An affecting work from a Ukrainian writer originally from Donetsk who fled to Kyiv and reoriented his life. Maidukov, a well-known writer in Ukraine, was 66 when the Russians invaded in February 2022, living with his wife, Luba, and grown children in Kyiv. Eight years before, he and his wife were living in Donetsk. After the fracture with Russia and the Maidan revolution of 2014, the author took a cue from his son, Sergiy, to leave the “rotten” ways of Donetsk in July 2014 and move to Kyiv with Luba, thus becoming thoroughly Ukrainian despite their Russian language family roots. Maidukov describes his break with his elderly parents, who were susceptible to Putin’s propaganda about Ukraine. When the invasion occurred, the couple headed west to flee to Poland. He and Luba, along with two granddaughters, lived in hotels in various Polish towns, relying on the kindness of strangers. As the Ukrainian military battled the Russians over the course of the year, Maidukov recorded his observations, and they eventually returned to Kyiv, a disorderly, war-ravaged landscape, but essentially free. “In Ukraine, even bushes and trees looked different,” writes the author. “Unshorn and unkempt, they grew up disorderly and freely. Indeed, it was symbolic of the very nature of Ukraine—freedom-seeking, desiring, defiant, willful, hard to grind or polish…. Russia failed to destroy the Ukrainian language and erase the national identity.” As a narrator, the author is engaging and honest, and he openly shares his fears, hopes for publication, and visions for Ukraine’s future. He chronicles how the public came, somewhat reluctantly, to regard President Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero, and how the war has taken an enormous toll on the physical and mental health of both the author and his wife. A moving look at a deeply riven Russian-Ukrainian family and how they rejected Russian aggression.

Kirkus Reviews

Sergey Maidukov’s book offers us a unique insight in the lives of a Ukrainian family, disrupted by Putin’s war. Having already fled Donetsk in 2014, where his parents – staunch Putin supporters – still live, Maidukov flees with his wife, daughter, and grandchild to Poland. With his laptop, his “most valuable possession”, he writes down the daily experiences of this odyssey: the money problems, the illnesses, the humiliations, the guilt feelings, but also the resilience and the hope for a better future. When, after six months, they decide to return to Kyiv, the situation is not better when the city becomes the target of Russian missile and drone attacks and the family tries to survive on the 22nd floor of an apartment building without electricity, water and heating. Maidukov wrote: “I am this book.” Indeed, he has written a beautiful book on the inside of the war and what the war does to him and to other victims.

Marcel H. Van Herpen, author of “Putin's Wars”