It is a cruel game to ask a historian to look into the future. But here we are and, as Plokhy himself says, rephrasing Churchill, historians are probably “the worst commentators on contemporary events except for all the others”. So what about the Ukrainians’ spring counteroffensive, I ask – which, when we speak in the last days of April, is expected any day. History is normally written from the calm, distant purview that a scholar attains when chaotic events have resolved themselves into some recognisable shape or pattern. It is not usually interrupted by grief for a family member killed as a result of those still-unfolding events. At first, he says, he resisted the idea of a book about the invasion, produced during the invasion. To write such a volume would be “to go against the basic principles of the profession”. “Our wisdom as historians comes from the fact that we already know how things turned out,” he says.

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. Amid the macro-level analysis, "The Russo-Ukrainian War" also reminds us of the conflict’s devastating human toll. Interviewing Ukrainian refugees, Plokhy writes of how they “fled the Russian invasion, abandoning all their possessions and trying to save their lives. They were driven out by the fear of death, not by the hardships of war, and often risked their lives in the process.” While many readers may generally be tempted to skip a book’s Afterword, Plokhy’s merits attention because it underscores the human tragedy through his painful account of the deaths, first of one of his readers, Lieutenant Yevhen Olerenko, and then of his cousin, Andriy Khlopov. Recounting how he struggled to find the right words to respond to their tragic deaths, he writes poignantly: “I did not find any, there were none.”

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In dit licht bezien was het besluit van Boris Jeltsin in 1993 om met militaire middelen een einde te maken aan de onafhankelijke positie van het Russische parlement van grote betekenis voor de toekomstige verhoudingen tussen Rusland en Oekraïne. Hij voerde daarna een nieuwe grondwet in die de macht verplaatste naar de president. De presidentiële verkiezingen van 1996, die Jeltsin slechts met grote moeite van de Communisten wist te winnen door zich te verbinden aan de nieuwe ‘oligarchen’-klasse, zetten de ontwikkeling van Rusland naar een “‘managed’ or ‘sovereign’ democracy” kracht bij. (48) Aldus werd de weg geplaveid voor een terugkeer naar een autoritaire regeringsvorm. Over a year into Russia’s grotesque full-scale invasion of Ukraine, disinformation and misconceptions of the conflict — fuelled both by the Kremlin and by political actors abroad — continue to permeate public debate. "The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History" by Serhii Plokhy takes aim at many of these myths, demonstrating how Russia’s centuries-long imperial obsession with Ukraine created the conditions for Europe’s largest land war since 1945. I may say this book is a grand one for finding problems of definition – what is an annexation? What is a valid referendum? What is an independent republic? What is democracy? But there were domestic forces too. They encouraged Ukraine’s recurrent democratic corrections, whenever one strongman or another tried to move the country towards autocracy. Here, Plokhy turns perceived wisdom on its head. More than eighteen months later, Ukraine is still fighting, and Plokhy’s blue blazer hangs on a hook behind his office door at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, where he serves as director, as well as Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history. His scholarly work covers much of modern and early modern Eastern Europe—particularly Russia, Belarus, Poland, and Lithuania—but his driving interest has always been Ukraine and its fascinating, tangled, often tormented history. The Russo-Ukrainian War, published in May, chronicles the first 10 months of the conflict. This was an unconventional undertaking: unlike the histories Plokhy is used to producing—written from a contemplative distance, after the explosions have ended and the outcomes are known—this book unfolds amid the chaos it seeks to explain, a chaos in which his friends and loved ones are caught up, with no clear ending in sight. The work is punctuated by grief.

Plokhy prefers “Russo-Ukrainian war” to alternatives like “ Russia’s war against Ukraine”. While the latter expression is well suited to emphasising Russia’s culpability in this war, the former stresses that Ukraine is not just a victim of Russia, but its equal.

Relinquished nukes and worthless promises

I've wanted to read Serhii Plokhy's history of Ukraine, 'The Gates of Europe', for a while now. But when I discovered that he has written a book about the current war in Ukraine, I decided to read that first.

Den andra halvan beskriver bara övergripande hur kriget har utkämpats fram till manusslutet i februari. Hans fokus är här fortfarande den politiska och ekonomiska sidan snarare än den militära. Även här är det välskrivet och informativt. Om det är något som saknas är det möjligen att han inte förklarar den enorma påverkan som de ortodoxa kyrkorna och deras strider haft som bidragit på olika sätt till konflikten. The book focuses on Russian and Ukrainian developments following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It highlights Russian persistance in weakening Ukraine whilst recognising it as the most important element of any imperial revival, be it the Tsarist Empire or Soviet Empires (whose flags have been raised in St Petersberg last month), or as a commonwealth, as envisioned by Yeltsin.

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Opmerkelijk genoeg relativeerde de Oekraïense regering de Amerikaanse waarschuwingen in die periode steeds. De realiteit was dat Oekraïne weinig opschoot met de Amerikaanse waarschuwingen, die het vertrouwen in de Oekraïense economie schaadden. De positie van Kiev was in de kern: 'Give us weapons, not warnings.’ An illuminating account of the war in Ukraine - its historical roots, its course, its possible outcomes - from the bestselling, award-winning author of Chernobyl 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 Over the last twenty-one months I have developed a deep love, admiration and respect for all things Ukrainian: her culture, her people, a beautiful rich land now ravaged by attempted domination and conquest. Well a barrier is one thing, but a springboard is a whole other thing. Putin might not mind a barrier but when the Ukrainian constitution was changed on 7 February 2019 to include the strategic objectives of joining the EU and NATO, then for Putin the barrier was now very clearly becoming a springboard.