BEST BOOKS 2023: FINANCIAL TIMES * THE TIMES * SUNDAY TIMES CULTURE * TLS

Do you know what is at stake in Ukraine? Urgent, compelling reading from the author of Chernobyl on the defining conflict of our times

On 24 February 2022, Russia stunned the world by launching an invasion of Ukraine. In the midst of checking on the family and friends who were now on the front lines of Europe's largest conflict since the outbreak of the Second World War, acclaimed Ukrainian-American historian Serhii Plo...

Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has reshaped history. In the decades after the collapse of Soviet communism, the West convinced itself that liberal democracy would henceforth be the dominant, ultimately unique, system of governance. An outburst of Western triumphalism proclaimed a US-led unipolar world entitled to 'impose democracy' on countries that failed to recognise the new order. Politicians foretold the universalisation of Western values as the final, enduring form of human society...