"In War: Stories from Ukraine" by Tim Judah. Book Launch

The evening will consist of a 90-minute session “in conversation with the author” hosted by SSEES Ukraine specialist Dr Andrew Wilson, including a slideshow of some of the author’s photography from Ukraine. Copies of the book will be available for inspection and purchase.

“Visceral, gripping, heartbreaking and often shocking, based on interviews with witnesses and victims on the ground, In Wartime is both astute political analysis and vivid war reportage of what’s really happening in the dirty war in Ukraine by a veteran observer of the Balkan wars who truly understands the complexities and nuances of the wars on Europe’s peripheries” Simon Sebag Montefiore. When President Yanukovych announced on 21 November 2014 that the deals with Europe were off, he unwittingly lit the blue touch paper of revolt. By linking their fate to the West, many Ukrainians had thought that a state of law would be introduced. Hundreds of thousands came to demonstrate their support for the revolution in Kiev, yet were left alarmed and disappointed when the war broke out.

 In this compelling book of reportage, Economist correspondent Tim Judah explores the impact of the ongoing conflict on the inhabitants of Ukraine.

 Each section of the book is a story in itself: Judah meets with 91-year-old Mihailo Gasyuk, who remembers when Communist Party officials came to lecture his village near Lviv on collectivisation in 1939; a local mayor and mother, Elena Zhecheva, who explains how corruption blocks her and others from being able to do anything to make life better for the village; a former Soviet naval man who describes how in this conflict, the words ‘information war’ have replaced the term ‘propaganda’; and Natalya Kircheva, the deputy head of a primary school in Zhovtnevoe, who believes that “it is politicians fighting it out, not a people’s war.”

Filled with vivid, enlightening stories and illustrated with Judah’s own photographs from the region, In Wartime mixes people, stories, history, politics and reportage to delve into the experiences and attitudes of Ukrainians today.

About the Author

Tim Judah writes for the New York Review of Books and the Economist, most recently on the situation in Ukraine. In his career he has covered the aftermath of communism in Romania and Bulgaria and the war in Yugoslavia for The Times and the Economist. His most recent books are Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know and The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia.