Podcast: The Russo-Ukrainian War

New book interview with Serhii Plokhy

Listen to my interview with Serhii Plokhy for the New Books Network about The Russo-Ukrainian War (Allen Lane, 2023) on Apple or Spotify.

"The Ukrainian nation will emerge from this war more united and certain of its identity than at any other point in its modern history," writes the author of Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy and Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis and, according to the Financial Times, “the world's foremost historian of Ukraine”.

But the war, he says, will do more than transform his homeland. "Ukraine’s successful resistance to Russian aggression is destined to promote Russia's own nation-building project. Russia and its elites now have little choice but to reimagine their country's identity by parting ways not only with the imperialism of the Tsarist past but also with the anachronistic model of a Russian nation consisting of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. By paying an enormous price in wealth and blood of its citizens, Ukraine is terminating the era of Russian dominance in a good part of eastern Europe and challenging Moscow's claim to primacy in the rest of the post-Soviet space".

Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard and director of the university's Ukrainian Research Institute.

For my Writer's Writers tip sheet, he chose The Zelensky Effect by Olga Onuch and Henry Hale (Hurst, 2022) and Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer (Allen Lane, 2023).