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Ithaka Press, the new narrative nonfiction imprint of Bonnier Books UK, has acquired A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, death and defiance in Ukraine,the third book from the Emmy-winningjournalist Andrew Harding .Fiona Hill (Russia expert and author of “There Is Nothing For You Here):“Fascinating, vivid, often harrowing,and also deeply moving. Cinematic and gripping - a must read for anyone trying to grasp both the human dimension and larger dynamics of events in this brutal contemporarywar.”

As soon as I got to Voznesensk and I started meeting some of the locals involved, it was clear to me – not only that this was a great news story, which we did for the BBC – but that this had the makings of a kind of moment that you could capture in a book that could tell a wider story, because the battle of Voznesensk was about that defiance that has become such a hallmark of Ukraine’s war effort,” he said. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. From 2-13 March 2022 - only a week into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine - Russian forces tried and failed to take and hold Voznesensk, a small but strategically important town 80 kilometres northwest of Mykolaiv. Considering his job, it’s almost redundant to say that much of what Miller describes is terrible and terrifying (I had to set the book aside with his description of arriving at the crash scene of the shot-down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, in which 298 people perished in 2014). One unforgettable moment after the battle of Donetsk Airport comes when Miller asked a Ukrainian soldier: “This is a war now, huh?” We overlooked the fact that, for many centuries, ‘great Russian culture’ belittled other countries and peoples, suppressed and destroyed them,” says Zygar.Focussing on characters such as Svetlana, aformidablegrandmother, and Valentin, a local lawyer who instantly signs up to join the town’s Dad’s Army defenders, A Small, Stubborn Townis a real-life thriller about ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances with resilience, humour and ingenuity. Harding’s BBC report on the town’sunlikely victory has been viewed over 5 million timesonline. The author's own book recommendations are Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival by Luke Harding (Guardian Faber Publishing, 2023) and Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov (MacLehose Press, 2021) Zygar remains optimistic that change is coming. He remains defiant, like the townspeople of Voznesensk. Defiant enough to write: “Russia as an empire has been consigned to the past, as a direct and irreversible consequence of the war.” A bold prediction from a brave writer. Beautiful blend This section of War and Punishment is loaded with details of the rollercoaster recent history between Russia and Ukraine, with Zygar attaching welcome memoirs to much of it. Plenty here will be familiar to anyone who has read any of the numerous books on Putin’s Russia (including Zygar’s own absorbing All the Kremlin’s Men). Where War and Punishment is particularly enriching, though, is in outlining the life and career of Volodymyr Zelenskiy before his emergence as a wartime leader. Zelensky’s past in TV and cinema poking fun at Ukrainian and Russian establishments features strongly, until, of course, he became part of the same establishment after election as Ukrainian president in 2019.

Andrew Harding’s slim book, A Small, Stubborn Town, telling the story of a Ukrainian town’s resistance against the hulking Russian war machine across a number of days in March last year, perfectly encapsulates the phrase “punching above your weight” – and perhaps shows in microcosm why Ukraine hung on in the initial fight for longer than many thought possible.

I didn’t steal these stories,” he writes. “But I did, sometimes, snatch at them, in the middle of an all-consuming war, from people who had too little time on their hands and far more urgent business to preoccupy them.” Once Harding seized the narrative, he never let go, recreating it through the eyes of 20 or so characters: be it grandmother Svetlana, who stood up to Russian soldiers as they seized her home for a HQ, or conflicted Russian soldier Igor Rudenko, who is Ukrainian and grew up on the Crimean Peninsula (“My soul hurts,” he said upon capture).

The heavily-armed Russians are expecting an easy fight - or no fight at all. After all, Voznesensk is a quiet farming town, full of pensioners. Andrey Kurkov (Ukrainian author of “Grey Bees”):It would be wonderful if the story told in thisbeautiful little bookwere the author's invention. But alas,the story itself is pure truth. Then again, it’s still very possible that the Ukrainians will make the kind of breakthrough that they have been pushing for. We always underestimate the Ukrainians, and it’s very difficult to assess and calibrate the role of courage and determination. Because while the Russians in some places are determined, in some places are well-trained, and in some places are adapting skilfully to changing situations, they are fundamentally a top-down conscript army that is suffering enormous losses of men and materials,” Harding said. Ukrainians answered their nation’s call to arms following Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion on February 24th, 2022, and the citizens, both young and old, of the farming town of Voznesensk became symbolic of this fighting spirit. Since spring 2022, Russia has retreated from the right bank of the southern Kherson region. Earlier this month, its troops blew up the Kakhovka dam, flooding settlements and towns on either side of the Dnipro River. Ukraine has launched a counteroffensive and reclaimed villages around Zaporizhzhia. But the Russians have dug in, and are determined to defend a chunk of occupied southern territory. The war’s outcome is grimly uncertain.The cookie is set by CloudFlare service to store a unique ID to identify a returning users device which then is used for targeted advertising. We soon end up at the mythology incorporating Lenin and Stalin, and the all too real Holodomor of 1932-33, when an estimated five million people died (four million of them Ukrainian). A large scattering of poets and writers and their roles in reinforcing or refuting national stereotypes and ideas are considered throughout, too. It’s an emotionally charged run-through and Zygar impressively relates early formative history to recent political agendas (who owns Crimea, for example), even if some expositions get boggy at times, especially when the Russian Orthodox Church is thrown in. A Small Town in Ukraine: Fascinating mapping of history and bloodshed around a geopolitical fault line ] This cookie is set by Addthis. This is a geolocation cookie to understand where the users sharing the information are located.