The ongoing disinformation war and military war that Russia has escalated since its 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine are the subject of author Tim Judah’s “In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine.”
Using his experience as a war reporter, the author begins his journey in Ukraine, near the Polish border, and goes on to Lviv. Eastward from there, he travels to Kyiv and to the eastern front near the Russian border. Along the way, Mr. Judah talks with mothers, soldiers, poets, businessmen, politicians and historians.
In Donetsk, civilians who cheered President Vladimir Putin find their hope crushed in the face of resource shortages and an unending war. The stories of these people are interwoven by Mr. Judah to show a tragic portrait of a country fighting a war of independence from Russia 25 years after the collapse of the USSR.
Prof. Timothy Snyder, author of “Black Earth” about the Holodomor, noted of Mr. Judah’s work: “The war in Ukraine was fought at the height of post-modernity, and at first images trumped words and propaganda overwhelmed reality. Yet with time there were 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.”
Mr. Judah is a reporter for The Economist and a contributor to The New York Review of Books. A graduate of the London School of Economics and of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, he worked for the BBC before covering the Balkan war for The Times of London and other publications. He lives in London with his wife and five children.
Readers may obtain copies at local booksellers and online retailers, as well as by contacting the publisher, Tim Duggan Books, www.timdugganbooks.com or 212-572-2537.