In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

by Tim Judah

From one of the finest journalists of our time comes a definitive, boots-on-the-ground dispatch from the front lines of the conflict in Ukraine.“Essential for anyone who wants to understand events in Ukraine and what they portend for the West.”—The Wall Street Journal Ever since Ukraine’s violent 2014 revolution, followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the country has been at war. Misinformation reigns, more than two million people have been displaced, and Ukrainians fight one another on a second front—the crucial war against corruption.With In Wartime, Tim Judah lays bare the events that have turned neighbors against one another and mired Europe’s second-largest country in a conflict seemingly without end.In Lviv, Ukraine’s western cultural capital, mothers tend the graves of sons killed on the other side of the country. On the Maidan, the square where the protests that deposed President Yanukovych began, pamphleteers, recruiters, buskers, and mascots compete for attention. In Donetsk, civilians who cheered Russia’s President Vladimir Putin find their hopes crushed as they realize they have been trapped in the twilight zone of a frozen conflict. Judah talks to everyone from politicians to poets, pensioners, and historians. Listening to their clashing explanations, he interweaves their stories to create a sweeping, tragic portrait of a country fighting a war of independence from Russia—twenty-five years after the collapse of the USSR.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Ukraine, War, Politics, Russia, Travel

279 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 10, 2015

About the author

Tim Judah is a reporter and political analyst for The Economist, and has written several books, mainly focussing on Serbia and Kosovo. A graduate of the London School of Economics and of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University he worked for the BBC[1] before becoming the Balkans correspondent for The Times and The Economist. During the Kosovo war he broadcast widely and wrote for the New York Review of Books,[2] The Observer, The Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian Weekend magazine. Judah is also the author of the prizewinning The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, published in 1997 by Yale University Press. Judah has reported from numerous places, for a wide variety of newspapers, and other outlets. Apart from the Balkans, Judah has reported from countries including El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan and Uganda. In 2009, Judah was a Senior Visiting Fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics. Recently, Judah has also written highly praised articles relating to the War in Donbass. He is now based in West London and is married to writer and publisher Rosie Whitehouse and has five children.

Reviews

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Wartime: Stories from the Ukraine

In his 2015 narrative, Tim Judah, a reporter for the Economist and the New York Review of Books, provides a vivid picture of the lives of ordinary Ukrainians in the period since the Maidan Revolution, Russia’s capture of the Crimea, and the conflict in the Eastern Donbas region. He travels through the country, beginning at the western Polish border through to Kyiv to the east near the Russian border, and interviews Ukrainians from all walks of life, young, old, and of diverse ethnic backgrounds. Judah intersperses their stories onto discussions of recent history and politics.

In Wartime enhanced my understanding of the events leading to the current conflict. However, it also made me aware of the gaps in my knowledge of Ukrainian history. Unfortunately, I listened to the book on audio which I regretted. It would have been better to read it and easier to look up background information if I had the Ukrainian spellings in front of me in writing. That said, I strongly recommend the book. It is beautifully and clearly written, and it couldn’t be more timely!

[Maciek · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's the end of January, 2017. War in Ukraine has been going on for almost three years, yet the conflict has all but disappeared from most media outlets. The focus of the world has been uniformly on Syria , a country torn in a bloody civil war for almost six years, and the incredible amount of terror and suffering inflicted on its citizens, which resulted in the greatest refugee and migration crisis in recent memory. Ukraine quickly disappeared from newspaper headlines, being demoted to an occasional paragraph or two at best, if it was mentioned at all. When reporters talk about preventing another Srebrenica, they are talking about the city of Aleppo in Syria; the fact that another Srebrenica can just as well happen again in Europe is not discussed anymore, and the annexation of Crimea by Russia seems to be all but accepted.

Tim Judah is an author and correspondent who has covered and written about conflicts in several countries - most recently about Ukraine for The Economist. In Wartime is a collection of dispatches and stories from the country, which he has amassed via his travels throughout it, and his conversations with the local people.

Good things first: In Wartime is very readable and engaging, and offers plenty of information about Ukraine to those who are not very familiar with the country. Judah takes care to offer background information for locations that he visits, indulging the reader with plenty of anecdotes about the very complex and often tragic history of Ukraine, a country which for long has been torn between its neighbors, and has suffered purges, pogroms, an incredible man-made famine and occupation which has killed millions of its citizens - all in the last century.
Judah has to be commanded for remaining neutral and letting his subjects speak for themselves, and the many conversations that he has with people that he meets show how far from uniform Ukrainian society is, and how it is divided on many important subjects, such as its ties with Russia.
An important question which hangs in the air is: what does it mean to be Ukrainian in a country which for centuries has been a melting pot of peoples, a crossroad of cultures? This is a tough question to answer: in the capital of the country streets are renamed to honor the Ukrainian insurgents who fought both against Nazism and communism, while at the same time a history museum and its director whitewash crimes committed by these same insurgents against ethnic Poles and Jews during that time. In another part of the country, these insurgents are viewed with condemnation as are the people who honor them, a fact which is constantly milked by political enemies of Ukraine to create further division.

The complain which I would have about Judah's book lies in its form: it is a collection of dispatches, and by no means aims to pain a complete - or even broad - picture of Ukraine, its society and even the conflict. What it does is show the reader individual faces of people of Ukraine who would otherwise mostly never be given a voice. The book offers glimpses into Ukraine and its history, but glimpses is all they are. I would argue that the book would have benefited from a central, unifying thread - such as the author trying to recreate the history of the conflict by traveling from one town to the other, as the way various towns are presented can be a little disorienting and confusing. Reading In Wartime can feel very disjointed, but then again we can argue that this is the nature of reporting - we read dispatches from where the reporter happens to be present at the time. But then again, what exactly is stopping him from organizing his thoughts, experiences and the material he gathered more coherently for book form?

While I would not name In Wartime as essential reading, I think the book will be useful for anyone willing to broaden their knowledge about Ukraine, and the causes and history of the conflict in the country, and hopefully inspire them to read more about them. I would even say that the book might be a necessary one - to remind the world that in the middle of Europe, in a country which co-hosted the 2012 UEFA European Championship, shots are being fired and people are dying.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the last 100 years Ukraine has suffered war, pogroms, political purges and famine, not all of which were carried out by outsiders. The country is large and perpetrators and victims are still around (as well as their children and grandchildren) with silence, anger and no national consensus. Judah covers a lot of ground both literally and figuratively. He visits destinations of note and interviews a variety of people.

Judah visits places that would hardly appear on a tourist map. There are grim war memorials comprised of tanks, shells and military vehicles; commemorations for the famine(s); a memorial that names those who disappeared to the Gulag after the war and a hotel built on the grounds of a former detention camp.

Chernobyl is 120 kilometers away and there is unique zoo and zoological lab, Askania-Nova, in Kherson Oblast. A trip to Bessarabia shows the situation of a province attached to its country by only a road. Lvov is an example of the dislocation that followed World War II: After the war 780,00 Poles crossed the border to live back in Poland and 439,000 Ukranian from elsewhere took their place in Lvov (not exactly, Russian soldiers occupied the empty houses). The Jewish population was nearly wiped out.

People seem willing to talk. In the eastern Ukraine there is loyalty to Russia and an unexpected veneration of Stalin who wreaked so much misery on this country. Those in western Ukraine look to Europe and hope to join the EU, but the endemic corruption makes it difficult for some to be patriotic. There is hope that EU membership and its standards will help reduce corruption. A large segment of the population, in both the east and west, only wants only a settled future and does not care who provides it.

All suffer from the cost of war and the uncertain future. Jobs are hard to find, bribing to get a job is common. Mortgages are made in foreign currencies and the devaluation of the Hryvnia has meant default for many. As elsewhere in the world, young people go to the cities and the elderly are in the countryside. Since the elderly can neither work or sell their land, most supplement their pensions by renting it out.

Two interviews and biographies stand out, not only for what they say, but for their globalized lives. One is the American Natalie Jaresko, Ukraine’s Minister of Finance, the other is a port owner/manager Andrey Stavnitser.

There is an OK index and there are notes. The photos are not labeled; often the content is clear from the narrative, but not always.

This is a good overview and puts a human face on the issues of this troubled country.

[Darya Silman · Rating 4 out of 5]

IN WARTIME: STORIES FROM UKRAINE sees author Tim Judah picturing the country as something with more potential than the sum of its historically and politically divided parts.

I picked up the book IN WARTIME: STORIES FROM UKRAINE, thinking that wartime refers to the present conflict. The well-preserved book was on the shelf under 'Military History' in our local library, along with my previous read, DIARY OF AN INVASION by Andrey Kurkov. However, it was published in 2015 after the start of rebel actions in Luhansk/Donetsk regions. In our modern, fast-paced life, the difference in 8 years (2015 against 2024) sometimes seems insuperable. MeToo, George Floyd, Angela Merkel, Trump, Covid, Yemen, 2022 invasion of Ukraine, 2023 exhalation between Israel and Palestine, floods and earthquakes - too little time, too little space to describe the world events of 8 years in one sentence. In this sense, the predictions the author and his interviewees made in 2015 quickly became outdated. The author didn't intend to demonstrate his ability to predict the future by delving into the past. What I needed, I thought, was not another straight history and not a political science-cum-analytical text. From what I could see on bookshop shelves and online, there was nothing focused on those bits of history which it is important to understand today, as opposed to Ukrainian history in general, nor was there a book which gave a flavour of what Ukraine is really like and what its people have to say, especially outside Kyiv.

The book, a compilation of interviews, describes the author's encounters with ordinary (and not so ordinary, like a Minister of Finance) Ukrainians from 2012 to 2015. He went to the far west of Ukraine, Bessarabia, a place rarely mentioned in recent studies because of its apartness and insignificance compared to the flaming east provinces. He went to DNR and LNR to talk with Russia-backed rebels and pro-Ukrainian citizens. Whatever oblast he described, he always included tidbits of its history as far back as 200 years. Tim Judah shows that the Ukrainian government's inability to fight against corruption has played into Russia's hands during the ongoing info war. The 2015 situation resembled a chicken and egg paradox: corruption led to the population's impoverishment, discontent, and low Western investments, while, to fight the rebels, Ukraine needed money and popular support. Ukrainians have been leaving Ukraine en masse since before 2014, coming, for example, to work in Estonia; Estonians, in their turn, have been going to Sweden or Finland in search of better salaries.

In contrast to the tradition observed in books after 2022, Tim Judah credits all sides without portraying pro-Russian views as wrong and pro-Ukrainian views as correct. In 2015, the diversity of opinions was tolerated and accepted. The year 2022 rewrote the history of Ukraine: anything less than the glorification of UPA in WW2 (like in THE WAR AFTER THE WAR by Mart Laar) or any mentions of widespread corruption have been made equal to Putin's support.

The author's intention to be as diverse as possible within 300 pages shows in the inevitable glut of information, and at the end of the book, I needed help remembering the interviewees' names. Secondly, as this is a incomplete narrative of Ukraine, knowledge of its history and geography is required in order to place events/locations within the broader context.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a marvelously researched book. Tim Judah visited each area of Ukraine and talked to people there and the wrote about it in this book. I cannot fully do it justice, I will include here what struck me most.

A possible reason for the war that followed the violent Maidan in 2014. “People were just angry.”

“In a country rich enough to provide its inhabitants with very decent lives, the EU deals were seen as some sort of lifebuoy to grab on to. By linking their fate to the West, many thought that the gradual implementation of the agreements would create the thing that had been missing in their lives – a state of law.”

Likewise, “it was also natural for many in the east to look to Russia, because of their historic, ethnic, language, family and business ties.”

“What you believe today depends on what you believe about the past. In that sense it is important for the “political technologists,” to use the pithy and apt term popular in post-Soviet countries, who might be understood by Westerners as turbo-spin doctors, to fashion a past which suits the future they are trying to create.”

“One of the great failings of the modern Ukrainian state is that it has never been able to create an all-encompassing post-Soviet narrative of modern Ukrainian history that was broadly accepted by most, if not all.” Judah’s example for Britain is Churchill’s famous speech about heroically fighting the enemy on the beaches. Most Britain’s have heard this speech and are proud of it and the spirit of defiance and courage it represents.

“The Chernobyl catastrophe was an historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.”

As I write this review, Russia is sending missiles into Lviv and I think not only of the people but also the rich cultural history and beautiful architecture. “Its center is a fabulous collection of gothic, renaissance, baroque and classic nineteenth century Austro-Hungarian styles.” Lviv is a veritable ‘melting pot’ of cultures and languages spoken include Yiddish, German, and Polish in addition to Ukrainian and Russian.

Lviv means different things to different people. “Poles remember a great city lost to them, a cultured and important Polish city, which they had fought the Ukrainians for in 1918 and managed to keep for Poland. Ukrainians recall Polish repression and the way they declared an independent Ukrainian state there twice, in 1918 and 1941. For Jews it is a city with an ancient Jewish history, swept away by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators.” In recent years, historians have been brought together to collaborate on a cohesive history of the people.

“Religion in Ukraine can be complicated. The mainstream Orthodox Church is divided between the Moscow Patriachate and the Kiev Patriarchate. There is also the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, founded in 1921, and the Greek Catholic Church, which is part of the wider Catholic community but draws on Orthodox rites and traditions.”

Bolgrad, Ukraine is situated close to the border with Moldova and has a Bulgarian cultural center which includes a small museum, “containing exhibits of Bulgarian ethnographic interest.” The exhibits include items such as a Soviet flag “and information on the “Communist Inquisition,” the Gulag and the Holodomor.” This exhibition is remarkable in that it unlike other exhibitions that tend to deny or ignore the darker parts of history, it “actually reflects what many ordinary unideological people think: it is possible to honor those who fought the Nazis and fascism without denying the evils wrought by communism in the Ukraine.”

“Donbass is a bandit region, and for local people things have become worse and worse since the 1990s. The local political-cum-mafia classes were not just stealing money, they were “carrying it out in suitcases. They are stealing our land too and our air, which is very polluted with methane gas which is everywhere and destroying our ecology. People are dying early because of the ecological situation.””

“Donetsk is the epicenter of the conflict. It has always had a reputation as a rough and ready kind of place.” […] “Whatever happens, the fate of the city and the region without such creative people, without modern-minded pro-Europeans and entrepreneurs, will be all the poorer. Some even say that in this way Donetsk is reverting to type. It is becoming again what it originally was: a small, rough-and-ready and violent place.”

“It is undeniable that, on the Ukrainian side of the war, some politicians and some organizations have their roots in the far right. It is a fact that is used against the country in the info-war, and the negative effect of this in the West is something which many Ukrainians don’t understand.”

Andrey Stavnitser “runs a particularly successful port business, which was built from scratch [which] makes what he has to say especially interesting.” […] “The company and port are called TIS, or Transinvestservice.” When his father died, he divided the business between him and his brother. “In these turbulent times Andrey has made no secret of which side of the barricades he is on. At the entrance to the TIS port is a giant Tranformers-style robot sculpture holding a Ukrainian flag.”

During the demonstrations in 2014, Andrey went among the protestors to learn to what they had to say. He “was shocked that middle-class people were among them.” […] “They were just fed up with low salaries and low pensions.”

Andrey estimated that perhaps thirty percent of his workers were pro-Russia and seventy percent pro-Ukraine. “The difference would be ten percent of the pro-Russians were actively propagating their views. When the war began and a port train driver stuck a Donetsk People’s Republic flag on the locomotive, Andrey says he was fired within two hours.”

“More sinister was the day his security men found a man dressed like a homeless person snooping about. When they searched him they found he had a Russian military officer’s ID document on him. He was handed over to the Ukrainian security services.” It was suspected that he was scouting the port for a possible area for military operations.

I picked up this book to learn about the people of Ukraine and their country and found it interesting and the information accessible.

[Mikey B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Judah travels the length and breath of Ukraine probing what is beneath the surface. After the Maidan demonstrations, the Russian annexation of the Crimea along with the subsequent support of separatist groups in Eastern Ukraine (Donbas) the future of Ukraine is in peril.

Page xv (my book, a cemetery near Poland))

Every tomb tells a story, but even more than that every memorial, or at least the more recent ones, is still fighting the history wars for those who fell for their cause. Over here are the men of the Austro-Hungarian army who died fighting the Russians in the First World War. Up here are the Poles who died fighting the Ukrainians when it was over, and next to them are their Ukrainian enemies. Here are the people murdered by the Soviets in 1941. Here are the Soviets who died fighting the Nazis. Here is a monument to the local Ukrainian SS Division. Here are the other Ukrainians who fought with the Nazis, against them, against the Poles again and then against the Soviets.

Nothing is entirely clear-cut. Ukraine is made up of many people of mixed Ukrainian and Russian heritage. Through-out Ukraine there is a constant switch between both languages, and there is also a blended version of Ukrainian/Russian.

Historically Ukraine has been very polarized in its confrontations. After the First World War, Ukrainians fought both Polish and Russian invaders. Western Ukraine was part of Poland and Eastern Ukraine part of the Soviet Union. In the 1930’s millions died from famine (the Holodomor) under Stalin’s modernizations plans.

In the Second World War, some Ukrainians fought with the Nazis, others with the Red Army, and still others for an independent Ukraine. And in the middle of all this were the Jews – and their plight was so horrendous that hardly any are left. After the end of the Second World War the ethnic cleansing continued under Stalin with Poles being forcibly removed from “Ukraine” and Ukrainians removed from “Poland”.

So all these memory scars are bubbling in the current war with Russia’s Putin. Ukraine is very low in the Transparency International Global rankings for corruption for 2016 (# 131); the same as Russia and behind countries like Sierra Leone and Pakistan. Corruption is at such a level that if a bribe is not accepted you may be murdered.

The Ukraine’s extreme right-wing with its’ Neo-Nazi outlook and paraphernalia is great propaganda for Putin to illustrate the Fascist-Nazi outlook of Ukraine – and gives ammunition (literally) as to why Russia should intervene and annex this “fanatical state”. The irony of this is that Russia itself is upping its own nationalist rhetoric, and whatever existed of a democratic media is rapidly disappearing.

The problem with the xenophobic Ukrainian right-wing is that they are the ones most willing to fight to stop the Russian encroachment – and many paramilitary units are forming on both sides of the border.

Page 166
Putin’s problem was to persist in believing, as he said, when Crimea was annexed: “We are not just close neighbours, we are essentially, as I have said more than once, a single people.” In other words, he could not bring himself to see that what might have been true long ago ( and many Ukrainians would disagree even with that) was no longer true now for most Ukrainians, and by starting what he had done he was making it even less true than it was before. By turning millions of hitherto friendly Ukrainians into enemies Putin might have won Crimea but the cost was losing Ukraine.


This book is a unique and personal exploration of the current situation in Ukraine. There are many Ukrainians who want no part of Putin’s Russia – and there are others who admire his strong-arm tactics. And many Ukrainians want no part of the E.U. as well, which is viewed as soft, Gay, and immigrant friendly. All of this contrasts with a growing Ukrainian nationalism.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Americans have some interest in Ukraine these days, which is nice, although the interest extends only insofar as the country plays a role in our national reality show. Once Trump is acquitted by the Senate, Ukraine will be forgotten, just as Crimea and the post-Soviet Budapest Memorandum (in which the U.S., as well as the U.K. and Russia, guaranteed the territorial integrity of Ukraine) have been forgotten. Fortunately, Tim Judah, a British journalist who covered the Balkans in the 90s, provides nuance and context for anyone who wants a glimpse of the country beyond MSNBC bullet points. In Wartime is neither "left" nor "right", although the self-evidence of those terms seems to become nebulous when I think about Ukraine these days. I tend to watch and read and listen to a fair amount of left-wing stuff, for example, and I agree with a lot of it, but I'm always disappointed by American left-wing discussions of Ukraine, which tend to involve terms like "NATO expansion", "U.S.-backed coup", "neo-Nazis" and "American imperialism." I've come to the tentative conclusion that a lot of people believe things like this about the Ukrainian revolution not because they've looked into it, but because they're applying what they know about U.S. foreign policy in relation to other parts of the world, especially Latin America. That history should never be forgotten; we should try not to elect presidents who are friends with Henry Kissinger. But in the particular case of Ukraine, the U.S. coup idea depends on believing a number of absurdities, not the least of which is the notion that the CIA manipulated hundreds of thousands of ordinary Ukrainians into gathering at Maidan, staying there for months in freezing temperatures, and in some cases losing their lives. U.S. agents also must have manipulated Ukrainians into believing that Yanukovich and the Russian government didn't have their best interests at heart...except that Ukrainians figured that out on their own, no Western propaganda necessary, and the subsequent Russian invasion of their country- now responsible for over 10,000 deaths and millions displaced- seems to have solidified the notion. But the broader problem with the coup interpretation, aside from the fact that there's no evidence for it, is that it ignores the agency of Ukrainians. A more plausible explanation might be that a majority simply wanted to live in a more just society- less unequal, less corrupt, less autocratic. And with a belligerent, more militarily powerful country on their eastern border, led by ideologues who believe that Ukraine is "not a real country", maybe they have a valid reason for wanting to join the EU and NATO after all.

Which is not to say that I prefer the right-wing interpretation- it would be a stretch to even call it an interpretation in Trump's case. He sized up Zelensky and thought he could exploit him; he obviously despises Ukraine and Ukrainians, and couldn't care less about helping them fight corruption or deal with Russia. He despises them for the same reason he despises the Kurds, Latin American immigrants, Puerto Ricans, Palestinians, and protestors in Hong Kong- he perceives them as weak. Because Trump worships power, and because Putin seems to be powerful, Trump knows that Putin must be right: that Ukrainians and Russians are "really the same people", which incidentally is not very different from the claim that Hitler once made to justify bringing Austria into the Reich.

Our culture of knee-jerk reaction is another reason that journalism like Judah's- in which he takes the time to explore the country, meet people both in positions of power but also in various humble walks of life, testing what he's read against what he's observed, open to nuance- is so worthwhile. I especially recommend chapters 24 and 25, about the origins of the eastern city of Donetsk. Founded as a coal-mining and steel town in the late 19th century by Welsh businessman John Hughes, and originally called Hughesovka, it was renamed Stalin in the early years of the Soviet Union- not as a tribute to the Soviet leader, but because stal is the Russian word for "steel", which was the city's business. It sounds like just about all of post-Soviet Donetsk (this name derives from a tributary of the Don that flows through the city) was bought up by the oligarch Rinat Akhmetov- these years saw the construction of modern apartment buildings, a soccer stadium, and an airport built in time for the European soccer tournament in 2012 (and today lying in ruins), but also the closing of factories, high unemployment, poverty, and growing inequality. Reading these chapters, I was struck by the parallels with the U.S. Rust Belt, an area of the country that was crucial for Trump's election. What's also deeply familiar is that the Ukrainian President Yanukovich, coached by none other than Paul Manafort, used social issues and identity politics (Ukrainian language vs. Russian language, whose grandparents did what during World War II) to divide people while perpetuating the same inequality and oligarchic corruption that he claimed to be fighting against. For a guy like Manafort, all of our countries were the same mark, and it sounds like he used the same formula everywhere he went: find the petty, ephemeral things that people bitch at each other about, divide people against each other, offer populist rhetoric, and maintain the corrupt system exactly the way it is. Ah, the fruits of an elite Catholic education.

Another thing that's commendable about Judah's account is his attempt to understand the perspectives of people in eastern Ukraine, including those who supported the separatists- he treats desperate people who reached for an extreme solution with empathy rather than contempt, which is probably something many of us could learn from. The separatist leaders themselves are a different story, and come across as self-styled ideologues on their own deluded trips, quoting "philosophers" like Alexander Dugin and saying things like "Ukrainians are Russians who refuse to admit their Russian-ness"; but others are people with genuine struggles, additionally terrified by the Russian media's coverage of the revolution (the Donbas region, which includes Donetsk, was/is saturated by Russian media, and a friend of mine who was there in 2014 told me that it was impossible to watch that coverage every day and take the side of the Maidan protestors), as a U.S.-backed neo-Nazi coup in faraway Kyiv. Judah reminds us that we can hold two ideas simultaneously: we can try to understand people whose legitimate struggles led them to embrace an extreme political solution, and we can also condemn the purveyor of that solution. In this case that means placing the blame for the war in Ukraine exactly where it belongs- on Russia.

Speaking of Nazis, another worthwhile chapter is 31, which discusses the Azov Battalion- yes, those guys with the Wolfsangel on their uniforms. Judah traces their development from a right-wing political organization in Kharkiv called Patriot of Ukraine to a self-organized battalion once the Russian invasion began in the east. There were many of these battalions, militias that sprang up in the wake of the Russian invasion, at a time when the Ukrainian military was ill-equipped. And while Azov effectively defended the port city of Mariupol, a city that could have allowed Russia to create a land bridge to Crimea, they obviously didn't do Ukraine any favors in terms of public perception. But read over the entire chapter, and I think you'll find that Judah very effectively debunks the idea that the group is in any way representative of the Ukrainian revolution:

In terms of winning the war for public opinion, the Azov battalion and the charge of Ukrainian neo-Nazism, fascism and extreme nationalism all combine to make Ukraine's Achilles' heel. Small elements of truth have painted, and allowed the Russian media and their Western fellow travelers to paint, an utterly distorted picture of the whole. In the general election of October 2014 Ukraine's far-right parties flopped. In electoral terms they are insignificant compared to their strength in Hungary, France or Italy, for example. And yet, many Westerners do not see this. Many also do not see that much of the Russian propaganda aimed at depicting Ukraine as a kind of Third Reich reincarnated is a sort of displacement activity. It is, after all, Russia which is in the grip of nationalistic euphoria and whose once nascent democracy has died as people rally round its one and only unchallenged leader.

The brief chapter 32 reminded me that Eric Hoffer's The True Believer is as relevant as it ever was. Judah meets a former French military officer by the name of Castel, who made a living in French Guiana as an Amazon tour guide before showing up in Ukraine. How many other Oswalds are out there longing to do something, be someone, just waiting to be healed by ideology, convinced of a noble crusade? Where else will they wash up, in this strange century of ours?

For Castel, the rebel Donbass cause is a noble crusade, which he has joined with the zeal of those foreigners who once flocked to the cause of the Spanish Republic. Everything he told me and believes about Ukraine has been said by the Kremlin's propaganda machine, but anything that counters this narrative is regarded as Western propaganda serving the interests of the American military-industrial complex...millions of Westerners also share some or all of his beliefs. They are the point where the worldview of the extreme right meets that of the extreme left. This is why among the foreigners fighting for the rebels in Ukraine there are modern-day fascists ranged alongside extreme leftists who believe they are participating in a new and glorious communist revolution. In this ideological confusion communist flags fly alongside ones depicting Christ. There is no inkling that maybe Putin believes in none of this and in one thing only: power.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an American, I can safely vouch for my ignorance of the state of affairs in whole sections of the Earth. While I consider myself reasonably well-informed, my job does not require an extensive knowledge of world affairs, and for the most part American news understandably focuses on stories that are of interest to most Americans. Like how much Donald Trump pays for his hair weave.

But one night I was watching the news and my young daughter walked in while the news was briefly focused on Russia's efforts to annex Crimea. She asked me to explain what was going on, and to my shame I realized that I couldn't even start. I was vaguely aware of the Maidan Revolution in 2014 in Ukraine and I knew of Vladimir Putin's cynical attempts to re-annex Crimea. But beyond that, my knowledge of Ukraine was limited to my childhood "RISK"-playing days.

In an attempt to remedy my narrow perspective, I picked up Tim Judah's "In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine." Tim Judah's book can go a long way toward remedying even the most casual reader's lack of knowledge of Ukraine - a better-researched but more-depressing book is hard to imagine. Ukraine, for lack of a better word, is broken. Judah, a political analyst for The Economist and author of well-reviewed books on Kosovo and the Serbs, takes a journalist's approach with "In Wartime." The book is almost a travelogue as Judah has divided the book into sections that correspond to the geographic regions of the country, which may be the most logical way to try to understand this war-torn country, given that it lies between some of the biggest powers in Eurasia - Russia to the East, the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the West, and Poland to the Northeast. Only the Black Sea to the south offers a safe border. One would be hard-pressed to find a country more perfectly situated to be the hot spot for European-Russian conflict.

As Judah explains as he tours the country and talks to dozens of people, both from the downtrodden and the connected, "Ukraine" is a fairly odd concept. While it's clear who a German is, or if you're English, it's not clear who a Ukrainian is. A Ukrainian from the city of Lviv in the West is much more likely to have European sympathies and a Polish cultural heritage than a Ukrainian from Lugansk to the East, a few miles from the Russian border. In addition to being divided by language and culture, the regions of Ukraine are also riven by the belief that only they are doing their part, but the criminals and thieves from the other parts of the country are coasting on their efforts. As one frustrated politico explains, it's hard to pay for schools when nobody pays their taxes, which they do not pay because the government can't provide the basic necessities of life, like schools.

When you add the confounding political vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of the kleptocracy that has elevated corruption to a systemic art form, 2014's ousting of elected President Viktor Yanukovych, and the economic collapse caused by the Russian invasion of Crimea, you see a country that is not functioning in any modern sense. A teacher must pay a bribe to get a teaching job. Judges are bribed to put business competitors in jail. Commercial litigation is won by whoever pays the most under the table. Raise your voice to complain, and you might not live out the month. We hear in the U.S. about the collapse in trust in institutions, but in Ukraine there are no institutions to trust in the first place.

While Judah focuses on the people living and fighting in today's Ukraine, he rounds out the book with a high-level review of Ukrainian history, giving just enough background for the non-initiated reader like myself to understand the context of Ukraine's problems. And that context is essential, as otherwise you would throw up your hands and say the whole country had gone insane.

While I cannot say that "In Wartime" is an essential read, it is an important one for anyone who wishes to understand their world a little better. Judah has done a noble service by bringing the stories of this war-torn land to light, so we can better understand the human cost of the headlines we all too often skim over.III

[Lance Charnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

The war in Ukraine still stutters on three years after its beginning following the 2013-4 Euromaidan rebellion that brought down that country's kleptocratic president. We in the West don't hear about it anymore unless the chronic disease becomes acute, such as the recent exchanges of shelling in the east. Even when the war in the Donbass was blazing hot and fast on our TV screens back in 2014-5, all most of us west of the Danube ever knew about it was framed in the larger U.S.-versus-Russia geopolitical game.

In Wartime presents the background behind the shaky cell-phone footage of burning buildings and dying men. It tries to answer the great question that underlays all the political and military wrangling: how did Ukraine, a nation that should be so rich, end up being such a basket case?

In a series of essays organized by region, the author assembles the depressing but convincing answer: the state of arrested chaos in Ukraine today is not only normal but practically inescapable, given the nation's grim history over the past two centuries. Like many other central and eastern European nations, Ukraine has been repeatedly invaded, partitioned, and had its borders shift hundreds of miles; it has alternately repressed and been repressed by a series of other nations and peoples; it's known revolts, short-lived breakaway "republics" from across the political spectrum, civil war, world war, massacres, pogroms, and two devastating man-made famines; and it's been misruled by tyrants and thieves both foreign and home-grown for centuries. The current state of the nation would be familiar to the great-grandparents of today's combatants.

Tim Judah, the Balkans correspondent for The Economist, has seen all this before, in the benighted former Yugoslavia as it spectacularly committed suicide in the 1990s. He knows how to navigate this kind of broken ground, who to talk to, what questions to ask. He talks to both officials and common citizens, the young and the old, the well-off and the poor. Through these interviews, we get an affecting portrait of a people that's tired of the fighting, can't see their way out of it, but can still glimpse some hope for the future, even though they can't agree on how that hope will arrive.

Judah writes like a journalist. The many essays that make up this book read like extended human-interest features in a magazine like The New Yorker. The effect is pointillistic: a quote here, a poignant sight there, a bit of history to explain a particular point, some fact-checking. When you pull back, the dots become a picture. He reports what his interviewees say, but he later debunks their more egregious lies and fantasies (which are distressingly common; weaponized history and fake news are like air there, especially in the eastern part of the country).

For a book called In Wartime, there's remarkably little war reporting. We're well into the second half of the book before we arrive at the front as it existed in late 2015. That's fitting in a way. It seems the actual fighting is almost beside the point; the real action is in the posturing and issuing of manifestos and spinning of narratives that are long on grievance and short on substance or strategy. Still, if you're looking for a blow-by-blow of battles and weapons and which militias did what, you won't find it here. Also on the negative side of the ledger: the pictures are too few, too small and uncaptioned, and there's no index worthy of the name, which makes referring back to a name or incident very hard, indeed.

There's no uplift in this book. When you finish the last page, you'll be ready to wash your hands of the place and write it off as an irredeemable mess. Other reviewers have criticized this book for not having a single throughline. It does, but that throughline is so bleak that you may wish it wasn't there at all. As an easily readable guide to one of the globe's intractable conflicts, though, In Wartime is an excellent resource to get you started.

[F.E. Beyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This prepared me for reading 'Overreach' which details the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. 'In Wartime' is about the conflicts in Eastern Ukraine that started in 2014. It's somewhat disjointed, but having read it took the pressure off me trying to understand the events of 2014 solely from the opening chapters of Overreach. There are many complex factors to grapple with in trying to understand how the current Ukraine War came about. A good summary would be to say Putin is nuts, but that's not the whole story.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

From one of the finest journalists of our time comes a definitive, boots-on-the-ground dispatch from the front lines of the conflict in Ukraine.
Ever since Ukraine s violent 2014 revolution, followed by Russia s annexation of Crimea, the country has been at war. Misinformation reigns, more than two million people have been displaced, and Ukrainians fight one another on a second front the crucial war against corruption.
With "In Wartime," Tim Judah lays bare the events that have turned neighbors against one another and mired Europe s second-largest country in a conflict seemingly without end.
In Lviv, Ukraine s western cultural capital, mothers tend the graves of sons killed on the other side of the country. On the Maidan, the square where the protests that deposed President Yanukovych began, pamphleteers, recruiters, buskers, and mascots compete for attention. In Donetsk, civilians who cheered Russia s President Putin find their hopes crushed as they realize they have been trapped in the twilight zone of a frozen conflict.
Judah talks to everyone from politicians to poets, pensioners, and historians. Listening to their clashing explanations, he interweaves their stories to create a sweeping, tragic portrait of a country fighting a war of independence from Russia twenty-five years after the collapse of the USSR."

This book is a series of short stories, many written from a journalists point of view about war torn Ukraine. The book begins by providing a map and a brief history of the country. There are also stories from locals about living in the country turning war time and how being on the home front effected them. The book also contains interviews with a variety of different people including normal citizens and local leaders. The authors also provides a great deal of historical research and a huge amount of photos throughout the book. I have to say that because of the context of the book, the contents are graphic at times, as one would expect from a book titled wartime stories. I think this is an important topics and an important books; this is the first book I have read about Ukraine and I have to say it did open my eyes more to what was actually happening and has happened in the past. Thank you to the publisher for sending me a review copy of this book.

[Fionnuala · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this immesely, and would have done regardless, but right now it's obviously a particularly topical issue. The book, consisting of chapters that stand as their own individual essays, paint a picture of the country and its history that is both wide and details -- an impressive feat that puts me in the mind of Svetlana Alexievich's brilliant oral histories. Not all of these essays are focused on war as you might expect, but all of them are linked in some way, focusing on aspects of history and culture that have led to the problems being faced by Ukraine at the time of the book's publishing in 2015, when the situation in Crimea was new. Considering the current invasion of Ukraine, some parts of the book seem depressingly prophetic, other parts like some monstrous foreshadowing. Really, it all goes to show that all events are linked, even in ways not immediately obvious -- as the saying goes, history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

Along with Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, 1921-1933 by Anne Applebaum, I would count this as essential reading for anyone trying to get a grip not on what is currently happening in Ukraine, but why. These stories go much deeper than the numbers and figures and technical details so focused on in the mainstream news, and reporters like Judah are essential to a deeper understanding of the context and the people involved. This is good, old-fashioned journalism, ignoring the rush of 24-hour news and taking the time to get to know a place and people. The insights provided by this patience and dedication are unmatched.

[Dmitry · Rating 4 out of 5]

(The English review is placed beneath the Russian one)

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Как я понимаю, эта книга о событиях на востоке Украины 2014 года, является одной из немногих на Западе, которая привлекла внимание обычных людей. Учитывая, что книг на эту тему вышло относительно много, но лишь несколько привлекли внимание публики, эта книга может рассматриваться как относительный успех. Думаю, дело в том, что автор не только заметный журналист The Economist, но и книга была написана с довольно необычной стороны. Да, журналисты обычно пишут довольно предсказуемые книги, т.е. книги которые походят на большие статьи. Эта книга тоже из этой серии, т.е. эта книга похожа на очень большую журналистскую статью. Однако мне понравился подход автора или авторская идея. Как типичный журналист, автор решил взять интервью у жителей Украины, но в этой книге все интервью связанны, во-первых, с историческим прошлым страны, а именно с периодом правления Сталина и Гитлера, ибо оба диктатора оставили после себя на территории Украины горы трупов. Во-вторых, интервью, в которых автор задаёт вопросы людям касаемо сегодняшнего конфликта. В итоге мы имеем две большие темы – советское прошлое Украины и современные события в Украине. Идея интересная, ибо как мне кажется, автор проводит параллель между тем, что думают люди по поводу Сталина и Голодомора, с одной стороны, и действий УПА и Бандеры, с другой. Как мы видим, картина классическая. Для одних Сталин был, условно говоря, «эффективным менеджером», а для других – человеком который намеренно устроил геноцид украинского населения. Для одних Бандера и УПА были истинными патриотами, которые очищали Украину от всякого сброда, а для других – соучастниками нацистов. Несмотря на то, что прошло много времени, как показывает автор, такое ощущение, что эти исторические события произошли буквально пару лет назад, ибо настолько сильны эмоции в отношении каждого вопроса. Но у автора есть ещё один ингредиент, который важен для понимания всей книги – фон на котором всё это происходит. Неважно кто и какие идеи защищает, ибо всегда всё сводится к главной проблеме современной Украины – коррупции. Я хочу сказать, что третий ингредиент книги, это бескрайняя и беспросветная коррупция. Просто одни граждане считают, что Европа поможет им в борьбе с ней, а другие считают, что «традиционные ценности», Сталин, Путин, «русский мир» и пр. Хотя у сепаратистов Донбасса позиции более слабые в этом вопросе, что видно в их речах. В любом случаи, и те и другие недовольны нынешнем положением Украины. Как сказал кто-то из восточных украинцев по поводу Януковича: он хоть и вор, но он наш вор. Да, иллюзий на Донбассе никто не питает по поводу «светлого будущего». Тогда почему конфликт всё идёт и идёт? Ну, помимо такого важного фактора как Россия, которая стоит за сепаратистами Донбасса, есть ещё и «украинские патриоты», которые пролили уже столько крови, что уже морально не могут пойти на какие-то уступки. Это видно на примере с Минскими соглашениями, которые были подписаны Порошенко, как утверждают некоторые люди, чтобы дать передышку ВСУ, т.е. дать возможность набраться сил, чтобы позже сокрушить сепаратистов. Как мне кажется, пролито слишком много крови, т.е. убито слишком много людей, чтобы можно было мирно решить этот вопрос. В книге об этом прямо не говорится, но обе стороны (а автор интервьюирует множество людей по обе стороны баррикад) настроены непримиримо. Не знаю как сейчас, но я не удивлюсь, если ситуация никак не поменялась. Впрочем, в книге показана усталость и обычных людей, так что как там сегодня обстоят дела, сказать трудно.

Касаемо истории. Это интересный ход. Автор долго и подробно рассказывает истории людей, которые пострадали входе, с одной стороны, советской коллективизации и Голодомора, а с другой, действий нацистов и, условно говоря, УПА или людей которые сотрудничали с нацистами в отлавливании евреев и пр. Истории интересные, но довольно жуткие. Я согласен с автором - действия одного диктатора не могут служить оправданиям действий другого, т.е. отвратительны обе стороны. Почему это не видят все остальные люди? По той причине, почему россияне не видят миллионные трупы своих собственных граждан убитых в гражданскую войну, во время Большого Террора, во время бездействия в предвоенные годы (когда Сталина предупреждали о планах Гитлера напасть на Советский Союз, но он не верил в это и не предпринимал действий), не видят огромных жертв замученных в ГУЛАГе и не видят жертв, которые были на всём протяжении существования СССР вплоть до самого последнего дня своего существования. Для меня это очевидно, но для многих россиян, это «приемлемые издержки» строительства империи. Вот то же самое справедливо и в отношении к Украине.

Вот автор показывает снова и снова насколько всем надоела коррупция. Кажется, что пришедший к власти Ющенко, чьи лозунги были посвящены тому, что «Украина – это Европа», должен был первым делом именно с коррупцией бороться, ведь так? Увы, но известен Ющенко проведением политики направленной на оправдание ОУН-УПА, признанием Романа Шухевича Героем Украины и продвижением темы Голодомора как преднамеренного геноцида устроенного русскими (мы же понимаем, что под фразой «советское правительство» понимается «русское правительство»). Ющенко продвигал идею, что погибших было на самом деле не 3 миллиона человек, а больше 6 миллионов или даже 10. Зачем Ющенко потратил столько усилий на борьбу с историей? Вот скажите мне, какой смысл в том, что вместо цифры 3 будет цифра 6 или 10? Что измениться? Измениться то, что в этом случаи не нужно будет бороться с коррупцией и строить современное европейское государство, ибо в народе ты станешь известен как непримиримый борец с московитами. Всё по канонам самой России, с которой боролся вождь Оранжевой Революции. Как тут не вспомнить Гегеля и его третий закон диалектики «Закон отрицания отрицания».

Примечательно, что когда автор берёт интервью у правых радикалов и у сепаратистов Донбасса, обе стороны заявляют о своём стремлении построить в Украине общество, основанное на традиционных ценностях. Обе стороны испытываюсь явную неприязнь к людям нетрадиционной сексуальной ориентации и как огня боятся однополых браков. У меня возникло ощущение, что радикалы как с одной стороны, так и с другой, нашли смысл жизни в этом военном конфликте. Кого ни возьми, в прошлом он был никем, а теперь у него берёт интервью британский журналист, интересуется его видением ситуации и мнением касаемо глобальных проблем. Мне кажется, государству нужно делать всё возможное, чтобы такие радикалы не выходили дальше своего двора. Другой вопрос – можно ли было предотвратить выход на сцену как одних, так и других?

As I understand it, this book about the events in eastern Ukraine in 2014 is one of the few books in the West that has caught the attention of ordinary people. Considering that there have been relatively many books on this topic, but only a few have caught the public's attention, this book can be seen as a relative success. The reason is that the author is not only a notable journalist for The Economist, but the book was written from a rather unusual angle. Yes, journalists usually write predictable books, i.e., books that are like big articles. This book is also in that series (style), i.e., this book is like a very big journalistic article. However, I liked the author's approach or author's idea. As a typical journalist, the author decided to interview the inhabitants of Ukraine, but, in this book, all the interviews are connected, firstly, with the historical past of the country, namely with the period of Stalin and Hitler, because both dictators left behind mountains of corpses on the territory of Ukraine. Secondly, interviews in which the author asks people questions about the current conflict. As a result, we have two big themes - Ukraine's Soviet past and contemporary events in Ukraine. The idea is interesting because I think the author draws a parallel between what people think about Stalin and the Holodomor, on the one hand, and the actions of the UPA and Bandera, on the other. As we can see, it's classic. For some people, Stalin was, conditionally speaking, an "efficient manager," and for others - a man who deliberately organized the genocide of the Ukrainian population. For some, Bandera and the UPA were true patriots who cleansed Ukraine of any rabble (scum), and for others - accomplices of the Nazis. Despite the fact that much time has passed, as the author shows, it feels as if these historical events took place just a couple of years ago because emotions about each issue are so strong. But the author has one more ingredient that is important for understanding the whole book - the background against which all this takes place. It does not matter who and what ideas are defended because everything always comes down to the main problem of modern Ukraine - corruption. My point is that the third ingredient in the book is boundless and unmitigated corruption. It's just that some citizens believe that Europe will help them fight it, while others believe that "traditional values," Stalin, Putin, the "Russian world," etc., will help them fight it. Although, the separatists of Donbas have weaker positions on this issue, which is evident in their speeches. In any case, both are dissatisfied with Ukraine's current situation. As one of the eastern Ukrainians said about Yanukovych: although he is a thief, he is our thief. Yes, no one in Donbas has any illusions about a "bright future". Then why does the conflict go on and on? Well, in addition to such an important factor as Russia, which is behind the separatists in Donbas, there are also "Ukrainian patriots" who have already spilled so much blood that they are morally unable to make any concessions. It can be seen in the Minsk agreements, which were signed by Poroshenko, as some people claim, to give the Armed Forces of Ukraine a break, i.e., to allow them to gain strength to crush the separatists later. As I see it, too much blood has been spilled, i.e., too many people have been killed, so this issue cannot be peacefully resolved. The book doesn't mention it outright, but both sides (the author interviews a lot of people on both sides of the barricades) are irreconcilable. I don't know how it is now, but I wouldn't be surprised if the situation hasn't changed in any way. However, the book shows the fatigue of ordinary people too, so it's hard to say how things are today.

Regarding the story. It is an interesting move. The author tells long and detailed stories of people who suffered as a result of, on the one hand, Soviet collectivization and the Holodomor, and on the other hand, the actions of the Nazis and, let's say, the UPA or people who collaborated with the Nazis in the capture of Jews and so on. The stories are interesting but gruesome. I agree with the author - the actions of one dictator cannot justify the actions of another, i.e., both sides are disgusting. Why don't all other people see it? For the same reason that Russians don't see the millions of corpses of their own citizens killed in the Civil War, during the Great Terror, during the inaction in the years before the war (when Stalin was warned about Hitler's plans to attack the Soviet Union, but he didn't believe it and didn't take action), don't see the enormous sacrifices of those tortured in the Gulag, and don't see the sacrifices that were made throughout the existence of the USSR right up to the very last day of its existence. For me, it's obvious, but for many Russians, these are "acceptable costs" of empire-building. The same is true for Ukraine.

Here, the author shows again and again how fed up everyone is with corruption. It seems that Yushchenko, who came to power and whose slogans were all about "Ukraine is Europe," had to fight corruption first, didn't he? Alas, but Yushchenko is known for his policy aimed at justifying OUN-UPA, recognizing Roman Shukhevych as a Hero of Ukraine, and promoting the Holodomor as a deliberate genocide committed by the Russians (we should understand that the phrase "Soviet government" means "Russian government"). Yushchenko promoted the idea that the dead were not 3 million people but more like 6 million or even 10 million. Why did Yushchenko spend so much effort to fight the history? Tell me, what would be the point if, instead of the number 3, there would be a number 6 or 10? What will change? What will change is that, in this case, there will be no need to fight corruption and build a modern European state because, in the people, you will be known as an irreconcilable fighter against Muscovites. All according to the canons of Russia itself, which the leader of the Orange Revolution fought against. How not to recall Hegel and his third law of dialectics - "The Law of the Negation of the Negation."

It is noteworthy that when the author interviews right-wing radicals and separatists in Donbas, both sides declare their desire to build a society based on traditional values in Ukraine. Both sides have an aversion to people of non-traditional sexual orientation, plus they fear same-sex marriage like fire. I have the feeling that radicals on both sides have found the meaning of life in this military conflict. Whoever you take, in the past he was a nobody, but today he is interviewed by a British journalist, interested in his vision of the situation and his opinion on global problems. It seems to me that the state should do everything possible to prevent such radicals from going further than their backyard. Another question is whether it was possible to prevent both some and others from entering the scene.

[Keen Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had no idea that this guy is Ben Judah's father. Good writing clearly runs in the family. Judah tackles this subject from a number of interesting angles and as result he has produced an incredibly refreshing and accessible summary of the Ukraine. You realise that from Ukrainian independence in 1991, the Orange revolution of 2004, Maidan revolution of 2014 and eventually the war, the country has never really gelled well together as one nation and on closer inspection it becomes apparent that it is an incredibly complex country of many factions.

He talks about the power of the media, the so called Info wars, propaganda, particularly in TV that has manipulated and deceived so many, something that is mentioned to a lesser extent in Ostrovsky’s “The Invention of Russia”. Judah emphasizes the importance of history and historical precedence in the shaping and status of the Ukraine today. He traces the origins back, using examples such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that effectively saw Stalin and by extension the Soviets as allies of Hitler from 1939-41 until Hitler broke that pact by invading Russia. Judah shows that it’s this revisionism and the ignoring of huge chunks of history like this, that can shape and distort historical facts into dangerous tools for those in power. Stalin’s murderous collectivisation and dekulakization policies that would eventually lead to the Holodomor. In spite of more than 3 Million deaths it’s scarcely acknowledged in the country today, as it throws up too many disturbing and uncomfortable truths that shames Russia leadership and others with vested political interest.

We see how complex and fascinating the history of Ukraine really is. So many areas of the country were formerly parts of other nations, not just of the USSR, but of Poland and the Austro-Hungarian empire, which comes with obvious problems in terms of trying to unite them under one country. Various people see themselves primarily as Jews, Russians or Poles before calling themselves Ukrainian.

Poland, Belarus and Nazi Germany all play a part in the geo-political back and forth over recent centuries. Lviv for instance was once the third biggest city in Poland from 1918-1939. He also talks to people from Bessarabia, which has a puzzling history, a strange existence and an uncertain future for its divided population. The story of Donetsk was interesting, in 1870 a Welshman, John Hughes and around 150 other Welsh specialists set sail for Russia, where they decided to mine in the Donbas, the village that grew up around the mining was initially named Hughesovka after him and was only changed to Stalino after the Russian Revolution and didn’t become Donetsk until 1961.

Judah talks to artists, activists, politicians and many ordinary citizens about their thoughts, feelings and opinions on their country with some absorbing and varied results. Luhansk, Crimea, Kiev and Chernobyl are also given some thought provoking coverage. In so many ways the majority of the people living in Ukraine seem just as lost and doomed as those in Russia. This a story of revolutions, propaganda and probably more than anything ignorance and corruption, incompetent and venal leaderships and bullying oligarchs, like Russia, the Ukraine seems destined to be stunted and ruined by corruption for many years to come yet.

[Toni Osborne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a grim and vivid human portrait of a society drained by years of war and corruption. “In Wartime” is a reminder that war is not only fought in the Middle East. From interviews with civilians, poets, political scientists and a wide range of people who have been caught up in the conflict Mr. Judah, a distinguished journalist, has written a timely account of life in Ukraine since March 2014.

The book opens in a taut and informative first person account as he makes his way across Ukraine, from Lviv in the west, south of Odessa, Bessarabia and Donetsk in the east, and tells the stories of people he meets and delivers a rare glimpse into the reality behind the headlines. This civil war which began in the wake of the Maiden Revolution was secondary to the fact that lives were getting worse in a country that was hardly poor, but it was a country so rife with corruption it was going to the dogs and civilians were suffering. A huge numbers of people have now fled the country, mostly the educated young, leaving in their wake and economic death.

If the author’s aim was to let us know what Ukraine feels like today, he succeeded through personal stories and a historical reality check. The main strength in this book is in its detail work, its pathos and in the violence described. Mr. Judah also explains what happened in the region during WW11 and the important connection to the present day. There is a lot to this book and is a challenge to follow the author criss-crossing the country, although at intervals the author added maps to locate us, I thought it wise to have my Atlas open on Ukraine just the same. What also piqued my interest immensely were numerous photos of people and events that were added that reinforced everything. At the end of the book we have notes of explanation and sources as references.

This book is ambitious in scope, thoughtful, effective, fast-paced and very topical.

Mr. Judah is a war correspondent that covered the Balkans wars for the Economist in the 1990’s. “In Wartime” is drawn from his experience during that conflict.

I received this book for free from “Blogging for Books” via Edelweiss for this honest and unbiased review

[Jeff Swystun · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an interesting read in terms of style. Judah blends his knowledge of European history with skills in modern journalism and brings to life Ukraine's frustrating past and troubling present with personal profiles. This is a country that has never really been a country. It has been a pawn between East and West and a strategic buffer zone. Since achieving independence it has sadly squandered the chance to be truly independent and important. Instead it has suffered from incompetence, corruption and external meddling.

Judah takes us through the Maidan Revolution to Crimea to the conflict on the eastern border. What fascinates me is Russia's clandestine, indirect and direct interference. To many in Russia "Ukraine was like 'a kit', made artificially at Russia's will and in accordance with Russia's geopolitical interests." The evidence is compelling that Russia has found "even more ways to spread poison, lies and conspiracy theories." Chief among them is the propaganda used by Russians suggesting Ukrainian politicians and society are overwhelmingly fascist. The first thing Russia rebels (many being Russian regular soldiers) did in 2014 was to take over local tv and transmission facilities when they took Ukrainian territory. They strove to control this narrative.

Even Putin has spoken of fascism in Ukraine drawing a direct line to Stepan Bandera during World War Two. Putin exploited an opening that resonated with older people both in Russia and Ukraine. This was made possible because, "One of the great failings of the modern Ukrainian state is that it has never been able to create an all-encompassing post-Soviet narrative of modern Ukrainian history that was broadly accepted by most, if not all." Many in Russia believe the collapse of the USSR created an artificial border between the two countries rather than recognizing Ukraine could and should be its own nation. The Holodomor, The Galician Division, and Ukraine's shifting alliances in WW2 cannot be agreed among Ukrainians and this contributes to the nation's current weaknesses.

The author does a great job of illustrating this history through the stories of real people. These vignettes are compelling, shocking and emotional. It takes the theories and macro-analysis and humanizes the conflict. The early days of Ukraine's chaotic response to Russian annexation and invasion is well portrayed. The nearly comic volunteer battalions betrayed the fact that the Ukrainian military was (and is) nowhere near an effective force. Granted, improvements have been made in the past two years but for this to resolve itself Western nations have to express more outrage and send more real support (not just tents and socks).

The summary is clear. Ukraine is a confusing place comprised of competing interests, divisions and conflicts. Judah previously reported on The Balkans and draws may comparisons to that messy mosaic. Further, until we recognize that Russia has invaded this will continue to be a dicey sideshow rather than a clear Russian strategy of attempting to unite the former Soviet Union. Everyone should recognize this for what it is and that is Maskirovka or Russia's military doctrine of deception and denial. While that external force destabilizes Ukraine, Ukrainians themselves do a great job of deceiving and denying amongst themselves.

[Irene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew very little about the history of the Ukraine, and this book was a good foundation. I picked this up to get some context for the war in Ukraine and found it quite illuminating. Judah starts on Stalin's era to establish a baseline for the disparate views held by people in different areas and of various generations, and then goes on to interview them.

There are people in eastern Ukraine who miss Russia and yearn for Stalin, while most people to the east would rather join the EU, and there is also a clear generational divide. Homophobia and misinformation are a strong motivator for those who'd like to become part of Russia. Overwhelmingly, people want to have enough money to live and not be at war, which seems perfectly self-evident. I have no idea how pensioners manage on the little money they get.

Corruption seems omnipresent and their currency is devalued, which makes getting out of the country difficult, even when your town isn't being actively bombed. I can't imagine what it must be like for the refugees who left with little to no documentation, their children and their pets, and no plan for the future whatsoever.

[Chris Wares · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Brilliant book. Very readable.

Judah wrote this ten years ago when war first broke out in Donetsk and it reads as if he is describing current events. Which he is of course. The current war in Ukraine is a continuation of that conflict.

Each chapter gives a different perspective on the conflict that has the overall effect of providing a rounded view of the background to current events. From the outset he does not attempt to give a history of Ukraine or a blow by blow account of the Maiden revolution or the war - other books can do that - but instead gives a series of more personal accounts that are captivating. A must read for anyone trying to understand Putin’s (2022) war against Ukraine

[Arthur · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well written account of the history of this current war. I'm glad to have read it.

[Felicity · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a more substantial book than is suggested by the anecdotal 'stories' of the subtitle. They are by no means random responses to the invasion of the country in 2014 but the constituents of a complex narrative of the contested borderland of Ukraine. Judah provides a very readable, well-informed and nuanced account of the historical background to the ongoing conflict without resorting to fixed positions on either side. Many of his interviewees articulate their own inner conflicts, shifting sympathies, provocation and evolving motivation. It is not what we are accustomed to see or read in current media coverage.

[Budd Margolis · Rating 4 out of 5]

What history books do not tell you about the Ukraine conflict is addressed by this book.
Highly informative, interesting and human.
Gave me a new and better perspective on how complex this war is.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this as a free ARC through librarything from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Unfortunately, I also misplaced it for a few weeks so it took me longer to finish than I would have liked.

The pros of this book are simple, but that doesn't make them unimportant. For starters, it sheds light on a confusing and ongoing battle in the Ukraine that has received very little press after the annexation of Crimea by Russia. This is done in a journalistic style that is, in my opinion, necessary to the topic at this point in time. There is very little in the way of personalizing, emotionalizing, or otherwise attempting to sway the audience. It's straight facts, as they are perceived/ interpreted by the author and the people whom he interviewed. For that reason, I'd say that this piece would make an excellent resource for someone studying the area. Political climate aside, it also gives insight into the economic situation of the country, and not just the overall wealth or lack there of as it pertains to the country as a whole. The reader also gets an idea of what it's like for the people actually living there and how they get by on a day to day basis. Finally, it was quite interesting to learn how the people of the Ukraine see themselves: some as Ukranians, some as Russians, and some as something else entirely.

There are a few cons to this book though. Because of the nature of the subject matter, the book itself is a little confusing. It's nice that he stays in the same towns, for the most part, in each section, but the jumbled nature of the war (?), conflict (?), predicament (?), whatever moniker you'd like to give it leads each chapter and section to be a little disorderly. I'm not sure if this is because the people he interviewed in each section weren't all on the same side, despite not necessarily taking part in the fighting, but regardless it made things a little difficult to follow at times. Additionally, and this is just a personal pet peeve, it really bothered me when names were split between lines, and I don't mean first name on one and surname on another. I understand that Eastern European names are long, at times, and can be difficult for people who aren't familiar with the language, but that's all the more reason not to hyphenate a name and split it between two lines.

Overall, I'd definitely recommend this as reference material, both for people studying the area and for people planning a trip to the country.

[Erik Versavel · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, having lived in Ukraine from 2011 to 2016, the most interesting aspect of this book is that the author makes it very clear that Russia had already launched its war against Ukraine in 2014. When reading the book now, it can sometimes look as if it is set in 2022... Also, the reach of the author in respect of locations and contacts across the country is impressive. Sometimes the stories can seem a bit short or end abruptly, but overall this is of course a great book.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before reading In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine, I did not realize how little I knew about Ukraine and the Eastern European regions most effected by population displacement during World War II. When I was in Germany, I heard more about Ukraine and the political situation there than I have while in the U.S., but I really did not know the background of the issues or what the issues really even were. I have only read one other novel about Ukraine, and that novel focused on finding mass graves in Ukraine from WWII but did not focus on how those events occurred.

Tim Judah’s writing is very easy to digest. I’m learning to really love novels written by journalists. The writing is easy to follow and comprehend. I am learning to move from the academic writing style of discussing every minute detail to synthesizing what I’m trying to say, and Judah does this with ease. I studied global migration, and even I did not realize just how much movement there was during World War II and after with the parceling up of Europe. Judah does an excellent job of addressing these movements and the effect they are having on current political relations and movements today.

I can’t believe I’ve never heard of Holodomor prior to this novel. How is it that a man-made famine that killed millions is not covered in U.S. World History books? How do we learn from the past if we do not have knowledge of events like these? I felt woefully uneducated about so many of the topics Judah discussed, and I highly recommend this novel as a way to educate oneself about the issues effecting Ukraine and Eastern Europe.

I received this novel for free from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review of the novel.

[The Bamboo Traveler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read several books in the past few months on Ukraine. I was beginning to think another book wouldn't do much in helping me understand the situation in that country. I guess I was wrong. In Wartime added a lot to my understanding of present-day Ukraine.

Tim Judah is a journalist who writes for the Economist and the NY Times Review of Books (I think those are his publications--could be wrong--I think he was working for the NY Times when he was in Ukraine researching the book).

I have to say that I'm usually pretty skeptical of journalists who fly into a country, travel around for a few months, and then write a book about it all while not speaking the local language. They usually aren't all that great.

This one felt different, perhaps because Judah spoke to so many everyday Ukrainians on both sides of the war and perhaps because he was able to see the similarities between what had happened on the eve of the Balkan War in the 90s and what was happening in Ukraine at that moment he was there in 2014. History doesn't repeat itself but there are patterns that occur that can help you predict the future.

He also delved more deeply into topics that haven't been mentioned in other books on Ukraine. Probably the most fascinating was the section on the Ukrainian fascist/neo-Nazi party, the Azov Brigade. I always wonder how these people feel about Zelensky being Jewish. Do they support him despite the fact that they're Neo-Nazis and he's Jewish?

I'm curious to hear what Judah thinks about what is happening now. When he was in Ukraine, it was 2014 and he mentions something about how the war would just continue as a stalemate. He never once predicts that Putin would actually try to take over the whole country. EVERYONE underestimated him.

[Justin Goldman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim Judah is an excellent writer and listening to this audiobook made clear, he certainly did his research and his visiting so many areas across Ukraine really enhanced this work. This work, first published in November 2015, provides important insights into better understanding the challenges Ukraine faces over a year into the Russian invasion. He does well as a storyteller, allowing the citizens of Ukraine he comes in contact with to provide their perspectives on the challenges they have confronted since the the Euromaidan protests emerged in opposition to former President Yanukovych when he rejected the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement which led to his ouster. He writes "for too long Ukraine, the second largest country in Europe after Russia, was one of the continent's most under-reported places.” This work from Tim Judah can certainly help those interested in better understanding Ukraine today. Critically, the book includes substantial reporting from the Donbas where in the aftermath of President Yanukovych being removed by Parliament led to Russian-backed protests in Donetsk and Luhansk. This book connects the fight in the Donbas and the invasion of Crimea with the history that is never far from the surface with memories are interwoven with widespread disinformation fueling people on both sides of the conflict. Perhaps one of the best insights comes from Tim Judah's interview of a businessman who has honed his ability to endure stating that “an optimist is not the first to shout 'hurray' but the last to shout 'we're finished."

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times difficult to read due to the style in which it is written and quite likely my almost complete lack of background knowledge on the topic, this book is still a wealth of perspective. The author intersperses historical information with current interviews, current in this case being 2014 -ish. Publication date was 2015. I began reading this with a faint understanding of Ruriken and Romanov Russia, duck and cover USSR through a Gen x American lens, and almost the ability to correctly identify key areas on a map. I am leaving it with knowledge of Bessarabia, the many cultural and ethnic groups that make up Ukraine throughout history, the surprising knowledge that Kievan Rus began with Viking trading down rivers, and a fuller understanding of why "it's complicated" accurately describes the relationship between Crimea, Ukraine, and Russia. Eastern and western Ukraine have had different interactions with Russia and Poland historically. I had no idea entire cities in Ukraine have been repeatedly de- and repopulated over time such that very few current residents of, say, Lviv, can claim generations of family residency in the same city. And finally, I see how Russia has grabbed select bits of Ukrainian history from world war II to bolster their claim they are fighting Nazis in their current illegitimate power grab.

[Artyom E · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall an interesting, well-round read about the current broader conflict within Ukraine proper and between Ukraine and Russia. The author does not specify the depth of each of the dimensions, but as he mentions, this is the overall problem of civil wars: one cannot ever be sure about the degree of influence of the foreign party. Tim Judah’s experience backs it up: he is a correspondent for BBC and he experienced the Balkan Wars, on which he reported throughout their duration. He also outlines an important notion, often overlooked in the West. While Russia is certainly to blame for the incursion, the war is not entirely to blame on one side of the conflict, as there were (and still are) some serious cleavages, primarily economic, within the Ukrainian society proper.

The book is rather short, but it is not limited by its length. For anyone interested in journalistic literature and the Ukraine conflict - I would definitely recommend to read it. This book, however, does not go in depth about the conflict proper. Some battles are mentioned, but this book is not about the war, it is rather about individuals and their experiences, and how their experiences apply in a larger framework of inner Ukrainian workings.

[Nate Rabe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ukraine, Crimea and Russia. All pretty obscure places and over the years I had only kept across the broadest of headlines. But as there is so much talk these days about Trump and Russia and Manafort and Trump and Manafort and Ukraine I decided to pick up Tim Judah's book to learn something. And I must say now that I've finished I do have a much better understanding of not just what's at stake for both sides but how over the centuries we've got to this point. I really liked it from that perspective. But there was something stopping me from REALLY enjoying the book and at this stage all I can say is its Judah's partisan view. He's clearly pro-Ukranian and his presence as a voice sometimes interferes with the voices of the people he is interviewing. All in all, though, very much worth your time.

[Tom TG · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim Judah paints a great introductory picture of the complexities of modern Ukraine by weaving together the voices of ordinary and extraordinary people from across the country. Rather than focusing on the brass in Kiev, Judah opts to explore the more contested areas which westerners would consider rather quirky - from the Bessarabian outposts of Bolgrad and Izmail in the far Southwest, through to villages and cities on either side of the ceasefire line in the Lugansk and Donetsk oblasts. For context, these stories are injected with stories and sources from history which help to explain the present situation. A must-read for those interested in the region.