At the time of writing this review, we still await the big Ukrainian counter-offensive. On its success or failure will depend the future course of the war. In February, when the detailed planning for the Big Push was already starting, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told me how nervous he was about it. Such frankness is typical of him. A charming, natural-seeming former actor, he has brought his professional abilities to the job of representing Ukraine at the highest level: providing the roar, he says, channelling Winston Churchill.
We know that the United States believes Ukraine’s counter-offensive won’t ultimately succeed, because we’ve seen the leaked documents that say so. But, of course, on the morning of 24 February 2022, Washington was sure the Russians would capture Kyiv within days – as were the Russians themselves. Zelenskiy’s decision to stay put, against American advice, was one of the main reasons Ukraine has proved so successful. So, as historian Serhii Plokhy shows in this sober, thoughtful, honest account of the war up to now, was the courage and grit of the 300 Ukrainian soldiers guarding Hostomel Airport outside Kyiv, who shot down several Russian helicopters and ensured that even when the others landed they didn’t have control of the skies.
Basically, though, the Russians defeated themselves, with their shocking incompetence. Some of the tanks destroyed on the approaches to Kyiv contained parade uniforms for the expected victory celebrations, and the invaders brought no more than three days’ worth of food with them. Russian military intelligence had lined up various senior Ukrainians to take control in Kyiv; but when they saw Russia’s failure at Hostomel they backed down abruptly. That morning the Kremlin’s press department had put out a statement talking about the imminent overthrow of “the band of drug addicts and neo-Nazis” that had “taken the whole Ukrainian people hostage”. By the afternoon, when the inhabitants of Kyiv failed to welcome their liberators as Putin had been told to expect, that approach wasn’t looking so good.
Ukraine’s army has done well for three main reasons. Its morale has been sky high. The weaponry that Nato has supplied is mostly a lot better than Russia’s. (To that extent, the Kremlin’s self-pitying claims of being at war with Nato are correct.) The third reason is the remarkable transformation in the military doctrine of the Ukrainian forces. When a high-powered Nato military team visited Kyiv before Russia’s takeover of Crimea in 2014, it found that the Ukrainian army was much like the Russian one, and the Soviet army before them: rather than take a decision and risk punishment, junior officers would pass the buck to their seniors, and the seniors would refer upwards to Moscow. The Nato team taught the Ukrainians that any decision, even a wrong one, was better than no decision at all, and that, cowardice or treachery excepted, there should be no punishment for orders that turned out to be wrong. Liberated by this, the Ukrainian forces have made the Russians look sclerotic and antiquated. Whatever happens now, Putin has demonstrated Russia’s incompetence for the whole world to see.
This book is appearing far too soon to be a definitive account of the war, of course. Plokhy, a Harvard professor of Ukrainian background and the author of the magnificent Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, says himself that it arose from the “shock, pain, frustration, and anger” caused by the invasion; yet it is a fine, scholarly, unemotional chronicling of the war’s origins and early stages. It comes alive when it uses diaries and testimony from people in places like Bucha, outside Kyiv, where 1,650 were killed, nearly half of them shot at point-blank range, sometimes after unspeakable torture. Yet Plokhy keeps his academic distance. There is no ranting.
Did the US promise Russia it wouldn’t expand Nato beyond the borders of East Germany? If some members of the George HW Bush administration did say this, it was entirely unofficial: no such promises were made public. Should Nato have expanded to take in so much of Russia’s former empire? “You have no idea how desperate the Baltic states, Poland, the Czechs, the Romanians and the others are to join,” a senior Nato diplomat told me at the time. “They’re yelling at us that we’ve got to protect them in case Russia comes calling.” The invasion of Ukraine shows how right they were; Putin’s assurances have turned out to be utterly meaningless. In March 2014, after capturing Crimea in contravention of two international treaties, he promised not to take any more Ukrainian territory. By February 2022 he was calling the whole of Ukraine “historically Russian land”.
The invasion, and its accompanying atrocities, have made any simplistic Elon Musk-style “Crimea for Donbas” deal impossible for years to come. Anything can happen now: a sudden victory for Ukraine, a long and bitter stalemate, the overthrow of Putin, all-out nuclear war. This impressive and valuable book can’t tell us which. But it is a clear, reliable and (in the circumstances) remarkably calm account of how we got here.
• John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor. The Russo-Ukraine 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.
