirmative Action Empire) or discussions about the genesis and consequences of collectivization. This is natural since these were the main issues that dominated the U-R relationship in the 1930s, whereas historians' research into the post-Stalin period often focuses on both socio-cultural issues and postwar reconstruction, as exemplified by William Risch's work on Lviv and the Soviet counterculture in the Western Ukraine. Likewise, the historiography on tsarist Ukraine focuses on the problematic relationship the empire had both with nationalism, the nature of national formation within Ukraine, and how the state and its subjects defined "Ukrainian" quite differently. Adding to this, there are certain issues like Judaism (a good many of the Empire's Jews were located inside the Pale of Settlement in the Western Provinces) that also tap into other historiographies and transect neat periodization schema.
For reading, I suggest looking at this syllabus created by one of the noted specialists in Ukrainian/Russian history, Alexei Miller. Most of the authors Miller has his students read (Weeks, Suny, Thaden, etc.) have in turn written multiple books and articles about nationality in the Western borderlands and USSR, so looking at their corpus of work will also help get a handle around this very broad topic.