“The War Came to Us” By Christopher Miller
A Review
There is a plethora of publications covering the current conflict in Ukraine, so there are plenty to choose from for anyone interested in trying to understand the origins and reasons for the current return of war to Europe for the first time in 70 years. It seems as though anyone with knowledge or experience of the country is rushing to print.
I never thought that in my lifetime we would see tanks again rolling into a sovereign nation in Europe, as though none of the lessons of history have been learned , and we have never moved on to a better way of resolving differences. I saw this book was reviewed in “The Guardian” and it stood out as particularly relevant to understanding what has provoked this tragic return to conflict.
Miller is currently a correspondent in Ukraine for the “Financial Times”, previously a world and national security reporter for “Politico” and a correspondent for the now defunct “Buzzfeed”. When aged 25, he was a local reporter working in Oregon, and like many young people of that age, wanted adventure and to make a name for himself. He signed up as a fresh-faced volunteer in the U.S. Peace Corps around 2009, and spent several years in Eastern Ukraine, at that time an unpromising backwater for a thrill-seeker.
He started off by doing intensive courses in learning first Russian and then Ukrainian, getting to know local people, and teaching in schools, finding both languages useful in a region where at times they can be interchangeable, and even merge into a hybrid of the two.
So Miller was already in Ukraine in the lead-up to the momentous 2013 “EuroMaidan” protest, and the 2014 “Revolution of Dignity”. When you are seeking a deep dive into a subject, you want your guide to be someone who has deep and specialist knowledge, and Miller doesn’t disappoint.
The book is full of granular detail and local colour. Vignettes, anecdotes, and regional words are woven into the narrative, making it a fascinating read, full of rich texture, and providing insight into the daily lives of ordinary people. There are vivid front-line dispatches and illuminating interviews with a remarkable cast of colourful characters. They may have been outwardly ordinary, but in times of revolution and war, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, which is probably why so much of our literary heritage, both fiction and non-fiction, is set in periods of conflict.
The long and complex history of Ukraine
The history of Ukraine is a long, complex, and often tragic one. You only have to listen to their slow, mournful national anthem in its minor key to sense the pain and suffering its people have endured. The nation suffered under Stalin, who inflicted the Holodomor, also known as the “Great Ukrainian Famine”. This was a man-made disaster in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions, which Stalin used to crush Ukrainian nationalism, which shows how far back the present conflict goes.
Confusing borders and regions
The curse of nationalism has seen fluid borders over the years. For example, did you know that the beautiful city of Lviv in modern Western Ukraine, used to be part of Poland, and was then part of the Soviet Union, before changing nation again when Ukraine gained its independence in the Orange Revolution, as the USSR crumbled? Likewise going even further back Kyiv was the historical capital of medieval Kievan Rus’ from 879 to 1240. Similarly, in 1954 the Soviet Union transferred control of Crimea to Soviet Ukraine, a decision that has come back to haunt Ukraine today with tragic consequences. The present battle over borders is merely the continuation of this history of flux.
Given this history and the fluidity of borders and claims for territory, it is easy to see why President Putin, a keen student of Russian history, had ambitions to expand Russia’s empire once more. He clearly sees Ukraine as still being part of Russia, coveting its territory if not its people: he spent his honeymoon in Kiev and Lviv, and could clearly never accept the loss of Crimea, which has long featured spa resorts for holidaying Russians.
Crisp prose
By immersing himself in living with local people, and visiting places like Crimea and Mariupol before the recent conflict, Miller became an expert on his subject. For a while he even lived in Bakhmut, later to be razed in some of the bitterest fighting, including assaults by the Wagner mercenary force.
Miller educated himself in this rich history and is able to impart his learning. His prose is crisp, sparse, and tightly written, reminiscent of George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, who also reported from areas affected by conflict including the Spanish Civil War, a style in sharp contrast to the lyrical, more poetic style say of Laurie Lee, who also reported from that earlier conflict.
Right place, right time
“The War Came to Us” is the result of fortuitous circumstances. Miller was a budding journalist with ambitions to be a renowned reporter, and by chance found himself in the right place at the right time to pursue this ambition, immersed in the local community and fluent by this time in Russian and Ukrainian.
When the “EuroMaidan” revolt took place in 2013 he moved to Kiev, and was working for the “Kiev Post” newspaper, so was ideally placed to cover the extraordinary events which unfolded.
Infuriated at the Government’s last-minute decision, under pressure from Russia, to step back from closer ties with Europe, a wide range of groups occupied and then barricaded the central square known as the Maidan, and defended it from the ruthless Berkut security police, and Russian undercover forces, who tried to disperse them.
Miller captures well the heady sense of excitement, optimism, and possibility that is in the air during a popular uprising of this nature, that sense of a single day being like a year, a month like a lifetime, captured in a quote by a young volunteer for Euromaidan’s PR arm who observes that:
“revolutionary Kyiv has an interesting allure to it … full of possibilities, full of potential for any young person”.
On the Maidan there were free lessons, field kitchens, and libraries, a tent city that formed a crucible for idealism and an aspiration for a better world, with liberal Western values.
Eventually, the peaceful protest descended into violence, when the Berkut brutally clamped down, wading in with batons. However, this only brought more ordinary people out onto the streets to defend the Maidan, enraged at the beating of young people.
As the protest became entrenched, huge barricades were built at the entrances to the square, at times with burning tires. Eventually, there was the inevitable bloodshed as Berkut and Russian snipers on the roofs of surrounding buildings targeted protestors. Dozens died, but remarkably the popular uprising finally won the day, the snipers withdrew, and President Yanukovych fled to seek sanctuary with Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkut_(special_police_force)
Miller was among the protestors, sometimes interviewing people at the very moment they were shot. It was a dangerous time to be a reporter — some journalists were beaten up, abducted and tortured, sometimes killed. So his reputation has been built at some considerable personal risk. He cultivated numerous contacts and due to his presence and immersion in the Maidan, his reporting became in demand among the international press, generating inquiries from multiple newspapers.
While many in protestors were idealistic students, union members, anarchists, left-wingers, and workers, Miller also identifies the presence of the “Right Sector”, a militia formed from right-wingers and football hooligans. When he goes into a building to interview their leader, on one floor he passes a sign saying “Nazis Only” and one supporter gives a Hitler salute. However, this was only a faction among many.
Telling the truth
With regards to impartiality, at times Miller clearly sided with the protestors in the Maidan, seemingly coming close to joining their cause. However, he also knew some of the separatists in Eastern Ukraine and could also empathise with their alienation from Kiev.
So his account is nuanced, and he is not an uncritical cheerleader for the regime. He never loses sight of the journalist’s critical role of telling the truth as he sees it, and we owe a debt of gratitude to Miller and other journalists who risk their lives to bring news and reporting to us.
The annexation of Crimea and the Donbas
He demonstrates his determination to succeed as a reporter when later going to cover the conflict in the Dombas and Crimea, passing through multiple checkpoints and risking contact with undisciplined militias which again must have been particularly risky, though his luck held.
The annexation of Crimea is covered well when he visits the airport and nearly gets caught up in a dangerous firefight. This is followed by a similar Russian attempt to annex the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Eastern Ukraine, with the faked elections to give these some air of legitimacy. He visits some of the bases at the start of the annexation and witnesses the tense stand-offs between Ukrainian troops and nationalists trying to evict them.
Ever on the hunt for a scoop, Miller visits the launch site of the surface-to-air Buk missile that brought down the MH17 passenger airliner on 17 July 2014, killing all 298 people on board, one of the many tragedies the Eastern region of Ukraine suffered around that time. The sight of bodies in the fields haunted Miller for long afterward. The missile seems to have been brought into Eastern Ukraine by Russia in support of separatists, and mistakenly fired at the civilian plane, by a militia thinking the aircraft was from the Ukrainian airforce.
Miller excelled at getting to speak to key figures, for example, Russian nationalist writer Alexander Prokhanov, in rebel-held Donetsk with who he went for a “safari”, and record his opinion that “this is a beautiful war”.
He was also able to produce journalistic scoops, being one of the reporters who found orders issued by Russian nationalist commander Igor Girkin, left behind when his forces retreated, sentencing looters to be executed by firing squad.
A critique
If I were to find fault with the book, I would say that it would have been good to learn more about Miller himself. How did it feel to be under fire, to meet both ordinary decent people, and also interview killers and torturers, did he feel tempted to take “sides” or to become involved in the Maidan even more, how did he maintain a relationship with his girlfriend when often separated, how did she view the conflict, his reporting, and the risks he took, how did his experience in Ukraine change him, what lessons did he take away from it?
There are benefits to detached, neutral reporting, but sometimes these also mean a loss of intimacy, personality, and subjectivity which is a shame. Dropping the neutral objectivity could also have been used as a criticism, so it might have been done as a separate chapter where he dropped the journalist’s detached objectivity of his training, and gave more of himself.
Similarly, the writing style shows a Hemingway-sparse precision of a reporter, rather than the more lyrical “prose as poetry” writing of Laurie Lee. So while it makes a fascinating historical insight it lacks some of the beauty that the English language can have with more imaginative semantic choice.
Godwin’s Law
An interesting feature of the current conflict is how frequently both sides accuse the other of either being or behaving like Nazis. There have certainly been very right-wing elements among both Ukrainian nationalists, such as the Azov battalion that held out for weeks in the steelworks at Mariupol alongside ordinary people and troops. Looking at some Amazon reviews of Miller’s work, some criticise him for covering the Azov presence, since this was used by Putin as a justification for the invasion.
However, there have been very similar right-wing elements among pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine. At times it seems to many as though modern-day Russia under President Putin has behaved like the very Nazis they fought in World War Two.
One is reminded here of “Godwin’s Law”. This is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that, when a Hitler comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever made the comparison loses whatever debate is in progress -
So bandying around accusations that the other side is like Nazis does little to promote understanding, and diminishes the horrors of the Holocaust.
To be even-handed, there are accusations of the use of torture or targeting of civilians against both sides in the current conflict, though clearly most commentators would probably point to Russia having started the current conflict by invading Ukraine, and as having a much worse record.
The current conflict
There is an eight-year gap in the book between 2014, and 2022. The final third of the book resumes when Miller returns to Ukraine shortly prior to Zelensky’s election as President, including interviews with him. The book covers the phony way ahead of 24th February 2022 when the warning signs were there but few believed Russia would actually invade.
So Miller was ideally placed to cover Putin’s extraordinary so-called “Special Military Operation”, when a vast column of tanks crossed the border from Belarus and headed for Kiev, with similar columns approaching from Crimea and via the Donbas, only to halt and turned back by the heroic actions of the Ukrainian army and local volunteers. This was accompanied by horrific war crimes in Bucha and elsewhere as the Russians occupied villages and then retreated, leaving devastation in their wake.
Miller was in Kiev at the time of President Zelensky’s famous words in reply to Washington’s offer to extract him to exile,
“The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride”
With his previous experience in Ukraine and many contacts, Miller was ideally placed to report the new conflict and understand the local people and circumstances for this part of the book. There are many other accounts of the current conflict, though few in the West from authors which such a deep prior knowledge of the country and its people.
The roots of conflict
If there is a moral to the book, it is about the horror of war, and the hazards of nationalism. The love of nation can unite a people or divide it, or cause conflicts between nations eager to burnish or restore their pride. In many ways the people of different sides in the military are very similar to each other, defending their own version of the same desire: a safe and healthy future for their families, though underscored by that dangerous theme of nationhood.
There seems to be an innate human need to belong to a team, to be partisan, to have an “us” and an “other”. To be able to circle the wagons, to unite in small group at the expense of wider unity. It is this adherence to the team or nation that leads to conflict, and as so “often, it is innocent civilians who suffer when caught up in conflict.
It is important to try and understand why wars happen. For example it is widely believed that World War Two happened partly due to the humiliation of Germany and the reparations from World War One. One conflict begets the next.
In the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is clear that Putin felt enormous loss of national pride at the collapse of the Soviet Union and its shrinking sphere of influence as more and more neighbour states joined NATO, perhaps also feeling threatened by Nato’s encroachment right to the borders of Russia. He went from rising through the ranks of the KGB, a career he had long wanted, to the possibility of being a taxi driver, a humiliation that clearly stung and was never forgotten by him and others who had the same experience.
It remains as speculation whether if Nato had shown greater magnanimity, and less enthusiasm to expand, whether the conflict could have been avoided. There is also speculation among some commentators over whether the unique isolation imposed by the Covid pandemic played a role in fuelling President Putin’s alleged paranoia, exacerbated by a reduction in communication between national leaders, when travel was not possible.
Is there a way out of this seemingly endless cycle of nationalist violence? One is reminded of the idealism of John Lennon in his song “Imagine”:
Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try No hell below us Above us, only sky Imagine all the people Living for today Imagine there’s no countries It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will be as one Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people Sharing all the world You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will live as one
We are a very long way from that vision in modern day Ukraine, and many other parts of the world riven by conflict. However if humanity as a whole is ever to progress, we need to all see ourselves as citizens of Earth, rather than tied to an individual nation. Particularly in these days of a climate emergency, we will sink or swim together. There has never been a greater need to see the bigger picture and work as one.
A book for our time
Miller now writes on Ukraine for the “Financial Times” and as a stringer for other publications. His book is part history, part autobiography, part travelogue. He has a journalist’s eye for spotting interesting details and an ear for poignant comments and quotations.
“The War Came To Us” takes readers on a riveting journey through the key locales and pivotal events of Ukraine’s modern history. From the coal-dusted, sunflower-covered steppe of the Donbas in the far east to the heart of the Euromaidan revolution camp in Kyiv; from the Black Sea shores of Crimea, where Russian troops stealthily annexed Ukraine’s peninsula, to the bloody battlefields where Cossacks roamed before the Kremlin’s warlords ruled with iron fists; and through the horror and destruction wrought by Russian forces in Bucha, Bakhmut, Mariupol, and beyond. With candour, wit and sensitivity, Miller captures Ukraine in all its glory: vast, defiant, resilient, and full of wonder.
Overall this is a fascinating, poignant and inspiring account.
There will be many books written about this period of history, when war returned to Europe, and this will stand out as one of the best.
A human, not an AI text generator, wrote this story. (More Info)
As always, thank you for reading.
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Mastodon- you can find me here
There is a plethora of publications covering the current conflict in Ukraine, so there are plenty to choose from for anyone interested in trying to understand the origins and reasons for the current return of war to Europe for the first time in 70 years. It seems as though anyone with knowledge or experience of the country is rushing to print.
I never thought that in my lifetime we would see tanks again rolling into a sovereign nation in Europe, as though none of the lessons of history have been learned , and we have never moved on to a better way of resolving differences. I saw this book was reviewed in “The Guardian” and it stood out as particularly relevant to understanding what has provoked this tragic return to conflict.
Miller is currently correspondent in Ukraine for the “Financial Times”, previously a world and national security reporter for “Politico” and correspondent for the now defunct “Buzzfeed”. When aged 25, he was a local reporter working in Oregon, and like many you people of that age, wanted adventure and to make a name for himself. He signed up as a fresh-faced volunteer the U.S. Peace Corps around 2009, and spent several years in Eastern Ukraine, at that time an unpromising backwater for a thrill-seeker.
He started off by doing intensive courses in learning first Russian and then Ukrainian, getting to know local people, and teaching in schools, finding both languages useful in a region where at times they can be inter-changeable, and even merge into a hybrid of the two.
So Miller was already in Ukraine in the lead up to the momentous 2013 “EuroMaidan” protest, and the 2014 “Revolution of Dignity”. When you are seeking a deep dive into a subject, you want your guide to be someone who has deep and specialist knowledge, and Miller doesn’t disappoint.
The book is full of granular detail and local colour. Vignettes, anecdotes and regional words are woven into the narrative, making it a fascinating read, full of rich texture, and providing insight into the daily lives of ordinary people. There are vivid front-line dispatches and illuminating interviews with a remarkable cast of colourful characters. They may have been outwardly ordinary, but in times of revolution and war the ordinary becomes extraordinary, which is probably why so much of our literary heritage, both fiction and non-fiction, is set in periods of conflict.
The long and complex history of Ukraine
The history of Ukraine is a long, complex and often tragic one. You only have to listen to their slow, mournful national anthem in its minor key to sense the pain and suffering its people have endured. The nation suffered under Stalin, who inflicted the Holodomor, also known as the “Great Ukrainian Famine”. This was a man-made disaster in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions, which Stalin used to crush Ukrainian nationalism, which shows how far back the present conflict goes.
Confusing borders and regions
The curse of nationalism has seen fluid borders over the years. For example did you know that the beautiful city of Lviv in modern Western Ukraine, used to be part of Poland, was then part of the Soviet Union, before changing nation again when Ukraine gained its independence in the Orange Revolution, as the USSR crumbled? Likewise going even further back Kyiv was the historical capital of medieval Kievan Rus’ from 879 to 1240. Similarly in 1954 the Soviet Union transferred control of Crimea to Soviet Ukraine, a decision that has come back to haunt Ukraine today with tragic consequences. The present battle over borders is merely the continuation of this history of flux.
Given this history and the fluidity of borders and claims for territory, it is easy to see why President Putin, a keen student of Russian history, had ambitions to expand Russia’s empire once more. He clearly sees Ukraine as still being part of Russia, coveting its territory if not its people: he spent his honeymoon in Kiev and Lviv, and could clearly never accept the loss of Crimea, which has long featured spa resorts for holidaying Russians.
Crisp prose
By immersing himself by living with local people, and visiting places like Crimea and Mariupol before the recent conflict, For a while he even lived in Bakhmut, later to be razed in some of the bitterest fighting, including assaults by the Wagner mercernary force.
Miller educated himself in this rich history, and is able to impart his learning. His prose is crisp, sparse and tightly written, reminiscent of George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, who also reported from areas affected by conflict in including the Spanish Civil War, a style in sharp contrast to the lyrical, more poetic style say of Laurie Lee, who also reported from that earlier conflict.
Right place, right time
“The War Came to Us” is the result of fortuitous circumstances. Miller was a budding journalist with ambitions to be a renowned reporter, and by chance found himself in the right place at the right time to pursue this ambition, immersed in the local community and fluent by this time in Russian and Ukrainian.
When the “EuroMaidan” revolt took place in 2013 he moved to Kiev, and was working on the “Kiev Post” newspaper, so was ideally placed to cover the extraordinary events which unfolded.
Infuriated at the Government’s last minute decision, under pressure from Russia, to step back from closer ties with Europe, a wide range of groups occupied and then barricaded the central square known as the Maidan, and defended it from the ruthless Berkut security police, and Russian undercover forces, who tried to disperse them.
Miller captures well the heady sense of excitement, optimism and possibility that is in the air during a popular uprising of this nature, that sense of a single day being like a year, a month like a lifetime, captured in a quote by a young volunteer for Euromaidan’s PR arm who observes that:
“revolutionary Kyiv has an interesting allure to it … full of possibilities, full of potential for any young person”.
On the Maidan there were free lessons, field kitchens, and libraries, a tent city that formed a crucible for idealism and an aspiration for a better world, with liberal Western values.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan
Eventually the peaceful protest descended into violence, when the Berkut brutally clamped down, wading in with batons. However this only brought more ordianary people out onto the streets to defend the Maidan, enraged at the beating of young people.
As the protest became entrenched, huge barricades were built at the entrances to the square, at times with burning tyres. Eventually there was the inevitable bloodshed as Berkut and Russian snipers on the roofs of surrounding buildings targeted protestors. Dozens died, but remarkably the popular uprising finally won the day, the snipers withdrew, and President Yanukovych fled to seek sanctuary with Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkut_(special_police_force)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Yanukovych
Miller was among the protestors, sometimes interviewing people at the very moment they were shot. It was a dangerous time to be a reporter — some journalists were beaten up, abducted and tortured, sometimes killed. So his reputation has been built at some considerable personal risk. He cultivated numerous contacts and due to his presence and immersion in the Maidan, his reporting became in demand among the international press, generating enquiries from multiple newspapers.
While many in protestors were idealistic students, union members, anarchists, left-wingers and workers, Miller also identifies the presence of the “Right Sector”, a militia formed from right-wingers and football hooligans. When he goes into a building to interview their leader, on one floor he passes a sign saying “Nazis Only” and one supporter gives a Hitler salute. However this was only a faction among many.
Telling the truth
With regards to impartiality, at times Miller clearly sided with the protestors in the Maidan, seemingly coming close to joining their cause. However he also knew some of the separatists in Eastern Ukraine and could also empathise with their alienation from Kiev.
So his account is nuanced, and he is not an uncritical cheerleader for the regime. He never loses sight of the journalist’s critical role of telling the truth as he sees it, and we owe a debt of gratitude to Miller and other journalists who risk their lives to bring news and reporting to us.
The annexation of Crimea and the Donbas
He demonstrates his determination to succeed as a reporter, when later going to cover conflict in the Dombas and Crimea, passing through multiple checkpoints and risking contact with undisciplined militias which again must have been particularly risk, though his luck held.
The annexation of Crimea is covered well, where he visits the airport and nearly gets caught up in a dangerous firefight. This is followed by the similar Russian attempt to annex the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Eastern Ukraine, with the faked elections to give these some air of legitimacy. He visits some of the bases at the start of the annexation and witnesses the tense stand-offs between Ukrainian troops and nationalists trying to evict them.
Ever on the hunt for a scoop, Miller visits the launch site of the surface-to-air Buk missile that brought down the MH17 passenger airliner on 17 July 2014, killing all 298 people on board, one of the many tragedies the Eastern region of Ukraine suffered around that time. The missile seems to have been brought into Eastern Ukraine by Russia in support of separatists, and mistakenly fired at the civilian plane, by a militia thinking the aircraft was from the Ukrainian airforce.
Miller excelled at getting to speak to key figures, for example, Russian nationalist writer Alexander Prokhanov, in rebel-held Donetsk with who he went for a “safari”, and record his opinion that “this is a beautiful war”.
He was also able to produce journalistic scoops, being one of the reporters who found orders issued by Russian nationalist commander Igor Girkin, left behind when his forces retreated, sentencing looters to be executed by firing squad.
A critique
If I were to find fault with the book, I would say that it would have been good to learn more about Miller himself. How did it feel to be under fire, to meet both ordinary decent people, and also interview killers and torturers, did he feel tempted to take “sides” or to become involved in the Maidan even more, how did he maintain a relationship with his girlfriend when often separated, how did she view the conflict, his reporting, and the risks he took, how did his experience in Ukraine change him, what lessons did he take away from it? There are benefits to detached, neutral reporting, but sometimes these also mean a loss of intimacy, personality, and subjectivity which is a shame. Dropping the neutral objectivity could also have been used as a criticism, so it might have been done as a separate chapter where he dropped the journalist’s detached objectivity of his training, and gave more of himself.
Similarly the writing style shows a Hemingway-sparse precision of a reporter, rather than the more lyrical “prose as poetry” writing of Laurie Lee. So while it makes a fascinating historical insight it lacks some of the beauty that the English language can have with more imaginative semantic choice.
Godwin’s Law
An interesting feature of the current conflict is how frequently both sides accuse the other of either being or behaving like Nazis. There have certainly been very right-wing elements among both Ukrainian nationalists, such as the Azov battalion that held out for weeks in the steelworks at Mariupol alongside ordinary people and troops. Looking at some Amazon reviews of Miller’s work, some criticise him for covering the Azov presence, since this was used by Putin as a justification for the invasion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Brigade
However there have been very similar right-wing elements among pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine. At times it seems to many as though modern-day Russia under President Putin has behaved like the very Nazis they fought in World War Two.
One is reminded here of “Godwin’s Law”. This is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that, when a Hitler comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever made the comparison loses whatever debate is in progress -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
So bandying around accusations that the other side are like Nazis does little to promote understanding, and diminishes the horrors of the Holocaust.
To be even-handed, there are accusations of the use of torture or targeting of civilians against both sides in the current conflict, though clearly most commentators would probably point to Russia having started the current conflict by invading Ukraine, and as having a much worse record.
The current conflict
There is an eight-year gap in the book between 2014, and 2022. The final third of the book resumes when Miller returns to Ukraine shortly prior to Zelensky’s election as President, including interviews with him. The book covers the phoney way ahead of 24th February 2022 when the warning signs were there but few believed Russia would actually invade.
So Miller was ideally placed to cover Putin’s extraordinary so-called “Special Military Operation”, when a vast column of tanks crossed the border from Belarus and headed for Kiev, with similar columns approaching from Crimea and via the Donbas, only to halted and turned back by the heroic actions of the Ukrainian army and local volunteers. This was accompanied by horrific war crimes in Bucha and elsewhere as the Russians occupied villages and then retreated, leaving devastation in their wake.
Miller was in Kiev at the time of President Zelensky’s famous words in reply to Washington’s offer to extract him to exile,
“The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride”
With his previous experience in Ukraine and many contacts, Miller was ideally placed to report the new conflict and understand the local people and circumstances for this part of the book. There are many other accounts of the current conflict, though few in the West from authors which such a deep prior knowledge of the country and its people.
The roots of conflict
If there is a moral to the book, it is about the horror of war, and the hazards of nationalism. The love of nation can unite a people or divide it, or cause conflicts between nations eager to burnish or restore their pride. In many ways the people of different sides in the military are very similar to each other, defending their own version of the same desire: a safe and healthy future for their families, though underscored by that dangerous theme of nationhood.
There seems to be an innate human need to belong to a team, to be partisan, to have an “us” and an “other”. To be able to circle the wagons, to unite in small group at the expense of wider unity. It is this adherence to the team or nation that leads to conflict, and as so “often, it is innocent civilians who suffer when caught up in conflict.
It is important to try and understand why wars happen. For example it is widely believed that World War Two happened partly due to the humiliation of Germany and the reparations from World War One. One conflict begets the next.
In the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is clear that Putin felt enormous loss of national pride at the collapse of the Soviet Union and its shrinking sphere of influence as more and more neighbour states joined Nato, perhaps also feeling threatened by Nato’s encroachment right to the borders of Russia. He went from rising through the ranks of the KGB, a career he had long wanted, to the possibility of being a taxi driver, a humiliation that clearly stung and was never forgotten by him and others who had the same experience.
It remains as speculation whether if Nato had shown greater magnanimity, and less enthusiasm to expand, whether the conflict could have been avoided. There is also speculation among some commentators over whether the unique isolation imposed by the Covid pandemic played a role in fuelling President Putin’s alleged paranoia, exacerbated by a reduction in communication between national leaders, when travel was not possible.
Is there a way out of this seemingly endless cycle of nationalist violence? One is reminded of the idealism of John Lennon in his song “Imagine”:
Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try No hell below us Above us, only sky Imagine all the people Living for today I Imagine there’s no countries It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will be as one Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people Sharing all the world You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will live as one
We are a very long way from that vision in modern day Ukraine, and many other parts of the world riven by conflict. However if humanity as a whole is ever to progress, we need to all see ourselves as citizens of Earth, rather than tied to an individual nation. Particularly in these days of a climate emergency, we will sink or swim together. There has never been a greater need to see the bigger picture and work as one.
A book for our time
Miller now writes on Ukraine for the “Financial Times” and as a stringer for other publications. His book is part history, part autobiography, part travelogue. He has a journalist’s eye for spotting interesting details and an ear for poignant comments and quotations.
“The War Came To Us” takes readers on a riveting journey through the key locales and pivotal events of Ukraine’s modern history. From the coal-dusted, sunflower-covered steppe of the Donbas in the far east to the heart of the Euromaidan revolution camp in Kyiv; from the Black Sea shores of Crimea, where Russian troops stealthily annexed Ukraine’s peninsula, to the bloody battlefields where Cossacks roamed before the Kremlin’s warlords ruled with iron fists; and through the horror and destruction wrought by Russian forces in Bucha, Bakhmut, Mariupol, and beyond. With candour, wit and sensitivity, Miller captures Ukraine in all its glory: vast, defiant, resilient, and full of wonder.
Overall this is a fascinating, poignant and inspiring account. There will be many books written about this period of history when war returned to Europe, and this will stand out as one of the best.
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