The great chronicler of Ukraine breaks new ground in his rigorous and elegant analysis of Europe’s biggest conflict since 1945 – and its impact on friends and family
, a compelling account of the 1986 nuclear disaster, which won the 2018 Baillie Gifford prize. His work is rigorous and objective, and also wonderfully readable and lucid., is in a similar elegant vein. It is deeply personal, too. On the morning of the invasion he phoned his sister in Zaporizhzhia, where there were explosions. A friend sent a photo of a soldier reading one of Plokhy’s books in a trench; days later, the young man was killed.
The invasion flowed from Putin’s warped imperial thinking. He believed Ukraine to be a part of “historical Russia”. In summer 2021, he published an essay setting out his so-called ideas. After two decades in power, Russia’s dictator-president had become increasingly obsessed with his long-dead predecessors. Portraits of Peter I and Catherine II “made their way” into the Kremlin’s antechamber.
The consequences for the global order have been profound. In Plokhy’s view, we have returned to an era of great power rivalries not seen since the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. Ukraine is “a new cold war Germany”, fought over by rival blocs. Putin’s desired international model has a back-to-the-future flavour: spheres of influence, where big countries bully and sometimes chew up smaller ones.
Plokhy’s account of the horrors of Bucha and Kherson is comprehensive. It lacks the vividness of frontline reportage and is mostly sourced from news reports. Where the book breaks new ground is in its analysis of how the war came about. After getting over his shock in February 2022, Plokhy “relearned how to think analytically”. He decided historians were the worst interpreters of current events, except for everyone else.
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