REMEMBER NOW?

Here’s the thing: neither Charlotte Higgins (Balliol, 1990) nor Luke Harding (Univ, 1987) are conventional war hacks, embedding with the men at arms and swilling whiskey like it’s orange squash, the Hemingway way.

Their approaches to the Russian invasion of Ukraine are far less about conquest, swag and weaponry; rather, they are more about politics, people, culture and art. 

In Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War, Charlotte (shown, right) explains that she didn’t know much about Ukraine at all in February 2022 and was then (and remains) chief culture correspondent for the Guardian newspaper.

However, she makes an incredibly important point that even serious observers have often missed, that at the deepest level Putin’s ‘problem’ is in fact Ukraine itself, its very existence the basis of an attempt to destroy it.

Again and again, she notes, the Ukrainian language, culture and heritage have been the target.

Early in Charlotte’s book (and only just after the invasion) she attends the Venice Biennale, meeting Pavlo Makov, an artist who had just fled from the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

Sitting in the rather surreal but entirely safe, watery sunshine of Venice, ‘he explained that the Russian war was revanchist: that Russia was a bitterly resentful former imperial power that could not reconcile itself to its neighbour’s independence, and wanted Ukraine back. It was not just about territory and resources, "but about Putin’s insistence that Ukraine had no valid separate identity". He framed the conflict as a war of culture.

‘…to have left this unreported…’, argues Charlotte as her premise, ‘…would have been to ignore a crucial instrument for understanding the war.’

Luke’s book Betrayal: Trump, Putin and the New Age of Conquest is different, reading like a fast-paced, page-zipping tour of the recent ‘now’ of current affairs, Ukraine at the crossroads of rapidly changing global power dynamics.

It’s heady stuff. He zips around from North Korea to Anchorage, Alaska, to Nuuk, Greenland. Ukraine is always there, the lens through which everything else is focused. 

Despite the different emphasis, Luke would not disagree with Charlotte’s premise, that Russia’s invasion was at heart about identity and the right of Ukraine to exist. 

The day we meet Luke (below left), who is senior international correspondent at the Guardian newspaper, it is a couple of days after Kyiv’s main book market received a direct hit from a Russian missile, and some commentators held back from saying that Russia intended to hit it, because it’s nigh on impossible to prove such intent beyond all doubt.

But Luke harbours no such doubt, insisting that Russia would have directly targeted it, an assault not on a piece of military infrastructure but on culture and language in the form of paper books, that were shown on TV news outlets burning and charred, flapping disconsolately in the firefighter-hosed wet mess of steam and smoke that daylight brought after the night inferno.

The epigraphs that preface each of Luke’s chapters would also get Charlotte’s nod. They range from Italian Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author to Shakespeare’s cruellest play Titus Andronicus (Act IV, Scene 4), by which he frames the United States voting with Russia at the UN, refusing to sign a resolution naming Russia as an aggressor towards Ukraine, as Luke tells it, an astonishing break with even the recent past in diplomatic relations.

This was just last year. ‘Whatever way you cut it, it looked like betrayal.’ A defining moment in the book.

Luke’s particular strength, carried forward from his earlier reporting in Invasion, is that he’s got the sources and pays attention. He wants you to pay attention too. He met the first North Korean soldier captured by Kyiv, Ri Chol-nam, a real scoop. He starts there, going into extensive detail about the extraordinary effort by Russia to keep the Korean connection a secret. Later on, we hear about the millions of artillery shells and ballistic missiles that North Korea has supplied to Russia, most of them deployed already.

The insistent, compiling direction of travel concerns the globalisation of a conflict that initially appeared to be regional.

We follow China’s role, Iran’s role, Trump’s role (more colourfully ambiguous and Putin-adjacent even than you thought it was), and Biden’s (which was less helpful to Ukraine than you may assume).

We visit Nuuk. We visit Leytonstone in North London where a warehouse burned down: it transpired, a Kremlin plot. We visit the London court that put away one former UK MEP, Nathan Gill, for taking Russian money to speak to Russian talking points in the European Parliament, and we get close to some of Luke’s Russian sources such as the smooth-talking Oleg Voloshyn, who no longer circulates the Westminster pubs but is safely back behind lines, in Moscow, Luke believes having a good time. There are many ‘betrayals’, he seems to be arguing, not just one.

Whether you agree or disagree, Luke pilots his narrative towards Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s (St Peter's, 1991 and Nuffield, 1993) recent speech about ‘rupture’, in which he detailed the collapse of the whole post-1945 world order.

Right across it run the enemies of democracy and a sprawling hybrid war defined by ‘drones, fighter jets, cable-cutting, hacking and bulk messaging designed to screw with your head and turn a society against itself…’

What, in fact, is ‘the West’ any more, Luke asks? He answers the question by citing another Oxonian Simon Kuper (Lincoln, 1988) from the Financial Times, who wrote a while back about the ‘Little West’, meaning Europe minus its growing list of wobbly members, at that time Hungary under Viktor Orbán; then add Britain and Canada, overall described as solid but fairly small and ‘herbivorous’. Rabbits amongst wolves.

Charlotte’s training is in Classics and this knowledge anchors her narrative in classical themes such as rage and grief, guilt and murder, as she visits and gets to know numerous Ukrainian artists who show almost unbelievable courage in the face of atrocity, to bear witness or to rescue artworks and museum artefacts, fully in the knowledge that Russia’s intention was to destroy as much as possible (and did so in too many instances, stealing art by the truckload from cities occupied early on such as Kherson).

Charlotte overlays her narratives not only with classical allusion but with the quest to learn Ukrainian herself, hence the title of the book.

However, she begins by confronting herself with this unexpected and unwelcome war, recalling asking a journalist colleague about the Rwanda genocide. ‘I said to her, "How can it happen?" She said, "It is a wonder that it does not go on more often."’ Higgins continues, ‘She had lost the illusion that the worst happens only to other people.’ She also admits that ‘it is a heavy burden, to know this,’ but also a sign of failure, or perhaps denial, not to even know some fragment of it. She means us. You and me.

This insight soaks through the book, along the way picking up a beautiful quotation by Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole: ‘we should recognise that the disaster is already here, simply not evenly distributed.’

In Luke’s world, that would be to recognise, smartish, that Russia and China and North Korea and Iran are naked adversaries, that Russia is advancing its war into NATO. That most of Europe is simply unprepared.

In Charlotte’s telling there is a battalion of fine Ukrainian women all over Western Europe, who are likened to Cassandras – via a retelling of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon: women who take a deep breath, tell their neighbours in London or Berlin what the war is, to be given faint praise or politely disbelieved. For too many of us it remains ‘bad stuff/other people’.

She makes a beautiful segue to a dramatic poem by Larysa Kosach, better known as Lesya Ukrainka, actually titled 'Cassandra'. We visit Zhanna Kadyrova, whose sculptures have included stones resembling traditional Ukrainian bread called palianytsia, neatly sliced, a way of symbolically rejecting Russians who have difficulty pronouncing the word correctly, a detail used on the battlefield to confirm identities.

Elsewhere the book treats the delicate subject of what Ukrainians have done with their Russian-language classic works by all the great Russian authors, distinguishing wisely between the individual authors (some at least) and the way they were exploited.

594 separate roads in Ukraine were named after the Russian poet Pushkin. It was nothing to do with Pushkin, it was Russian cultural imperialism. We take in decolonisation legislation by Zelensky, the very idea bringing an unexpected new complexion to this conflict.

Threaded through the book are narratives of particular artists, some of whom the author got to know personally, subsequently killed as a result of the war. These include writer Victoria Amelina and children’s writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, who was turned in by an informer and received a bullet to the head for writing children’s books in Ukrainian.

We visit film director Mstyslav Chernov (2000 Meters to Andriivka) and we spend a crazy time with Leonid Marushchak, racing around in a Mercedes Sprinter van rescuing art and cultural artefacts from regional museums in an almost insanely dangerous mission – that he was not killed is miraculous.

Even Instagram is mentioned for an anonymous posting board project that revealed all sorts of intimate secrets, the personal DNA for what a war does to people at the most personal level.

What Luke and Charlotte share is the reporter’s zeal to shake us out of our complacency and say, ‘look, this is happening right here, in Europe, not far from you. What do you think about it?’

The verdict is harsh if you read carefully. Luke plays the game ‘which past is echoing loudest with today?’. Earlier renditions in 2022 tended to bring up the blood-soaked 20^th century, but some critics have now given up on that and simply conclude that we are returned to the Middle Ages in a Hobbesian war of all against all.

Charlotte notes how almost every Western museum historically describes artist Kazimir Malevich, the founder of the school of Suprematism, as Russian when in fact he had Polish parentage and grew up in Kyiv.

Somehow, they are saying: we have to try harder.

Despite being completely different, the two books also tango, unexpectedly and unintentionally.