A clear-eyed account of Ukraine under siege

Illia Ponomarenko moved to Kyiv in 2016 with a backpack and $100 in his pocket. He typified the can-do spirit of the post-Soviet generation: when a tycoon-proprietor tried to muzzle critical reporting at the Kyiv Post, the newspaper where Mr Ponomarenko worked, he and the entire writing staff quit. They then founded a feistier paper, the Kyiv Independent. Since the war began, it has been an essential source of news about Ukraine.

“I Will Show You How It Was”, Mr Ponomarenko’s book about wartime Kyiv, serves two useful functions: it is a gripping account of Ukrainians’ struggle and it offers moral clarity about the causes of the war. The conflict has nothing to do with NATO or imaginary Western provocations. The problem is that Russia is a dictatorship. The state is geared to serve Vladimir Putin’s interests, not those of the Russian people. That is why the Kremlin spent “years and billions on the propaganda of hatred, revanchism, territorial grabs and confrontation with the West”, all designed to cement Mr Putin’s hold on power, “while more than 12% of Russians did not have toilets in their homes”.

Mr Putin’s invasion plan was built on a fantasy: that Ukraine was not a “real nation”, and that, “except for a handful of grotesque Nazis and armed nationalists”, it would not resist the invaders. This was such a preposterous delusion that, at first, Ukrainians did not take the signs of looming war seriously. In 2021 Mr Putin published an essay twisting centuries of history into a list of supposed crimes committed by foreigners against Russia, and threatening that if Ukraine did not end its anti-Russian policies it might lose its statehood. Many dismissed it as a bluff rather than the rationale for “one of the most shamelessly trumped-up, absurd and unnecessary wars the world had ever seen”.

The lesson, for Mr Ponomarenko, is simple: “Do not underestimate the lunacy of aged dictators.” As a defence reporter, Mr Ponomarenko has long understood the geopolitical threat from the Kremlin; as a Ukrainian, he understands viscerally why “We did not want these creeps to tell us what to do.” He took part in the Maidan revolution of 2013-14, when huge popular protests forced out a kleptocratic Putin-backed president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. The protesters wanted a future as part of Europe, not as a Russian satellite.

Mr Putin could not abide the idea of a Westernised democracy on his doorstep, setting an example of what Russians, too, could have if only they shook off their despot. So he tried to make Ukraine fail. He started by annexing Crimea and orchestrating the takeover of Donbas by criminal gangs in 2014. But he overreached catastrophically when he launched what he thought would be a lightning war to seize the whole country.

Ukrainian troops are not only motivated, since they are defending their homeland, but also encouraged to think for themselves. Mr Ponomarenko describes how they took aerial pictures of damaged aircraft hangars, then printed life-size copies and draped them over undamaged hangars, so the Russians thought their bombs had destroyed them and did not bother to bomb them again.

As for how the war will end, Mr Ponomarenko is grimly realistic. He has seen what happens to towns the Russians capture: the torture, the rape, the death pits. If Ukrainians do not keep fighting, their nation will “simply cease to exist”.

For the Russian troops who commit atrocities, the author reserves a chilled fury. Yet he musters empathy for those who are merely cannon fodder. Seeing the patch on the uniform of a dead conscript, he searches the man’s name online. He was from “a poor village of log houses and dusty, unpaved streets” in the Russian far east, near Mongolia. His mum is a teacher; he loved football. “You could have just stayed home,” laments Mr Ponomarenko. “You could have had a family.” Instead, the soldier died “7,000km away…in an idiotic war for the sake of just one delusional old man’s monstrous act of megalomania”. ■