On “the evening before everything changed”, the Guardian journalist Luke Harding was in Kyiv sharing borscht, Ukraine’s much-loved national dish, with Andrey Kurkov, the country’s most celebrated living writer. On what would become the fateful eve of Russia’s invasion, Kurkov called himself an optimist. Harding described himself as “increasingly gloomy”.
The date of 24 February is now seared in memory and history. Europe’s worst war in 80 years has scorched entire cities, cost many thousands of lives, torn countless families apart and sparked price hikes and hardship far and wide. It has also upended our understanding of Russia’s much-vaunted military might and Ukraine’s now much-lauded fighting spirit. A reminder, if ever there was one, that wars are about metal and mettle.
It’s an impressive turnaround to publish a book entitled Invasion as Russia’s onslaught still unfolds to devastating effect. On a recent long drive travelling through Ukraine to reach the capital, Kyiv, I was reading the book’s chapter describing the run-up to Ukraine’s ingenious counterattack first launched in August on the southern region of Kherson and in the first and only provincial capital, Kherson city, to fall to Russian forces in the early weeks of the war. Then, a few days later in Kyiv, I found myself reading Harding’s online report for the Guardian that Ukrainian forces had entered the city of Kherson on 11 November. Another article of his was bylined “first reporter to reach Mylove in the Kherson region”. In the dangerous killing fields of Ukraine, in areas still occupied by Russian forces, it’s no idle boast.
Harding’s book, his ninth, is framed as “the first rough draft of history”. There aren’t many rough edges to this elegantly written, deeply researched and, most of all, lived history. Harding was there: in Kherson oblast (province), in January, weeks before the invasion and “before a quiet terror descended”; in the Donbas, eastern Ukraine, in December, where the frontlines were “frozen” before becoming the hottest of frontlines in February. Harding either suspected a very big story was about to break or he was just doing his job as a journalist. The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent from 2007 to 2011, until he was expelled, he has stuck with this story. It shows.
There’s a light touch of Ukraine’s deeply layered history, often provided through the reflections of poets and political thinkers from both Russia and Ukraine. History was sitting in every European capital as leaders struggled to respond to this conflagration on their doorstep. But in a war that was never just about Ukraine, there’s also a reminder of how the west’s recent years of “limited and conventional responses” to crimes, including the poisoning of Russian dissidents and the 2014 annexation of Crimea, confirmed President Putin’s view of a weak and irresolute west; it kept fuelling his ambition.
As this punishing war approaches its one-year mark, Invasion is a valuable reminder of those momentous months where “unthinkable things happened… things which seemed impossible in the 21st century”.
Places that dominated headlines for days and then disappeared are brought back and developed in detail: Chornobyl, where Russian tanks rumbled in on the first day, even into the forbidden nuclear area; Snake Island, where a Ukrainian border guard declared “Russian warship, go fuck yourself”, inspiring memes on stamps, T-shirts and more; Mariupol, a place not many of us knew, virtually wiped off the map; and Bucha, a pretty suburb with green picket fences now a byword for war crimes.
And there’s that astonishing arc of military history, from those first hours of disbelief where almost everyone predicted Moscow’s swift success against Ukraine’s outgunned and outmanned forces to the early summer arrival of the US Himars (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System), widely seen as a gamechanger. From day one, this was a war Ukrainians said they would and could win. “We will smash them,” one young officer tells Harding on 24 February. They say it to this day.
Even for those of us who lived through those uncertain early weeks in Kyiv, as a 40-mile long Russian military convoy lumbered ominously towards the capital, this book offers new twists. Did Putin choose the date of 24 February because it was the birthday of one of his heroes, Fyodor Ushakov, the 18th-century naval commander and admiral celebrated for his success in battle? It’s a date Harding says appeared to have “occult-like significance” for the Russian leader.
And there are delicious words too, such as zugzwang. In chess parlance, it means that any move you make leads to a deterioration in your position. Harding’s conclusion, shared by many, is that “Russia had basically lost”. But war, ugly and cruel, always throws up surprises and shocks. As this war drags on, with its growing global consequences, there’s more talk, especially in western capitals where weapons stocks are now running low and energy prices rising high, of trying to find that elusive peace. From the very beginning, many tried to clinch it; many failed. President Zelenskiy, knowing the mood of his people, now prefers the word “victory”. A lot more history may still have to happen before an extraordinary moment like that. Then again, Luke Harding may already be writing his first rough draft.
Lyse Doucet is a presenter and chief international correspondent for the BBC
Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival by Luke Harding is published by Guardian Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
