Nine Books to Read to Understand the War in Ukraine

Kyiv is burning. I am struggling to explain this to my young children; they know that I wrote a book about the 2013–14 Ukrainian revolution on the Maidan, Kyiv’s central square. They were too small then to understand that their parents’ friends and colleagues were being shot at by snipers. They do know, though, that I dedicated the book to them, “in hope of a better world to come.” And they have had their own experience of post-Maidan Ukraine, playing soccer and dancing at weddings and eating sour-cherry dumplings called varenyky at outdoor cafés.

I am a historian, and so in some sense I always see translucent images from the past juxtaposed on surfaces of the present. Many images are very dark. The Holodomor, the great famine of 1932–33, brought about the deaths of millions of peasants in Soviet Ukraine by starvation. Stalin’s officials confiscated grain from the countryside to pay for the industry that would allow the Soviet Union to “catch up and overtake” the West, a favorite phrase of his. In 1986, still during Soviet rule, the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl dispersed massive radiation, causing thousands of cancer cases.

In part, this abyss of the past made the Ukrainian revolution so breathtaking. What began as a protest against then–Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign an association agreement with the European Union became a revolt against a regime’s violence toward its citizens. The in Kyiv and that Russians need to save their Russian-speaking Ukrainian brothers—by bombing their cities. This is ironic in many ways: The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, , and a native Russian speaker. He won a democratic election with some 73 percent of the vote.