Diary of an Invasion

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After four years in Moscow, Harding was expelled in 2011 for reporting on the brutal corruption of Putin and his cronies. Like Kurkov, he views Ukraine as a victim of Russia’s enduring imperialist mindset. Many Irish readers will note the parallels between his portrayal of Russia’s disdain for its “little brother” – even great Russian writers such as Solzenitshyn and Bulgakov dismissed Ukraine as a folk myth – and the brutal ignorance of certain other overbearing colonialist powers.

Diary of an Invasion | The Spectator Andrey Kurkov: Diary of an Invasion | The Spectator

The year before Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s former puppet prime minister and president, had stated bluntly that Ukrainians were Russia’s “vassals”. When we became refugees, we left all our books in Kyiv. Now, since my first wartime trip into Europe, I have some books again – gifts from my English publisher. I’m wondering when I will be able to take those books home and add them to my library.Such lofty disdain translates, on the ground, into hatred and murder. At Bucha, the Kyiv suburb briefly held by Russia before its northern offensive was routed in March, Harding traces the miserable fate of Volodymyr Cherednichenko, a 26-year-old electrician who was abducted, tortured and murdered by Russian troops. His mother and aunt, who risked their lives to search for him, last saw him under interrogation, his arm broken, covered in blood, sobbing that he knew nothing. He was found alone a few days later, shot through the ear in a filthy basement, one of at least 1,400 Ukrainians to die in the area. One of my favourite writers A.J.Cronin gets a mention in Kurkov's diary. But not in the way we might expect. That particular passage goes like this – We started talking every day, probably from November or December last year, about whether the war would come or not," Kurkov says. "I was sure there would be an escalation - that Russia would go for the whole of The Donbas - but not an all-out war. Nato may have been re-energised and EU cooperation strengthened, but no one knows how Putin's war will end, which makes Kurkov's poignant book all the more important, telling, as it does, of the devastating impact on ordinary people.

Diary of an Invasion by Andrey Kurkov | Book Review Diary of an Invasion by Andrey Kurkov | Book Review

Every war leaves a deep wound in the soul of a person. It remains a part of life even when the war itself has ended. I have the feeling that the war is now inside me. It is like knowing that you live with a tumour that cannot be removed. You cannot get away from the war. It has become a chronic, incurable disease. It can kill, or it can simply remain in the body and in the head, regularly reminding you of its presence, like a disease of the spine. He was under the influence of this philosopher, Alexander Dugin, an advocate of the Eurasian policy (which considers Russia to be closer to Asia than Western Europe) based on anti-Western values. Kurkov also explores the role of the church in the current war, the Moscow Patriarchate versus the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, as well as the linguistic identity and forced aggressive russification that has occurred throughout the history in Ukraine and other countries in Eastern Europe. The more powerful these mediums are, the longer the works remain relevant to the people, and, in the end, the best of them fall into the cultural canon of historical experience.”

Summary

For several days now, Ukrainian Facebook has been boiling over with the joy resulting from this victory. Ukrainians joke that Putin woke up last Sunday morning and was horrified to hear that Ukraine had won. It took him a while to realise that Ukraine had won the Eurovision, not the war – not yet.