In his latest book, “On Freedom,” American scholar Timothy Snyder establishes a thought-provoking distinction between the word "liberation" and the Ukrainian wartime variant "de-occupation" to probe the fraught but necessary question: When is a person truly free? Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine has left countless settlements in ruins and displaced
Autocratic regimes like Russia are becoming increasingly bold in their efforts to undermine the principles and norms that came to define the democratic world order in the aftermath of World War II. A month after the start of the full-scale war against Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov even declared
The year 2024 proved to be another landmark for books about Ukraine and Ukrainian literature in translation, with a continued trend in publishing in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Unsurprisingly, Russia’s ongoing full-scale war against Ukraine was the most common topic among these works. Whether through incisive on-the-ground reportage that
For Russian liberals, late opposition leader Alexei Navalny represented a glimmer of hope for a democratic future. Yet for many Ukrainians, especially in the context of a decade of war, he was a more complex figure, often casting doubt on whether Russian opposition to Vladimir Putin necessarily aligned with support
Editor’s note: This story contains graphic descriptions. The accounts of elderly Ukrainian civilians who survived the hardships of World War II in their youth, only to face the brutality of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, underscore the cyclical nature of history’s relentless and unforgiving course. It’s
The propaganda surrounding Russia’s 2014 invasion of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts has been so pervasive that, even a decade later, people continue to parrot lines about the need to "protect the Donbas people from the Kyiv regime." It’s time for the voices of people from both regions to
“How should I manage this anger? Or should I?” Ukrainian author Oleksandr Mykhed asks himself following the start of Russia’s all-out war. In his book “The Language of War,” the first major Ukrainian prose work published by a Penguin imprint, Mykhed recounts how the lives of Ukrainians were upended
At a bar in Moscow leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, reporter Jen Stout interrupts a local parroting lines of propaganda from state-controlled television about so-called Ukrainian Nazis by asking him if he’s ever actually been to Ukraine. He seems taken aback by such a simple
Like any true detective novel, Andrey Kurkov’s “The Silver Bone” starts off with a brutal murder and endeavors to maintain high stakes until its final pages. The novel, now available to English-language readers in translation by Boris Dralyuk, was recently longlisted for the International Booker Prize, one of the
Editor's note: All the photographs in this article are featured for illustration purposes only. “I’m a photographer,” writes U.S. combat veteran and photojournalist J.T. Blatty, “But really, I’m just a human drawn toward the truth, in snapshots of truth.” Blatty’s new memoir "Snapshots Sent Home:
Ukrainian author Artem Chapeye has lived many lives: journalist, activist, translator, and since the spring of 2022, a soldier in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Being a writer helps him to “endure everyday army life,” he said in an interview in June 2023, but “until everything is finished, it is very
“We are dealing with a powerful state that is pathologically unwilling to let Ukraine go,” President Volodymyr Zelensky tells journalist Simon Shuster on a train from the front line back to Kyiv in 2022. “(Russia sees) the democracy and freedom of Ukraine as a question of their own survival.” Originally
In the midst of a full-blown agoraphobic episode, the unnamed narrator of Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel “Forgottenness,” becomes engrossed in reading old newspapers. Asked by her increasingly concerned partner what she’s looking for, she simply tells him: “I want to understand what time is.” “Time consumes everything living by
Warning: This book review contains graphic descriptions. While embedded with Ukrainian forces entering Bakhmut in December 2022, the bloodiest battle to date in the Russo-Ukrainian war, journalist Yaroslav Trofimov encountered anti-Kadyrov Chechen fighters fighting on the side of Ukraine. “It’s like Mariupol all over again,” one of the men
Ukraine’s authors should have been able to dedicate their lives to honing their craft. Instead, many of them have stepped up to contribute to the war effort and fight back against Russian aggression. Like any other member of society, Ukrainian authors have lost loved ones and colleagues to Russia’
A historian by profession who has studied war for over a decade, Olesya Khromeychuk found her research spilling over into real life when her older brother Volodymyr was killed in 2017 near Popasna in Luhansk Oblast, nearly two years into his military service. The Russian invasion of Ukraine’s Donbas
When Belarusian author Hanna Komar brought the manuscript for her poetry collection “Ribwort” to a publisher in Belarus in the summer of 2021, she was told that their business would be shut down if they published her work. Komar, like thousands of her fellow Belarusians, took part in the 2020-2021
At a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, amidst the joyous remarks of the other presenters on the unification of the European continent, Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych conveyed his skepticism about the success of the “New Europe.” For Andrukhoych, 2009 was marked by the
Less than a month into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian shelling destroyed a popular bookstore on Kharkiv’s main street. Ukrainian writer and Kharkiv local Serhiy Zhadan uploaded a photo of the bookstore’s ruins onto social media on March 15 and asked, “Does anyone still want to talk
For many people worldwide, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine appeared unprecedented and unthinkable. However, for those familiar with Ukrainian history, it unfortunately represented a familiar pattern. In his latest book, "The Russo-Ukrainian War: A Return to History," the historian Serhii Plokhy explores how the myths deeply intertwined with Russian statehood
Back when he was a young Peace Corps volunteer, the American journalist Christopher Miller was looking to get stationed somewhere on the African continent, but instead, he was sent to the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, known then as Artemivsk. The once-prosperous industrial city in Donetsk Oblast – which has become
The 90s is an overlooked period in contemporary Ukrainian literature – unlike Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine – and the setting alone makes Oksana Lutsyshyna’s award-winning novel “Ivan and Phoebe” an achievement. Now available in Nina Murray's English translation from the U.S. publisher Deep Vellum, Lutsyshyna’s novel is
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