Books on the Russo-Ukrainian War

“Our Enemies Will Vanish is a superb account of the build-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 by one of the world’s most astute observers of global affairs. Trofimov explains how the bloodiest war Europe has seen since 1945 broke out, and sets out with admirable clarity what is at stake for Ukraine, as well as for the rest of the world” Read more...

The Best Politics Books of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing

“This book is a difficult read but an important one. Aseyev is a journalist from Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine occupied by Russians in 2014. He stayed in Donetsk after the occupation and reported on what was happening. Then he was captured and brought to a concentration camp, where he was imprisoned for two years, from 2017 to 2019. In the book, he describes all the forms of psychological and physical torture that he and the other prisoners of this concentration camp endured. This book allows us to understand the Russian occupation and everything that has been going on since Russia forcibly invaded Ukraine in 2014. When we hear various calls to appeasement, to peace talks with Russia, this is what we need to keep in mind. This is what Russia does on occupied territories. This is what Russia does to Ukrainian citizens. Aseyev’s witness reminds us that we need to keep focusing attention on the lives of those in occupied territories, on the Russian trademark concentration camps. We know that other similar detention centers are mushrooming wherever Russia has been able to establish its occupation authorities.” Read more...

The Best Ukrainian Literature

Sasha Dovzhyk, Literary Scholar

“It tells a personal story of the loss of a brother at the front line of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The author’s brother was killed in 2017. He volunteered to serve in the army to defend his country. It was a point at which the rest of the world had more or less forgotten about the war unfolding in Ukraine. The author, Olesya Khromeychuk, tells the story of her loss in this lucid, compassionate manner. I imagine—I cannot say this for sure, because grief is a strange and personal thing—that it can allow many people to come to terms with the losses they are experiencing today.It is important to recognize the sheer longevity of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The book was republished in 2022, and a few chapters were added to reflect upon the full-scale invasion. Khromeychuk’s book brings the entire, almost decade-long history of the war into the present moment. A work of creative nonfiction, it includes imaginative, fairytale-like stories and dream-like moments, evoking the writer’s emotions, memories, and feelings about her brother.” Read more...

The Best Ukrainian Literature

Sasha Dovzhyk, Literary Scholar

“This is a remarkable book. Owen Matthews is a very experienced journalist with a quarter of a century history of working as the Moscow correspondent of various world media. He’s well-known to the Russia-watching community and he has written a number of books. In my personal opinion, this book has the best possible title: Overreach. It’s one of those cases where a word is spot on. It symbolizes the whole complex thing in just one word…You have a nice little plan which you’re sure will succeed. You have done the same thing before, and it went fine. Then you do it again, but on a larger scale, and everything collapses around your ears. You have overplayed your hand.” Read more...

The Best Russia Books: The 2023 Pushkin House Prize

Ekaterina Schulmann, Political Scientist

“The very title of the book is provocative in that it poses a certain point of view. There has been a dispute going on since the beginning of the war about whether this is Putin’s war or Russia’s war. I’m in Germany, and the quasi-official position here is that it’s Putin’s krieg. It’s not a war that the Russian nation is waging against the Ukrainian nation—it’s a campaign led by the Russian authoritarian leadership. What the author of this book is trying to do is analyze the state of mind of the Russian people. She focuses on public opinion trends.” Read more...

The Best Russia Books: The 2023 Pushkin House Prize

Ekaterina Schulmann, Political Scientist

“The Russo-Ukrainian War is by Serhii Plokhy, a Ukrainian historian at Harvard who looks to history to understand the conflict, seeing it as an ‘old-fashioned imperial war’ with its roots in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. As he notes in the preface, ‘I take a longue durée approach to understanding the current war. I decline the temptation to identify the date of February, 2022, as its beginning, no matter the shock and drama of the all-out Russian assault on Ukraine, for the simple reason that the war began eight years earlier, on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament.'” Read more...

Notable Nonfiction of Early Summer 2023

Sophie Roell, Journalist

“There was another book which I wanted on the shortlist, Alexander Etkind’s Russia Against Modernity, which was published in April. It’s a short one, more of an extended article than a book, which makes it even more readable. Etkind is a well-known thinker. He’s currently at the Central European University in Vienna. He was in Florence for many years. He is the author of Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience. It’s his term, actually. This book is about Russia’s war as a war against modernity, an attempt to stop time.” Read more...

The Best Russia Books: The 2023 Pushkin House Prize

Ekaterina Schulmann, Political Scientist