Our Enemies Will Vanish

Informationen zum Autor Yaroslav Trofimov Klappentext "Yaroslav Trofimov, the Ukrainian chief foreign-affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, offers an eyewitness account of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine"-- Leseprobe Chapter 1 The "People's Republics" Russia's war against Ukraine had begun eight years earlier, with what Ukrainians called their "Revolution of Dignity" and what Moscow described as an American-sponsored putsch. The initial divorce between Russia and Ukraine, agreed in December 1991, was surprisingly bloodless. At a meeting in a Belarusian forest lodge, Russian president Boris Yeltsin and his counterparts from Ukraine and Belarus decided to dissolve the Soviet Union, respecting each other's territorial integrity. Russia recognized Ukraine's sovereignty over lands that many, if not most, Russians had always considered rightfully theirs, from Kharkiv to Crimea to Odesa. The Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky reacted by writing a vitriolic poem wishing that the mighty Dnipro River would flow backward to punish ungrateful and uppity khokhols , a Russian slur for Ukrainians. Another Russian Nobel Prize winner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, cried betrayal. But nobody in Moscow seriously tried to stop the breakup. Russia was so magnanimous because it expected Ukraine's independence to be nominal at best, just like that of nearby Belarus. The bonds between the two countries and the two peoples were so tight, after all, that a truly separate and viable Ukrainian state was impossible to imagine-at least in Moscow. In Belarus, the 1994 election of former collective farm chief Aleksandr Lukashenko-the only member of the Belarusian parliament who voted against independence-snuffed out any attempt to steer the country westward. Lukashenko brought Belarus into a confederation with Russia, and brutally suppressed the democratic opposition by jailing or outright assassinating opponents. The authoritarian Yanukovych, a Russian-speaking coal-industry boss and onetime juvenile criminal from Donbas, was supposed to perform a similar role for Ukraine-and he might well have, except that the Ukrainian people revolted twice. The first revolution was in 2004, when Yanukovych, who was prime minister at the time, tried to steal a presidential election by using local bureaucracies to stuff ballot boxes. President Leonid Kuchma, at the end of his second and final term, ordered security forces to remain neutral. Under pressure from protesters, Ukraine's supreme court acknowledged the fraud and ordered another round of elections. This time, Yanukovych lost. In 2010, a chastened, seemingly changed Yanukovych won the presidency fair and square. In part, he gained power because of unchecked graft and infighting in Ukraine's pro-Western camp. As all Ukrainian presidents had done since independence, Yanukovych promised to seek closer ties with the European Union. He even negotiated a free-trade and political-association agreement with the EU. But, in November 2013, he unexpectedly pulled out of the deal and moved to join a customs union with Russia. As stunned Ukrainians digested the news, Mustafa Nayyem, a Kyiv journalist of Afghan descent, made the first call for protests. "People, let's get serious," he wrote on Facebook. "Who is ready to come to Maidan before midnight tonight? Likes don't count." Hundreds of thousands showed up in the following days and weeks. The initially peaceful rallies turned violent when Yanukovych ordered riot police to open fire, and descended into an outright bloodbath on February 20, 2014, with dozens gunned down in central Kyiv. The Ukrainian parliament-including many lawmakers from the president's party-intervened to outlaw the use of force against protesters just as a delegation of European foreign ministers reached a compromise. On February 21, Yanukovych agreed to form a government of nati...

Autorentext

Yaroslav Trofimov

Klappentext

***Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist • Winner of the Peterson Literary Prize

• “Our Enemies Will Vanish achieves the highest level of war reporting: a tough, detailed account that nevertheless reads like a great novel. One is reminded of Michael Herr's Dispatches . . . Frankly, it's what we have all aspired to. I did not really understand Ukraine until I read Trofimov's account.” —Sebastian Junger

  A revelatory eyewitness account of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and heroism of the Ukrainian people in their resistance by Yaroslav Trofimov, the Ukrainian chief foreign-affairs correspondent for *The Wall Street Journal.

• Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Yaroslav Trofimov has spent months on end at the heart of the conflict, very often on its front lines. In this authoritative account, he traces the war’s decisive moments—from the battle for Kyiv to more recently the gruelling and bloody arm wrestle involving the Wagner group over Bakhmut—to show how Ukraine and its allies have turned the tide against Russia, one of the world’s great military powers, in a modern-day battle of David and Goliath. Putin had intended to conquer and annex Ukraine with a vicious blitzkrieg, redrawing the map of Europe in a few short weeks with seismic geopolitical consequences. But in the face of this existential threat, the Ukrainian people fought back, turning what looked like certain defeat into a great moral victory, even as the territorial battle continues to seesaw to this day. This is the story of the epic bravery of the Ukrainian people—people Trofimov knows very well.

  For Trofimov, this war is deeply personal. He grew up in Kyiv and his family has lived there for generations. With deep empathy and local understanding, Trofimov tells the story of how everyday Ukrainian citizens—doctors, computer programmers, businesspeople, and schoolteachers—risked their lives and lost loved ones. He blends their brave and tragic stories with expert military analysis, providing unique insight into the thinking of Ukrainian leadership and mapping out the decisive stages of what has become a perilous war for Ukraine, the Putin regime, and indeed, the world.

  This brutal, catastrophic struggle is unfolding on another continent, but the United States and its NATO allies have become deeply implicated. As the war drags on, it threatens to engulf the world. We cannot look away. At once heart-breaking and inspiring, Our Enemies Will Vanish is a riveting, vivid, and first-hand account of the Ukrainian refusal to surrender. It is the story of ordinary people fighting not just for their homes and their families but for justice and democracy itself.

  Leseprobe
  Chapter 1

  The "People's Republics"

  Russia's war against Ukraine had begun eight years earlier, with what Ukrainians called their "Revolution of Dignity" and what Moscow described as an American-sponsored putsch.

  The initial divorce between Russia and Ukraine, agreed in December 1991, was surprisingly bloodless. At a meeting in a Belarusian forest lodge, Russian president Boris Yeltsin and his counterparts from Ukraine and Belarus decided to dissolve the Soviet Union, respecting each other's territorial integrity. Russia recognized Ukraine's sovereignty over lands that many, if not most, Russians had always considered rightfully theirs, from Kharkiv to Crimea to Odesa.

  The Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky reacted by writing a vitriolic poem wishing that the mighty Dnipro River would flow backward to punish ungrateful and uppity khokhols, a Russian slur for Ukrainians. Another Russian Nobel Prize winner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, cried betrayal. But nobody in Moscow seriously tried to stop the breakup. Russia was so magnanimous because it expected Ukraine's independence to be nominal at best, just like that of nearby Belarus. The bonds between the two countries and the…