From the coal-dusted, sunflower-covered steppe of the Donbas where authoritarian leader Viktor Yanukovych rose to prominence to the heart of the Euromaidan revolution camp in Kyiv that overthrew him; from the Black Sea shores of Crimea where Russian troops stealthily annexed Ukraine’s peninsula and reshaped the geography of Europe to the bloody battlefields of the east where Russian warlords ruled with iron fists; from the frontline of the war against corruption in the capital to the hipster cocktail bars and underground raves that give the country its quickened pulse; and from the beginnings of the new Ukraine to the destruction and terror wrought by Russian bombs in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and beyond that threaten to wreck it.
This is the story of modern Ukraine and its transformation, as told through the lives of Ukrainians, their fears and struggles. And the savage beauty of a country ravaged by war seen through the eyes of one of the region’s best reporters. It’s Ukraine in all its glory: vast, weird, exhilarating, defiant, resilient, trying to escape the long shadow of its former imperial ruler while fighting to build a new future. And the story of the Ukraine we knew, the Ukraine we have lost, the Ukraine that has been changed forever.
The book will cover four periods, with some history and context woven in: Ukraine before the latest revolution and first Russian invasion (pre-2014); Ukraine during the revolution, annexation, and hottest part of the first war; Ukraine struggling to reform and evolve and peel itself away from Moscow’s sphere of influence amid the simmering war in the east; and then the run-up to and inside Russia’s full-scale invasion. There will be several chapters within each section that delve deep into key events and moments. Woven throughout will be very insightful human stories and personal accounts that help the reader understand Ukraine.
You will meet the oligarchs, the revolutionaries, the warlords, the gangsters, the journalists, the activists shaping Ukraine. You’ll get inside the smoke-filled rooms where they plot and toil, drink and dance, and be transported to the frontlines where they fight and die.
This is not a dry political book but a work of narrative non-fiction filled with vivid and surreal characters, a narrative and evocative exploration of what the country of Ukraine was and is really like.
