Hi everyone and welcome to this new, book-themed special issue of ‘The Long War’. What follows is a list of eight English-language books about Ukraine I believe you should read in order to better understand the country as well as the war its people is now fighting. After some thinking, I decided to only include non-fiction works—while there are some novels I thought of mentioning, the truth is that my knowledge of Ukrainian literature is still severely lacking. Book recommendation website “Five Books” has however recently published a great list of Ukrainian literature works compiled by the editor of the London Ukrainian Review.
Another caveat is that this is a highly subjective list, with no attempt on my part to make a list that would be representative of the Ukraine-related production out there (hell, I’ve even included two books I haven’t read yet!). With that being said, I hope you find it valuable and if you do, consider subscribing or upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t done so. I really want to keep this newsletter going, and I quite literally cannot do it without your support.
Alright, enough soliciting—onto the list.
Christopher Miller | The War Came to Us
While there are lots of excellent books about Ukraine and its people, and already many good ones about the Russian invasion, ‘The War Came to Us’ is for now the only one I’ve come across that managed to so excellently weave the two together. Because Chris Miller has experienced Ukraine long before the Russian invasion, and because that experience of Ukraine goes from the black spoil tips of Donbas to the muffled corridors of the presidential office in Kyiv, he manages to tell his story with both unparalleled sourcing and genuine empathy for the people who, in some cases, have been thrown into the chaos of war back in 2014. That is incredibly rare, as most reporting tends to focus on one aspect or the other.
Anna Arutunyan | Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow's Struggle for Ukraine
Arutunyan’s book about the various fighters and ideological entrepreneurs who took up arms or fanned the flames of war in Ukraine is one I think would be great to read in tandem with Miller’s ‘The War Came to Us’. They cover a lot of the same topics, and even locations, while still being extremely complementary. The bottom-up approach taken by Arutunyan is a great way to show, put it simply, how much of a mess Moscow’s initial involvement in Ukraine was. From local figures feeling alienated by Ukrainian authorities and hoping to see the annexation of Crimea repeated in their lands to ultranationalist Russian soldiers of fortune dreaming of ‘Novorossiya’, from simple workers to businessmen, it is the nuanced story of a spiraling war the consequences of which still resonates today.
Hiroaki Kuromiya | Freedom and Terror in the Donbas-A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s
Published in the late 90s, Kuromiya’s “Freedom and Terror in the Donbas” is still the most comprehensive recent history of the region and remains a must-read for anyone looking to get a decent understanding of how this region at the heart of the past nine years of war came to be. To me, it also served to highlight the region’s complexity, a complexity that is often absent from reports but, frankly, that can be hard to decipher even when you’re on the ground. It is unfortunately a very difficult book to find these days—the best way (though not the most convenient) is to lend it for free on the website of the Internet Archive.
Serhii Plokhy | The Gates of Europe : A History of Ukraine
The book I took with me when I first went to live in Ukraine. Is it the best history of Ukraine out there? I don’t know. But it is both comprehensive, covering the history of Ukraine from the early days of Kyivan Rus’ to the Maidan revolution, and accessible. It’s also a Ukraine-centric history, something that seems painfully obvious today but was still pretty rare in English when the book first came out. All in all, it’s a great way to get started, though you might find it a bit lacking if you already have some knowledge of Ukrainian history.
Mariana Budjeryn, Yuri Kostenko | Inheriting the Bomb & Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament: A History
Two books about how Ukraine ended up with a couple thousand nuclear weapons on its territory, and the arduous process that sent those weapons back to Russia. I haven’t yet gone through Kostenko’s “Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament” but it has enjoyed some very positive reviews (including from Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy), so I feel it is safe to include it. Both works were also published recently, late 2022 for the former and early 2021 for the latter.
These two books matter because the story they tell is one that still heavily resonates in Ukraine today. Already before the Russian invasion, it wasn’t rare to hear Ukrainian politicians and analysts lament the loss of their nuclear stockpile in exchange for security guarantees that proved worthless. That frustration only grew stronger after February 2022, and often finds a sympathetic ear in the West as the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 turned into a symbol of what Ukraine should not do—make major concessions while receiving precious few solid security guarantees. In this context, there is a huge value in going back to what actually happened in those crucial years.
Omer Bartov | Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town called Buczacz
There are lots of excellent books about the Holocaust in Eastern Europe broadly, and in the territories now part of Ukraine more specifically, but I think “Anatomy of a Genocide” is one you will particularly want to read if you want to know more about Ukraine and its history. The book is a gut-wrenching, painful retelling of the Holocaust as it unfolded in Buczacz. The town, now located in Western Ukraine, was part of Austro-Hungary until 1918 and Poland until 1939. That contentious history of a place thrown between empires is crucial to understand the Holocaust as it happened in Buczacz—a genocide that was “public and nonchalant”, perpetrated not in faraway camps but just outside the city itself. The first third of the book is thus dedicated to the history of Buczacz in the decades before World War 2, dissecting the rising tensions between the local Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish populations that will explode with the start of the war. It’s a difficult book, but an important one.
Olga Onuch, Henry E.Hale | The Zelensky Effect
I haven’t read this book (yet). What I’ve done however is read a lot of works by Olga Onuch and a lot of interviews she gave in the past years—and they were some of the most interesting sociological studies about the changes of Ukrainian society following the Maidan revolution that I’ve come across. This therefore makes me confident that her book on Ukraine’s unlikely wartime leader is more than just that, that beyond the biography of Volodoymyr Zelensky is an insightful look at the society that brought him to power.
Looks like a great list. I have read some (or at least bought) some of these books.
I’d possibly add one: “War and Punishment” by Mikhail Zygar. I was skeptical at first - too popular. But I saw a blurb by Serhii Plokhy. I’ve only read a couple of chapters, but what Zygar does is digest academic work in a very accessible way. It’s directed at debunking Russian myths about Ukraine. I’d be curious to see what you think.
I’d like to hear from some Ukrainians what they think of Christopher Miller’s book before reading it. I think that a lot of Ukrainians distrust him for his previous biased articles about Ukraine in which he pandered to the Western audiences and helped fuel the “Ukrainians are nazis” myth. He never apologised for this and I’m wondering if he has owned the trust of Ukrainians since.
In general, on matters concerning Ukraine, I’ve learned to fully trust the moral compass of Ukrainians or the people who the Ukrainians themselves trust (like Timothy Snyder) and to be very sceptical of the people who Ukrainians don’t trust.