There had been peace at one time,
and now that peace was dead.
—mikhail bulgakov,
The White Guard
It was the evening before everything changed. The Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov had invited me for dinner. A few friends, he said, and borshch. We had first met earlier that memorable winter—a pleasant meal in a Georgian restaurant in Podil, a neighbourhood in the lower part of Kyiv next to the Dnipro River; a glass of red in a boutique café near the old city. The date was now February 23, 2022. It was 8:15 p.m., and I was late. I stopped in a shop, bought a bottle of Kolonist port from a winery in Odesa, and hurried to Kurkov’s flat.
These meetings happened under the shadow of war. The news—which I was writing for my newspaper, theGuardian—was alarming, terrible even. A week earlier, Russian-backed separatists had shelled a village in Ukrainian-controlled territory next to the pro-Russian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. The missile had landed in a school gym. Mercifully, no one was killed, but the eight-year conflict in the east was heating up.
Humour was essential in these dark times. Kurkov sent me a meme via WhatsApp. It showed Fyodor Dostoevsky’s head floating surreally in a hole in the school’s wall, peering at the rubble. Around the great nineteenth-century Russian writer were soccer balls, a mural depicting a jungle, and a climbing rope. Kurkov was an agreeable companion, the author of many playful and magically luminous books, and Ukraine’s most celebrated living writer. Also, remarkably, he was an optimist.
I, by contrast, was increasingly gloomy. The omens pointed in one scarcely believable direction: Russia was about to invade Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin had a long-standing interest in Ukraine. In 2014, he responded to a pro-European uprising in Kyiv by annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and coordinating a counter-rebellion in the Donbas, a region subsequently controlled in part by Russia-installed rebels. By the end of the decade, it had grown into a brooding obsession.
The crisis had been growing since autumn 2020 like a fog rolling in. First, Putin had sent troops, tanks, and armoured vehicles to Russia’s western border with Ukraine and to Belarus, a brother state that Moscow had practically absorbed. The vehicles bore a curious white symbol: the letterV.
Next, Putin had issued a series of demands so imperious and swaggering you could only marvel at their audacity. He sought nothing less than the annulment of the security infrastructure that has governed Europe for the three decades since the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse. Further, he wanted the Biden administration to guarantee Ukraine would never join NATO, the United States-led military alliance set up in 1949 to contain the Soviet Union.
Additionally, Russia’s president demanded that NATO take its forces and equipment out of European countries that had once been Cold War satellites: Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, plus the Baltic states. These countries had joined NATO after 1997; now Moscow wanted to wind the clock back. Putin’s apparent goal was to re-create the USSR’s sphere of influence that had existed across the European c
