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.
At 6am he woke and checked his email. A US colleague alerted him to the stunning developments. Russian armoured columns were on the move. They were not merely advancing into eastern Ukraine, which Plokhy had considered the most likely vector for a bigger attack. A war instigated by the Kremlin had raged there since 2014, in which 14,000 people had perished.
Instead, Russian troops were going to Kyiv. Their objective: to overthrow Zelenskiy’s pro-western government and to replace it with a Moscow-loyal Gauleiter administration. Meanwhile, enemy rockets and missiles were falling on the capital and on other cities including Dnipro and Plokhy’s native region of Zaporizhzhia. “It was surreal,” he observed.
Plokhy is the foremost chronicler of early and modern Ukraine and the author of numerous books. They include The Gates of Europe, Lost Kingdom, The Man With the Poison Gun and Chernobyl, a compelling account of the 1986 nuclear disaster, which won the 2018 Baillie Gifford prize. His work is rigorous and objective, and also wonderfully readable and lucid.
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.
The book covers the first 10 months of full-scale war. Its title nods to an outcome that few had imagined when it began: Ukraine’s survival as a sovereign nation. The Kremlin did not make it to Kyiv. Last year, the Russian army lost large swaths of territory it initially occupied. It is now fighting a grinding war against a well-organised state, supported by its citizens, and backed and armed by a rejuvenated west.
The invasion flowed from Putin’s warped imperial thinking. He believed Ukraine to be a part of “historical Russia”. In summer 2021, he published an essay setting out his so-called ideas. After two decades in power, Russia’s dictator-president had become increasingly obsessed with his long-dead predecessors. Portraits of Peter I and Catherine II “made their way” into the Kremlin’s antechamber.
Plokhy describes the current conflict as “an old-fashioned imperial war” conducted by Russian elites who see themselves as “heirs and continuators” of great-power traditions. These expansionist ideas come from Russia and the Soviet Union. The Kremlin’s aggression, he suggests, is a 19th-century land grab, fought using 20th-century battlefield tactics and 21st-century weaponry.
Ukraine, meanwhile, is fighting for its survival. The invasion turbo-charged a process of decolonisation, which began in 1991, and accelerated in 2014 when Putin annexed Crimea. Statues have been toppled, Pushkin and assorted Moscow generals carried away. A plaque to the Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov – who opposed Ukrainian independence – has disappeared from the medical academy in Kyiv where he studied.
The consequences for the global order have been profound. In Plokhy’s view, we have returned to an era of great power rivalries not seen since the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. Ukraine is “a new cold war Germany”, fought over by rival blocs. Putin’s desired international model has a back-to-the-future flavour: spheres of influence, where big countries bully and sometimes chew up smaller ones.
So far, Russia’s brazen challenge to a US-led system has failed. Putin expected the west to grudgingly accept his pan-Ukraine takeover, as it did with Crimea. Instead, the invasion gave rise to an extraordinary anti-Kremlin coalition. It rebooted Nato, with Finland and Sweden joining, and confirmed Washington’s status as the world’s pre-eminent power. It saw Boris Johnson emerge as Kyiv’s mop-headed champion.
US supplies of sophisticated weapons such as long-range artillery systems have driven Ukraine’s counter-offensive. Putin has long railed against American hegemony and called for a “multipolar” world. Plokhy believes the war has taken us into a new age of superpower rivalry. Its poles, however, are Washington and Beijing. Moscow is China’s weaker and poorer partner.
Plokhy’s account of the horrors of Bucha and Kherson is comprehensive. It lacks the vividness of frontline reportage and is mostly sourced from news reports. Where the book breaks new ground is in its analysis of how the war came about. After getting over his shock in February 2022, Plokhy “relearned how to think analytically”. He decided historians were the worst interpreters of current events, except for everyone else.
His chapter contrasting Ukraine and Russia’s different trajectories is fascinating. After a semi-democratic interlude under Boris Yeltsin, Moscow reverted to autocracy. Ukraine, by contrast, managed to preserve a competitive presidential-parliamentary system. Regional differences helped. Pro-reform nationalists in the west of the country had to find compromises with Moscow-leaning communists in the east.
The result, Plokhy writes, was that there was more optimism in Bankova, Ukraine’s equivalent of Downing Street, than in the Kremlin. Ukrainians were unwilling to tolerate tsar-like behaviour or the arbitrary system on offer next door. After becoming president in 2010, Viktor Yanukovych locked up his enemies and stole billions. In 2014, he fled to Moscow after his security forces killed anti-government protesters.
Could the invasion have been prevented? Plokhy points to France and Germany’s fateful decision in 2008 to block a Nato membership plan for Ukraine and Georgia. This concession to Moscow was the “worst possible outcome” and left Kyiv with no protection from the alliance. Months later, Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, a brutal action done to halt Tbilisi’s integration with the west.
There were further errors. They included Germany’s addiction to Russian gas, and Angela Merkel’s axiom that trade might be pursued and growing repression inside Russia ignored. In London, the Conservatives accepted millions from Moscow-linked donors. Johnson made Evgeny Lebedev a peer. And Emmanuel Macron tried to play peacemaker with Putin – an impossible and naive mission.
Zelenskiy’s commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, is expected to launch another counterattack soon. How much land he can wrest back is unclear. Plokhy is cautiously optimistic. Ukraine has already “terminated the era of Russian dominance” in much of eastern Europe, he thinks. It will emerge more united and certain of its identity than at any other point in its modern history.
• Luke Harding’s Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival is published by Guardian Faber
• The Russo-Ukrainian War by Serhii Plokhy is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
