The Telegraph’s 50 best books of 2023: Serhii Plokhy’s book is on the list

“The Russo-Ukrainian War”, the English-language edition of Serhii Plokhy’s book was included in the list of the 50 best publications of 2023, according to information by Telegraph’s Books desk.

The English translation was published in summer 2023 by the leading UK publisher Allen Lane, and in February of the same year by Penguin Books Ltd. “The Russo-Ukrainian War” is the 33rd in the Telegraph’s ranking.

“Perhaps the most definitive account of the history leading up to today’s war in Ukraine, from the author of Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy,” is written in description of the book by Serhii Plokhy in The Telegraph ranking list.

The Telegraph’s Book Desk has compiled a list of “definitive ranking of this year’s essential reading” based on suggestions from book reviewers and authors of specialized guides to the best works of history, fiction and other genres.

“Though the current war began eight years before the all-out assault ― on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament ― the roots of this conflict can be traced back even earlier, to post-Soviet tensions and imperial collapse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a broad historical context and an examination of Ukraine and Russia’s ideas and cultures, as well as domestic and international politics, Plokhy reveals that while this new Cold War was not inevitable, it was predictable,” is stated in the annotation to the book.

Serhii Plokhy is a Ukrainian-American historian and writer specializing in the history of Ukraine, Eastern Europe and the Cold War, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, and a recipient of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Literature for his book “Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe.”

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“The Russo-Ukrainian War” is the author’s account about the war in Ukraine, the evolution of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia from the collapse of the Russian Empire to the rise and fall of the USSR and the development of democratic politics in Ukraine. The author analyzes the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the unification of the West against the backdrop of this war, and the movement towards Russia’s isolation in the modern world. The book was presented in Ukraine at the end of August 2023.

Source: The Telegraph

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