Diary of an Invasion:

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This war is not about the Russian language, which I have spoken and used in writing all my life. This war is about the aging Putin’s last chance to fulfil his dream of recreating the USSR or the Russian Empire. Neither one nor the other is possible without Kyiv, without Ukraine. Therefore, blood is shed, and people are dying, including Russian soldiers. (…) Putin has often stated publicly that, for him, the greatest tragedy he has experienced is the collapse of the Soviet Union. For most Ukrainians, it was not a tragedy. Rather, it was an opportunity to become a European country and to regain independence from Russia’s Empire. (…).” I have been thinking about that Makariv bread for several days now – remembering the taste. Only now, while remembering, I sense the taste of blood on my lips, like when I was a child and someone split my lip in a fight. The day before the start of the war, our children, including our daughter who had flown in from London, had gone with their friends to the beautiful city of Lviv in western Ukraine. They wanted to visit the cafes, museums, the medieval streets of the old centre. We decided to join them. The journey of 420km took 22 hours. The traffic jams varied in length, from 10 to 50 miles.

In the Ukrainian countryside, there is a long tradition of having plenty of bread on the table and of eating it with butter and salt or dipping it in milk. However, this territory is complicated, too. Like millions of Ukrainians, Kurkov, who was born near Leningrad, is a native Russian speaker and part of the fascination of his book lies in its accounts of the struggle for identity within the country, something the war has made more vexed. Ukraine has, for instance, demanded that Russian culture be boycotted. But while many younger Ukrainians are enthusiastic about this idea, older people are more conservative. The council of the Pyotr Tchaikovsky conservatory in Kyiv, the country’s national music academy, recently met to discuss whether it should be renamed after the Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko – and eventually decided against. Meanwhile, an opera-loving friend of Kurkov’s wept at the thought of not being able ever again to hear Eugene Onegin at Kyiv opera house. The first volume of his Diary Of An Invasion begins on December 29, 2021, with "Goodbye Delta! Hello Omicron!" - if only Covid was all Ukraine had to worry about - and ends in early July, before the recent successes of Ukraine's army, to whose soldiers Kurkov has dedicated the book.

Summary

But he had already foreseen that his pro-Ukrainian views would get him arrested. “I knew that sooner or later they would turn me in, and there were plenty of snitches,” he wrote. Diary of an Invasion' is Andrey Kurkov's diary written during the ongoing war in Ukraine. It starts a few months before the war and describes the events leading up to the war and Kurkov's own everyday, personal experiences. It ends at a time a few months after the start of the war. The diary runs for around six months. Around the time the diary ends, the expectation was that the war will get over before winter or latest by spring. But now we know that the war has dragged on into the second year with no end in sight. Kurkov says in his epilogue that he is continuing to work on this diary and we can expect a sequel. In Mariupol and other cities of the south and east, bookshops were destroyed along with their books. In other cities they were simply shut down. When they open again, it will mean that peace has come to Ukraine. When a bookshop opens again in Mariupol, it will mean much more. 4 April 2022 Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov is strongest when he writes on cultural matters. Photograph: Sergei Supinsky/AFP

As if by some divine joke, in the Ukrainian National character, unlike in the Russian one, there is no fatalism. Ukrainians almost never get depressed. They are programmed for victory, for happiness, for survival in difficult circumstances, as well as for love of life.”From day one I stopped writing fiction. I couldn't concentrate on anything but reality. So, when I was asked to comment about events, I started speaking on radio and television then writing about what was happening." 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. Surprisingly perhaps to a British audience, he is not an unalloyed supporter of Zelensky, whose leadership has won worldwide praise, drawing comparisons to Winston Churchill. Although he does believe the president has proved himself under fire. Ukraine has given me thirty years of life without censorship, without dictatorship, without control over what I wrote and what I said. For this, I am infinitely grateful to my country. I now understand very well that if Russia succeeds in seizing Ukraine, all the freedoms that the citizens of Ukraine are so used to will be lost, together with the independence of our state”, reflects Andrey Kurkov at some point in his “Diary of an Invasion”. Oftentimes, though, he dismisses such pessimistic thoughts by affirming Ukrainian spirit and the will of Ukrainians to fight and defend their country at all costs. Kurkov is best known for his 1996 novel Death and the Penguin, a book that has been translated into more than 30 languages. When the war began, he was hard at work on a new novel, but he hasn’t touched it since. At first, he was too distracted and he missed his library, left behind in Kyiv. Then he started writing his diary, the phone began ringing and he found himself too busy being a voice for Ukraine out in the world: “It’s a big responsibility. I wish there were more like me.” But there are also, he knows, things he can say that might sound hollow if they came from a non-Ukrainian. Take culture. He believes that it is never more important than in a time of war, offering as evidence for this the fact that no sooner had the conflict started than Kyiv’s metro platforms were being used as free cinemas. “People cannot live without it,” he says. “It gives meaning to a person’s life. It explains to a person who he or she is and where he or she belongs.”

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. Immediate and important ... This is an insider's account of how an ordinary life became extraordinary' Helen Davies, The Times 'At first we did not understand what war was. As I leave Kapytolivka, past the budding apricot trees that line the lanes, I look up and see a sedge of cranes flying overhead. I want to believe they are the same birds that Vakulenko saw a year ago: the birds that brought him hope. During World War II, there was a slogan in the Soviet Union that said, “For the Motherland, for Stalin!” The soldiers who died did so for the U.S.S.R. and for Stalin. […] Now the Russians are dying, “For the Motherland, for Putin”. Ukrainians die only for their Motherland, for Ukraine. Ukrainians don’t have a tsar to die for. […] Ukraine is a country of free people. Writing about the siege of Mariupol, Harding interviews women and children who were among thousands of civilians who sought refuge in the city’s famous theatre. At least 600 were killed on March 16th when a Russian aircraft, ignoring the word “children” painted on the roof, dropped a laser-guided bomb on the undefended building. One of Harding’s former local guides, Anatoliy, calls him repeatedly on his cell phone, across the lines of the siege, with increasingly desperate pleas for international help. His last call is wordless, just the sound of the wind. He has not been heard from since Mariupol fell to the Russians.The rest of No Choice is concerned with abortion care in the US in the past century. Andrews shares the devastating and rousing stories of the people on the front lines, from doctors to patients, campaigners to senators. Most chillingly, her accounts of underground abortion services before Roe vs Wade in 1973 – provided by groups such as the Army of Three and the Jane Collective – now seem an indication of what is to come. As for a possible coup, he adds: "Putin is from the KGB, he is very well protected. He has made the two Russian secret services - the FSB and GRU, the Army intelligence service - fight each other, the typical behaviour of a dictator. The truth is, nobody's happy there. In reality they have already lost the war. They can still destroy Ukraine, but the war is lost." These anecdotal curiosities prove far more engaging than the close attention given throughout the diary to some of Kurkov’s closest friends and family. Repeat mentions of the author’s brother who lives near an aircraft factory along with lengthy descriptions of the decisions that friends and neighbors have to make attempt to provide the continuity of a story line (Will they get out? Will they stay?) without building upon themselves or progressing in ways that feel like a plot. The real story here isn’t with these characters, but with Kurkov’s own feelings towards how the war he observes is transforming the people and places he knows so well. We found our children disoriented and sad. Not far from the house they were renting, I noticed a gun shop. It was still closed, but there was a line of people in front of it. There were men, young boys and girls in the queue, waiting for opening time. This journal of the invasion, a collection of Andrey Kurkov's writings and broadcasts from Kyiv, is a remarkable record of a brilliant writer at the forefront of a 21st-century war.