Ukraine

Ukraine is a country caught in a political tug of war: With Russia to the east and the European Union to the west, this pivotal nation has long been a pawn in a global ideological game, the stakes of which have only gotten higher through the Russian annexation of Crimea and subsequent invasion. To better capture this shifting panorama, Karl Schlögel has added a major essay on war to his Ukrainian Lessons of 2015, based on years of travel and research into the country. Lviv, Odessa, Chernivtsi, Kiev, Kharkiv, Mariupol: All those names we have come to associate with terrible news can be rediscovered here as doorways into an open, diverse world that the West has ignored for far too long. Combining a historian’s meticulousness with his customary journalistic flair, Karl Schlögel illuminates Ukraine. And his urban portraits make it patently clear that, in order to know what is at stake in Europe, we must look here.