John Sweeney — Author
Transworld — Publisher

A gripping and explosive account of Vladimir Putin's tyranny, charting his rise from spy to tsar, exposing the events that led to his invasion of Ukraine and his assault on Europe.

In Killer in the Kremlin, award-winning journalist John Sweeney takes readers from the heart of Putin's Russia to the killing fields of Chechnya, to the embattled cities of an invaded Ukraine.

Bogdan Logvynenko — Author
Ukraїner — Publisher

The importance and timeliness of this book lie in the opportunity to give a voice to the people who survived the Russian occupation. In the foreword, human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk writes, “It often lacks resonance against the backdrop of statements by politicians who suggest handing over the occupied territories to the aggressor country and satisfying its imperial appetites. The voice of the survivors makes such appeals immoral.”

Yaroslav Trofimov — Author
Penguin Adult / Penguin Press (imprint) — Publisher

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 see-saw to this day. This is the story of the epic bravery of the Ukrainian people—people Trofimov knows very well.

Author — Myroslav Laiuk
Ukraїner publishing house — Publisher

During the most intense fighting for Bakhmut in the winter and in March 2023, the author spent days and nights with Ukrainian infantrymen and artillerymen, medics and chaplains, rescuers and children who remained in the city and its surroundings, where artillery shelling and street battles were a constant. It’s a story about the anti-aircraft gunner who has just shot down a Russian fighter jet, father and sons fighting side by side, and a member of Wagner who cherishes Nabokov. It’s a journey to places where dogs feast on the dead, where you are petrified by fear and desolation but also stunned with courage, resilience and even love.

Mikhail Zygar — Author
SIMON & SCHUSTER (Scribner imprint) — Publisher

From one of Russia's smartest and best-sourced young journalists comes the first work by a Russian author that reveals his country's history of oppressing Ukraine, blames Russian culture for the war, and dismantles the imperial narrative that Putin used to justify a brutal invasion.

Stanislav Aseyev — Luke Harding
Faber & Faber — Publisher

The first book of reportage from the front line of the Ukraine war. This is a powerful and moving first draft of history written by the award-winning Guardian journalist and #1 New York Times selling author of Collusion and Shadow State who forecast Putin’s dark adventurist ambitions.

Prior to the Soviet period, Ukraine enjoyed diverse contacts with its Islamic neighbours: the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire and, likewise, with its central and western European neighbours, especially Poland and France. This book reintroduces Ukraine's long-overlooked connections beyond Eastern Europe and smashes old stereotypes about Ukrainian isolation.

Abducted by Russian security forces in 2017, journalist Stanislav Aseyev survived the hell of imprisonment in a concentration camp operated by Russia’s military proxies in eastern Ukraine. This intense book recounts the author’s mental and physical struggle to survive imprisonment in a camp where horrific torture was employed to destroy countless lives. There are no laws behind the prison fence. Here, life consists of humiliation, unending fear, and agony— where wounds from electrical shocks and broken bones destroy a man’s desire to live and distort one’s ability to distinguish between faith, forgiveness, and hatred. By recounting his struggle to remain human in the most inhuman conditions, we come to understand how the darkness of his captivity forever altered the author’s outlook on life.

One of Ukraine’s leading art historians examines the phenomenon of the “Ukrainian avant-garde” art movement, which the Western art world discovered relatively late, thanks to the 1973 exhibit in London known as “Tatlin’s Dream.” The art of the Ukrainian avant-garde was exceptional since it was produced during a relatively short period of profound historic turmoil — World War I, followed by the Bolshevik Revolution, the collapse of the Russian Tsarist empire, the birth of the Ukrainian Republic, revolutionary war, the destruction of religious institutions, brief Ukrainianization, followed by a forced famine and Stalinist political repression. The book profiles the leading artistic figures of the Ukrainian avant-garde and notes its profound influence on the nonconformists of the 1960’s, including the Ukrainian cultural and political anti Soviet dissident movement of the sixties.

The book’s Jewish Ukrainian author analyzes the most painful events in the history of the Ukrainian and Jewish peoples and focuses on the systematic efforts of Russia’s tsarist and Soviet empires to sow interethnic conflict, employing disinformation and historical fabrications to create hatred and dysfunction.

This volume of articles, edited by the Kyiv-based Editor-in-Chief of Ukraine’s newspaper Den (The Day), strives to shatter the image of the Ukrainian people as chronic victims. The book traces the thread of Russian chauvinism from the Romanovs to Putin’s Russia, as it presents the unknown stories behind an array of vastly different historical figures, including Ivan Mazepa, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mykola Skrypnyk, General Petro Grigorenko, and Mikhail Gorbachev. As alluded to by the book’s title, readers are challenged to detoxify themselves from the imperialist myths imposed on the Ukrainian psyche by centuries of toxic Russian authoritarianism and destructive colonialist policies.

This timely and relevant book places imperial nationalism and chauvinism at the centre of Putin’s Russia and identifies them as the driving pretext for the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.