Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence - Hardcover

Trofimov, Yaroslav

 
9780593655184: Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593655184 ISBN 13: 9780593655184
Verlag: Penguin Press, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

“Our Enemies Will Vanish achieves the highest level of war reporting: a tough, detailed account that nevertheless reads like a great novel. One is reminded of Michael Herr's Dispatches . . . Frankly, it's what we have all aspired to. I did not really understand Ukraine until I read Trofimov's account.” —Sebastian Junger

A revelatory eyewitness account of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and heroism of the Ukrainian people in their resistance by Yaroslav Trofimov, the Ukrainian chief foreign-affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Yaroslav Trofimov has spent months on end at the heart of the conflict, very often on its front lines. In this authoritative account, he traces the war’s decisive moments—from the battle for Kyiv to more recently the gruelling and bloody arm wrestle involving the Wagner group over Bakhmut—to show how Ukraine and its allies have turned the tide against Russia, one of the world’s great military powers, in a modern-day battle of David and Goliath. Putin had intended to conquer and annex Ukraine with a vicious blitzkrieg, redrawing the map of Europe in a few short weeks with seismic geopolitical consequences. But in the face of this existential threat, the Ukrainian people fought back, turning what looked like certain defeat into a great moral victory, even as the territorial battle continues to seesaw to this day. This is the story of the epic bravery of the Ukrainian people—people Trofimov knows very well.

For Trofimov, this war is deeply personal. He grew up in Kyiv and his family has lived there for generations. With deep empathy and local understanding, Trofimov tells the story of how everyday Ukrainian citizens—doctors, computer programmers, businesspeople, and schoolteachers—risked their lives and lost loved ones. He blends their brave and tragic stories with expert military analysis, providing unique insight into the thinking of Ukrainian leadership and mapping out the decisive stages of what has become a perilous war for Ukraine, the Putin regime, and indeed, the world.

This brutal, catastrophic struggle is unfolding on another continent, but the United States and its NATO allies have become deeply implicated. As the war drags on, it threatens to engulf the world. We cannot look away. At once heart-breaking and inspiring, Our Enemies Will Vanish is a riveting, vivid, and first-hand account of the Ukrainian refusal to surrender. It is the story of ordinary people fighting not just for their homes and their families but for justice and democracy itself.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Yaroslav Trofimov is the chief foreign-affairs correspondent of The Wall Street Journal and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for two consecutive years, in 2022 and 2023. Before covering the Russian war on Ukraine, he reported on most major conflicts of the past two decades, serving as the Journal’s bureau chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan and as a correspondent in Iraq. He holds an MA from New York University and is the author of two critically acclaimed books, Faith at War and The Siege of Mecca.

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Chapter 1

The "People's Republics"

Russia's war against Ukraine had begun eight years earlier, with what Ukrainians called their "Revolution of Dignity" and what Moscow described as an American-sponsored putsch.

The initial divorce between Russia and Ukraine, agreed in December 1991, was surprisingly bloodless. At a meeting in a Belarusian forest lodge, Russian president Boris Yeltsin and his counterparts from Ukraine and Belarus decided to dissolve the Soviet Union, respecting each other's territorial integrity. Russia recognized Ukraine's sovereignty over lands that many, if not most, Russians had always considered rightfully theirs, from Kharkiv to Crimea to Odesa.

The Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky reacted by writing a vitriolic poem wishing that the mighty Dnipro River would flow backward to punish ungrateful and uppity khokhols, a Russian slur for Ukrainians. Another Russian Nobel Prize winner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, cried betrayal. But nobody in Moscow seriously tried to stop the breakup. Russia was so magnanimous because it expected Ukraine's independence to be nominal at best, just like that of nearby Belarus. The bonds between the two countries and the two peoples were so tight, after all, that a truly separate and viable Ukrainian state was impossible to imagine-at least in Moscow.

In Belarus, the 1994 election of former collective farm chief Aleksandr Lukashenko-the only member of the Belarusian parliament who voted against independence-snuffed out any attempt to steer the country westward. Lukashenko brought Belarus into a confederation with Russia, and brutally suppressed the democratic opposition by jailing or outright assassinating opponents.

The authoritarian Yanukovych, a Russian-speaking coal-industry boss and onetime juvenile criminal from Donbas, was supposed to perform a similar role for Ukraine-and he might well have, except that the Ukrainian people revolted twice.

The first revolution was in 2004, when Yanukovych, who was prime minister at the time, tried to steal a presidential election by using local bureaucracies to stuff ballot boxes. President Leonid Kuchma, at the end of his second and final term, ordered security forces to remain neutral. Under pressure from protesters, Ukraine's supreme court acknowledged the fraud and ordered another round of elections. This time, Yanukovych lost.

In 2010, a chastened, seemingly changed Yanukovych won the presidency fair and square. In part, he gained power because of unchecked graft and infighting in Ukraine's pro-Western camp. As all Ukrainian presidents had done since independence, Yanukovych promised to seek closer ties with the European Union. He even negotiated a free-trade and political-association agreement with the EU. But, in November 2013, he unexpectedly pulled out of the deal and moved to join a customs union with Russia.

As stunned Ukrainians digested the news, Mustafa Nayyem, a Kyiv journalist of Afghan descent, made the first call for protests. "People, let's get serious," he wrote on Facebook. "Who is ready to come to Maidan before midnight tonight? Likes don't count."

Hundreds of thousands showed up in the following days and weeks. The initially peaceful rallies turned violent when Yanukovych ordered riot police to open fire, and descended into an outright bloodbath on February 20, 2014, with dozens gunned down in central Kyiv. The Ukrainian parliament-including many lawmakers from the president's party-intervened to outlaw the use of force against protesters just as a delegation of European foreign ministers reached a compromise. On February 21, Yanukovych agreed to form a government of national unity with the opposition and to hold presidential elections under international supervision by December.

But the president lost his nerve that night. The Ukrainian security services crumbled and protesters demanded that Yanukovych leave Kyiv by the morning. From his palatial residence, he absconded first to the eastern city of Kharkiv, then to Donetsk, and eventually on to Crimea, where he was picked up by Russian troops and escorted to safety in Russia. The next day, February 22, the Ukrainian parliament declared that Yanukovych had abandoned his constitutional duties. Lawmakers appointed the new opposition-backed speaker as interim president and scheduled a presidential election for May. Moscow called it a coup.

Up until that moment, most Ukrainians had often been wary of Russia's intentions but had not considered Russia a foe. Millions of Ukrainians worked in Russia, which, because of its oil and gas wealth, and because of Ukraine's corrosive corruption, was perceived as a prosperous land of opportunity. Zelensky also spent much of his time in Moscow working as a comedian and was a rising star of Russian state TV.

In the middle of the Ukrainian revolution, Zelensky cohosted Russian TV's 2014 New Year's Day show, watched by tens of millions of people in both nations. He sang and danced onstage, wearing a black tuxedo, a bow tie, and a black top hat.

"New Year, the first day, what awaits us," Ukraine's future president crooned. "Na-na na-na-na." Then he delivered a schmaltzy stand-up routine, comparing the previous night's celebrations to a military campaign. "You can even write military memoirs about it. The New Year's offensive started precisely at midnight with a volley of champagne," he joked. The stars of Russian showbiz howled with laughter in the audience, raising their glasses.




The real military offensive began fifty-seven days later, on February 27, 2014.

Russian special forces-operating without insignia and dubbed "little green men"-fanned out from the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol. The base had been leased from Ukraine by Moscow since the Soviet Union's collapse in an agreement that was extended by Yanukovych in 2010. The soldiers seized Crimea's government and legislature buildings, raising Russian flags. Crimean lawmakers, gathered at gunpoint, voted to secede from Ukraine. Ukrainian forces in Crimea didn't offer much resistance, except for singing patriotic songs.

Many military leaders, including the newly appointed commander of the Ukrainian Navy, simply joined the Russians. Hollowed out and thoroughly infiltrated by Russian agents, the Ukrainian military was hardly a fighting force. Only some 6,000 Ukrainian troops were combat-ready, the interim government estimated. When they tried to deploy, they discovered that their armored vehicles lacked batteries. Private businessmen had to pitch in with a few million dollars to fix that.

Russia didn't have military bases in other parts of Ukraine, but it had cultivated a network of sleeper agents, especially inside Ukrainian law enforcement, as well as a legion of pro-Russian politicians. As one of its first moves, the interim government in Kyiv, which held power until Poroshenko's victory in May's presidential elections, passed legislation to limit the use of the Russian language in public, a blunder that made it easier for Putin to posture as the defender of Ukraine's Russian-speakers.

Overnight, Russian flags appeared across cities in eastern and southern Ukraine. Pro-Russian protesters, organized and often armed, tried to seize government buildings, clashing with rival, pro-Ukrainian activists. The police mostly stood by, or even tacitly helped the pro-Russians.

In Kharkiv, an overwhelmingly Russian-speaking metropolis of 1.5 million people, a deadly gun battle erupted in March as Russian and pro-Russian militants stormed the headquarters of a pro-Ukrainian organization. Terror spread to the streets, and pro-Russian thugs assaulted one of Ukraine's most famous novelists, Serhiy Zhadan, beating him with bats in the center of the city.

Even as blood was spilled in Kharkiv, many people in...

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Verlag
Penguin Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593655184
ISBN 13 
9780593655184
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
400
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