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.
