The Russo-Ukrainian War: From the bestselling author of Chernobyl

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Either way, “a lot depends on it”. This year started, he says, with “the realisation that things will be decided on the battlefield more than they will be decided at the negotiating table. On the battlefield there were two questions: the outcome of the Russian winter offensive; and the outcome of the Ukrainian spring counteroffensive. We have the answer to the first question. Nothing came out of the Russian offensive.” Now the second question is about to be answered. It may prove a turning point for the whole war.

De vraag of sprake was van een ‘intelligence failure’ of ���error of judgment’ dringt zich niet alleen aan Russische kant op, maar ook aan Oekraïense. “Among those most surprised by the Russian all-out invasion was the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky,” aldus Plokhy. (155) Tot op het laatste moment hoopte Zelensky dat de onderhandelingen tussen zijn chef-staf Andrii Yermak en Poetins vertrouweling Dmitry Kozak een oorlog konden afwenden. “But Kozak failed to convince Putin to accept Ukraine’s assurances not to join NATO and called Yermak that morning to demand a surrender. Yermak swore and hung up. The negotiations were over.” (156) De Oekraïense militaire top verwachtte evenmin dat Rusland Oekraïne over de gehele linie zou binnenvallen. “To the end,” erkende de Oekraïense bevelhebber van het noordelijke district, generaal Dmytro Krasylnykov, “we believed that our enemy would not intrude with large-scale aggression on every front across all lines.” (157) In het zuiden van Oekraïne richtten de voorbereidingen van de Oekraïense autoriteiten zich bovendien op een herhaling van het Krim-scenario van 2014: “The Ukrainians were preparing for a police exercise, not a military operation.” (203) Plokhy onderstreept dat een grote meerderheid van de Oekraïners hoe dan ook niet geloofde dat een oorlog op handen was, in weerwil van alle Amerikaanse waarschuwingen. De schok en de verontwaardiging waren navenant groter. This book is in two halves, before 22 February 2022 and after. I needed the first part (but not the second) because after all the millions of words spouted forth by the journalists and professors, still my brain could not quite grasp exactly why Putin decided to roll his tanks.

But soon he began to change his mind. History, after all, is a weapon in this conflict. Vladimir Putin’s justification for his aggression towards Ukraine is rooted in his (twisted and faulty) understanding of the past. He even wrote a sprawling, inaccurate essay laying out his views in 2021, titled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians. Plokhy began to feel compelled to fight the Russian president’s terrible history writing with good, solid history writing of his own.

At the time of Ukrainian entry to the USSR, Crimea was included in the Ukraine SSR, leading one to think that Crimea would share Ukraine's status after the 1992 referendum on independence. That was the case – until Putin's 2014 annexation of Crimea by force. His latest title, The Russo-Ukrainian War, 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 historian’s cousin Andriy Kholopov died fighting in Bakhmut, a scene of terrible slaughter. A friend sent a photo of a soldier reading one of Plokhy’s books in a trench; days later, the young man was killed A child on an evacuation train in Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, November 2022. Photograph: Anatolii Stepanov/AFP/Getty Images Critics who dismiss the bulk of the book as “just a competent assemblage of press cuttings” completely miss how crucial such work is. Without a chronological narrative of this war, more analytical work is impossible.

In exchange, it received economic aid and the beautiful words of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994: Russia, the United Kingdom and the US would respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity, independence and sovereignty – and refrain from using military force or economic coercion against the country. These promises, of course, turned out to be worthless.