Before my first reporting trip to Ukraine, one of my seasoned war correspondent colleagues had two pieces of advice. First, not to miss the delicious coffee and pastries you can find in Kyiv (which is a wonderfully reassuring thing to hear as you head off towards a conflict). Second, that it was absolutely necessary to read Serhii Plokhy’s 2015 book The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. I did, and it unwound 2,500 years of complex, fascinating and often tragic events, all the way from Herodotus’s accounts of the ancient Scythians to the Maidan protests in Kyiv a decade ago. Now Plokhy and I are speaking by Zoom – me from London, he from his home near Harvard, where he is professor of Ukrainian history. He’s in his study. There are globes on every surface, and antique maps of Ukraine hang on the walls.
Plokhy, 65, is a genial presence – calm, expansive, gently humorous, not given to grandstanding – exactly how you might imagine and want a history professor to be. However, his latest project is anything but conventional historiography. He begins The Russo-Ukrainian War, his new book, by recalling the moment he picked up his phone and checked his emails, early on 24 February last year. He was in Vienna. One email from a Harvard colleague, with whom he’d been discussing the prospect of an all-out invasion, hoped he was OK. “I was not OK,” he writes. Aside from anything, his sister and her family were in Zaporizhzhia, the south-eastern city where he’d grown up. By the time he called her, she could already hear the pounding of Russian artillery. He describes how he dressed carefully, that first morning, putting on a shirt and a blazer for a visit to some archives – “to show that I was collected and prepared to carry out my duties, whatever they might be”. The book ends with an afterword that pays heartbreaking tribute to his cousin, killed in October near Bakhmut.
