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
On 23 February 2022, Serhii Plokhy was in Vienna on sabbatical from his teaching job at Harvard. He went to bed hoping the disturbing news on CNN was somehow wrong. Like many others, including his country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian historian was reluctant to believe Russia was about to launch a full-scale assault on his homeland.
The omens suggested otherwise. That autumn, Vladimir Putin had massed tanks and battalions close to Ukraine’s borders. And yet it was hard to believe this portended a brazen imperial expedition by one state against another, and the biggest war in Europe since 1945. “I believed the troop movement was part of Russian blackmail,” Plokhy writes. Continue reading...
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