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Tim Judah

In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine Hardcover – Deckle Edge, October 11, 2016

by Tim Judah (Author)

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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.

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Tim Duggan Books
Publication date

October 11, 2016
Dimensions

6 x 0.9 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

0451495470
ISBN-13

978-0451495471
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Essential for anyone who wants to understand events in Ukraine and what they portend for the West. . . . Mr. Judah has written the first important book about the war in Ukraine, and it should be on the shelf of every diplomat and journalist shipping out to the region.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Vividly clear. . . . A portrait of what it’s like living during wartime. . . . Judah gives a very helpful overview of Ukraine’s systematic economic difficulties. . . . . Brave, thoughtful, self-effacing, and effective.” —William T. Vollmann, Bookforum

”Judah’s book is full of detailed reporting from both Western and Eastern Ukraine—he covered the conflict with Russia for The New York Review of Books—and although he sympathizes with the attempts to strengthen the government in Kiev and repel Russian aggression, his book offers a nuanced portrait of people on all sides of the conflict.” —Isaac Chotiner, Slate

“Rich and beautiful. . . . Deep, fastidious, and detailed. . . . Judah articulately and comprehensively explains what happened in the region during World War II, and the important connection between history and present-day violence.” —The Chicago Tribune

“An important new book. . . . Fast-paced and very topical. . . . Readers won't forget the pathos and violence Tim Judah has described.” —Christian Science Monitor

“Judah writes in taut, informative language. . . . Instilling a lasting impression of a nation at once divided in loyalties and in the throes of a war—a real and somewhat bizarre one—a quarter-century after independence from the Soviet Union.” —The Minneapolis StarTribune

“A lively blend of research and personal narratives.” —Las Vegas Weekly

“It is no small trick to convey what life is like for ordinary Ukrainians. . . . Judah succeeds by traveling to these often out-of-the-way communities, poking around neighborhoods and museums, starting conversations with the people he meets. . . . He reveals the links between the current conflict and the history lying beneath the emotions and memories.” —Foreign Affairs

“A fascinating and often grim portrait of Ukraine . . . . . Judah offers a compassionate human view of these conflicts, mixing personal stories, history, politics, and reportage . . . . This special and timely book will provide lay readers with an apt introduction to Ukraine, and specialists will appreciate its atypical yet enlightening approach.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“A compelling and acute piece of contemporary reportage.” —David Edgar, The London Review of Books

"Haunting . . . Timely . . . Judah concentrates skilfully and affectingly on the human cost of manoeuvres in Ukraine. He seldom makes his own thoughts and opinions seem intrusive, instead letting his eloquent and compassionate subjects give a far greater insight into the horror and privation." —Alexander Larman, The Observer

“The war in Ukraine was fought at the height of postmodernity, and at first images trumped words and propaganda overwhelmed reality. Yet with time it was a few journalists, the handful of women and men who were willing to travel, learn, and report, who transformed the two dimensions of the screen into the three of life, the clichés of governments into the faces of people. Tim Judah, one of the best of them, does not tell us what to think about war but instead teaches us how: with courage, humility, attention to human detail, and admirable historical intuition." —Timothy Snyder

"The strength of Judah's In Wartime lies in the depth, range and balance of his reportage and his eye for telling details." —Tony Barber, Financial Times

"A kaleidoscopic portrait . . . Judah Looks at the present—what Ukraine looks and feels like now. He criss-crosses the country from the Russian-speaking east to the Ukrainian-speaking west." —Marcus Tanner, The Independent

“Visceral, gripping, heart breaking and often shocking, based on interviews with witnesses and victims on the ground, In Wartime is both astute political analysis and vivid war reportage of what’s really happening in the dirty war in Ukraine by a veteran observer of the Balkan wars who truly understands the complexities and nuances of the wars on Europe's peripheries.” —Simon Sebag Montefiore

“Tim Judah has written a timely account of life in Ukraine . . . A vivid, human portrait of a society drained not just by war but by years of corruption.” —Annabelle Chapman, Prospect

"Judah has carved out a reputation as one of Europe's best writers on the Balkans. His job description should be something like History Wars Correspondent." —Roger Boyes, The Times

"Tim Judah has got a lot closer to the war in eastern Ukraine than most western reporters—close enough to be able to convey vividly to readers the smells and sounds of such strange, screwed-up oddities as the Donetsk People's Republic, the Russian-backed splinter state. His experience of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s helped Judah spot this war as it mutated from malignant propaganda into blood-spattered reality. As a reporter, he excels at letting the Ukrainians themselves do the talking. His own sardonic undertone perfectly suits his subject." —Niall Ferguson

About the Author

Tim Judah is a reporter for The Economist. A graduate of the London School of Economics and of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Judah worked for the BBC before covering the Balkan wars for The Times and other publications. He covered the war in Ukraine for The New York Review of Books. He lives in London with his wife and five children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1.
Weaponizing History

Just because something is a cliché does not mean that it is not true. In his book 1984 George Orwell famously wrote: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” The war in Ukraine is not about history, but without using or, to employ the fashionable term, “weaponizing” history, the conflict simply could not be fought. There is nothing unique about this. In our times, in Europe, history was deployed as the advance guard and recruiting sergeant in the run‑up to the Yugoslav wars, and exactly the same has happened again in Ukraine. In this way people are mobilized believing horrendously garbled versions of history. On the Russian and rebel side, fear is instilled by summoning up the ghosts of the past and simply ignoring inconvenient historical truths. On the Ukrainian side, the ugliest parts of history are ignored, as though they never happened, thus giving the enemy more propaganda ammunition to fire.

In this conflict the words “info-war” or “information war” have replaced the word “propaganda.” In one way that is fitting because fighting the info-war is more complicated than disseminating old-fashioned propaganda. The battlefields include Facebook, Twitter, vKontakte (the Russian equivalent of Facebook) and YouTube. On news and other websites tens of thousands of people “comment” on articles in such a way as to make them feel as though they are doing something useful. They are, as a boy who was about to start military training in Kharkiv told me, “sofa warriors.” But some it seems are mercenaries too. According to numerous reliable reports, the Russian authorities contract firms to employ people to “comment” and spread, among other things, the central line of Russian propaganda, which is that the Ukrainian government, after the Maidan revolution, is nothing but Nazism reincarnated.

What is odd is how much rubbish people believe, disregarding what they must know from their own experiences or those of their families. What has happened on the Russian side of the info-war, especially, bears close resemblance to the experience of Serbs in the early 1990s. Then, most of their media painted all Croats as Ustashas, after their wartime fascist movement, and Bosnian Muslims as jihadis. While of course, just as there were indeed then some admirers of the Ustashas, and some jihadis too, just as there are admirers of Ukraine’s wartime fascists now, the big lie is to give them a significance they didn’t and don’t have. As in the Balkans, the same is happening again: in Russia all of the mainstream media is following the modern party line. As the rebels seized control of eastern regions of Ukraine in April 2014, they moved quickly to take over local TV buildings and transmission facilities, turning off Ukrainian channels and tuning in to Russian ones. On the other side of the line, Russian channels were switched off and removed from cable packages. However, in the age of satellite TV and the Internet, it is not possible to deprive everyone of all information, bar that which you want them to see, but it is nevertheless remarkable how people so often accept what they are told. In this story, or “narrative” to use the technical term, history is something of a foundation and bedrock and this is why rewriting history is as important as writing the news. 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.

When Vladimir Putin, Russia’s triumphant president, spoke on March 18, 2014, to his parliament, the Duma, and other Russian leaders and announced the annexation of Crimea following its referendum, which took place with no free debate and was rammed through under the watchful eyes of armed men and Russian soldiers, he repeated the line that maybe even he believes, but certainly many Russians and those in rebel-held territory believe. There had been a coup d’état in Kiev against the lawfully elected government of President Yanukovych executed by “nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites.” Some of these there were, just as there are plenty of the same on the Russian and rebel side, but to tar the whole revolution in this way made sense only to people who actually wanted to believe it. For supporters from Western countries and other foreign admirers of Putin and the rebels, it also provided what seemed like a noble “anti-fascist” cause to belong to, rather than subscribing to an invented and racist interpretation of events in which all Ukrainians were fascists and the Russians or the rebels were heroic liberators. “We can all clearly see the intentions of these ideological heirs of [Stepan] Bandera,” said Putin, “Hitler’s accomplice during the Second World War.”

In Kiev I talked with Professor Grigory Perpelytsia, a former Soviet naval man, who now teaches at the Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy. We walked down the hill from the academy and ducked into a dark restaurant serving hearty old-fashioned Ukrainian cuisine, meaning mostly large portions of meat. Putin, he said, wanted Russian troops to be welcomed with “flowers and songs”—as they were by many in Crimea, though anyone who did not feel this way was hardly likely to be on the streets. In order to achieve this, he said, Putin had launched an info-war against “Ukrainian fascists” and Banderovtsi. Many were receptive to this kind of message, he explained, especially older people in Russia and to a certain extent in Ukraine, because many still retained a Soviet mentality, “want to go back to the USSR” and perceived Russia to be its inheritor. To burnish this image Russia exploited the victory of the Second World War and the symbols of the USSR, which disoriented people and confused them. In Ukraine, all this served to consolidate divisions which already existed. 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. The modern Ukrainian state has no common soundtrack of history, which for Britain for example includes Churchill telling Britons they would fight on the beaches and in the hills, or de Gaulle telling the French that they had lost a battle but not the war. Reality might have been more complex, but nevertheless there are no serious challenges to these modern narratives—even in France, where there was plenty of collaboration. In Ukraine’s case, however, the story is different and, as the conflict has shown, two baleful figures loom over it, those of Bandera and Stalin. Understanding this is essential to understanding Ukraine today.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tim Duggan Books (October 11, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0451495470
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0451495471
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.9 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,802,117 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #108 in General Belarus & Ukraine Travel Guides
- #647 in Russian & Former Soviet Union Politics
- #4,593 in Russian History (Books)

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Top reviews from the United States

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THOMAS J GROCHALSKI

Not quite what I expected but did solidify my view ...

Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2016

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Not quite what I expected but did solidify my view that the United States should be very careful in deciding when and how to aid the Ukraine government.

2 people found this helpful

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Luis Carlos Ortega Rosales

Amazing

Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2020

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The book was amazing, I had no idea of everything behind the conflict.

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Pete Nichols

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2017

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A good history/explanation for the situation Ukraine finds herself in today.

One person found this helpful

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Beau B NYC

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2017

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Not only informative but it's well-written as well. It puts the conflict into a current and a historical perspective.

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LA Wasserman

An insightful, valuable book.

Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2018

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A fascinating, insightful book. It makes clear a number of contrasting viewpoints, and is quite valuable.

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Markian Lapchak

How diverse a country it is.

Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2018

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The variety of stories about all the ethnic groups was good. The timeline lacked continuity.

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Jeffrey Swystun

Deception and Denial

Reviewed in the United States on July 17, 2017

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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.

One person found this helpful

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Bryan Schaaf

As Judah points out there are many good books regarding Ukrainian history

Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2017

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As Judah points out there are many good books regarding Ukrainian history. Instead of writing another, he focused on interactions with Ukrainians throughout the country. How you view Ukrainian history depends on where you grew up, the language you are most comfortable with, religion, and so on. A good book about a complicated country with a tragic past, a challenging present, and a promising future.

2 people found this helpful

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Peter

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 31, 2016

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good

Schmidt

Überzeugende Momentaufnahme der politischen und gesellschaftlichen Situation in der Ukraine

Reviewed in Germany on January 25, 2018

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Als Ukraine-Erfahrener und Kiewer Maidan-Besucher im Februar 2014 kann ich das Buch nur weiterempfehlen. Judah führte 2014/15 zahlreiche Interviews mit Durchschnittsbürgern und lokalen Größen und beleuchtet alle Aspekte der jüngsten Entwicklungen in der Ukraine. Außer englischem Lehrmeister-Gehabe bei der Nähe ukrainischer Widerstandskämpfer zum Nazi-Regime insgesamt objektiv und alle Landesteile (in die Krim wurden er vom Besatzer nicht gelassen) differenziert betrachtend.

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emed0s

Nice mix of Ukraine last century history and current realities on the ground

Reviewed in Spain on November 15, 2016

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Good introduction to Ukraine, which occupying a central position in Europe its history has been tied to Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Austria-Hungary, Russia (pre-soviet, soviet and post-soviet), Germany. The author mixes the big picture, both current and past, with interviews with regular Ukrainian folk, that of course helps humanizing the story and making it more readable.

One person found this helpful

Mary S

Stories of the Ukraine

Reviewed in Canada on November 7, 2016

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Very sad and not a book to pick up your mood, but this is the situation!

AA_Basel

Very vivid picture of the current situation in Ukraine

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 17, 2016

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Tim Judah paints a vivid picture of the current situation in Ukraine for normal people, about their fears and hopes, through many touching and crisp interviews. It brought the reality of a country in war limbo closer to my daily reality. There's a broad range of portraits of mothers with sons at war, business people desperate to maintain jobs and to protect their life-long work, of ideologically charged separatist leaders under the spell of Soviet nostalgia, and of teachers, factory workers, doctors and old people trying to make ends meet in the rubble of destroied towns. It's journalism about what matters most: the people who carry on despite war and abandonment by their leaders.
It also gives enough historical context and political analysis to understand why the country is strogly divided in pro Russian and pro Western loyalties and why the famous Maidan Revolution hasn't brought real change to the country. I recommend it to anyone who lives in Europe and want to understand what happens at EU's borders.
(I personnaly bought this book for many reasons, not least because a lot of our friends in Germany are Ukrainin Jews who migrated here between 2005-2010 and I wanted to understand more about their old country. We also have many Dutch friends and we were really shocked and saddened with them by the crush of the Malaysia MH17 plane in July 2014. The book made me realise that what happens in Ukraine today touches many Europeans in ways we might not be aware of in the whirlwind of more pressing current issues. After having read it in original, I can only hope that the book gets at least translated in German so i can recommend it to family and friends here.)

4 people found this helpful

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