-16°C, sunlight, silence. I drove the children to school, then went to see the revolution. I walked between the tents. Talked with revolutionaries. They were weary today. The air was thick with the smell of old campfires. Ukraine Diaries is acclaimed writer Andrey Kurkov’s first-hand account of the ongoing crisis in his country. From his flat in Kiev, just five hundred yards from Independence Square, Kurkov can smell the burning barricades and hear the sounds of grenades and gunshot. Kurkov’s diaries begin on the first day of the pro-European protests in November, and describe the violent clashes in the Maidan, the impeachment of Yanukovcyh, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the separatist uprisings in the east of Ukraine. Going beyond the headlines, they give vivid insight into what it’s like to live through – and try to make sense of – times of intense political unrest.

"Henri Nouwen's account of two pilgrimages to Ukraine in the early 1990s, with an introduction by Archbishop Borys Gudziak, setting this story in the context of the current war in Ukraine."--

Powerful graphic journalism that highlights the contrasting realities of a Ukrainian journalist and a Russian artist grappling with their own individual experiences of Russia’s war on Ukraine—collected, edited, and illustrated by award-winning author Nora Krug Immediately after Russia began its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Nora Krug reached out to two anonymous subjects—“K.,” a Ukrainian journalist, and “D.,” a Russian artist—and began what would become a year of correspondence. Based on her weekly interviews with K. and D., Krug created this collection of illustrated accounts that chronicles two contrasting viewpoints from opposing sides of the first year in this ongoing war. With millions displaced, injured, or killed as a result of the invasion, Krug presents a look at the devastating effects on an everyday, individual level. K.’s diary documents a year of emotional and existential distress. She experiences loss in every sense of the word: the death of those close to her, the disconnection from her family and friends, and the devastation of her country—but her account is also a story about bravery and survival in the face of dire uncertainty. In juxtaposition, D.’s narrative details his disdain for his government’s murderous actions and his attempts at emigrating his family abroad. He navigates his own struggle with cultural identity, guilt, and lack of action in the face of a tyrannical regime—a perspective that is necessary in challenging readers to confront the political actions of their own countries. Krug approaches Diaries of War with the immense skill and thoughtfulness required to document these two complicated experiences for the purpose of encouraging critical thinking. Published as an Op-Comic series with the Los Angeles Times, with a portion of the entries unique to this book, Diaries of War is a harrowing real-time record of an international conflict that continues to devastate countless lives.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, former Soviet republic Ukraine has struggled against its “giant neighbor to the north”—Russia— to maintain its sovereignty. In early 2014 tensions turned to conflict as Vladimir Putin, determined to keep Ukraine from forging stronger ties with the West, seized Crimea and fomented conflict in eastern Ukraine. In the latest Brookings essay, Chrystia Freeland, a former Ukrainian-based reporter with strong family ties to the country, offers a personal reflection on the conflict and the sentiment of the Ukrainian people. She highlights the fact that despite historic, cultural, and linguistic ties between the two countries, Ukrainians stand defiant in their desire for independence.

In the lives of ordinary people are the truths of history. Such truths abound in the diaries of Jacob Epp, a Russian Mennonite school-teacher, lay minister, farmer, and village secretary in southern Ukraine. This abridged translation of his diaries offers a remarkably vivid picture of Mennonite community life in Imperial Russia during a period of troubled change. Epp’s writings reveal a skilled and honest diarist of deep feelings, and tell a human story that no conventional historical account could hope to equal. The diaries overflow with the details of his workaday world. Family, village, church, and community routines are broken by trips to market, visits to other Mennonite settlements, and a memorable steamer voyage to boomtown Odessa on the Black Sea. He chronicles his long-time involvement in an unusual Imperial experiment in which Mennonites were “model farmers” in Jewish villages. Harvey L. Dyck places the diaries in their historical, ethnocultural, social, religious, economic, and political settings. Based on archival research, interviews, travels, and consultations with other scholars, his detailed and perceptive introduction and analysis trace Jacob Epp’s life and present a sketch and interpretation of his larger family, community, and Imperial world. With striking clarity the diaries and introduction together re-create a time and way of life marked by controversy and flux. They reflect significant facets of the experience of ethno-religious minorities in Imperial Russia and of the development of the southern Ukrainian frontier. Above all, they fill significant missing pages of the great community-centred story of Russian Mennonite life. This book is richly illustrated with maps, black-and-white photographs, and watercolour paintings by Cornelius Hildebrand, Jacob Epp’s former village school pupil and later brother-in-law.

Between 1917 and 1923, Ukraine experienced an anti-colonial war for national liberation, foreign invasion, socialist revolution, and civil war simultaneously, resulting in almost unimaginable civilian casualties. In Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine Stephen Velychenko surveys the plight of civilians, details the socio-economic background to the political events that unfolded during this time, and documents the country’s demographic losses. Focusing specifically on two causes of civilian death, deliberate killing and appalling living conditions, Velychenko outlines prewar improvements in living conditions and describes their decline after 1917. He examines governmental culpability in civilian death and notes that while ideologies and the inability of leaders to control subordinates were undeniably causes of violence, there were other factors at play. Velychenko mines previously unused archival sources to create a picture of the social conditions leading up to and during this catastrophic period, combining this data with stories and reports from memoirs of the period. Readers familiar with the explosion of violence against Jews at this time will find here a compelling framework for understanding the context of that violence.

One of the most important Ukrainian voices throughout the Russian invasion, the author of Death and the Penguin and Grey Bees collects his searing dispatches from the heart of Kyiv. This journal of the invasion, a collection of Andrey Kurkov's writings and broadcasts from Kyiv, is a remarkable record of a brilliant writer at the forefront of a 21st-century war. Andrey Kurkov has been a consistent satirical commentator on his adopted country of Ukraine. His most recent work, Grey Bees, is a dark foreshadowing of the devastation in the eastern part of Ukraine in which only two villagers remain in a village bombed to smithereens. The author has lived in Kyiv and in the remote countryside of Ukraine throughout the Russian invasion. He has also been able to fly to European capitals where he has been working to raise money for charities and to address crowded halls. Kurkov has been asked to write for every English newspaper, as also to be interviewed all over Europe. He has become an important voice for his people. Kurkov sees every video and every posted message, and he spends the sleepless nights of continuous bombardment of his city delivering the truth about this invasion to the world.