War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance by Mikhail Zygar – review

For Russia’s liberals, these are unhappy times. A decade or so ago, it was possible to imagine a better, brighter future without Vladimir Putin. Street protests would drive him from power, maybe. And after a dark period of authoritarian rule, Alexei Navalny – or another opposition figure – would bring the country back to democracy and common sense, the hope went.

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this dream has died. Putin has transformed Russia into what he always wanted it to be: a totalitarian state. The last vestiges of independent media have been closed. Critics have been jailed for tweeting against the war. Navalny languishes in a penal colony, criminal cases piling up around him, with zero prospect of release.

Like many of his progressive peers, the Russian political journalist Mikhail Zygar was forced last year to escape Moscow. He relocated to Berlin. Zygar is the founding editor-in-chief of the liberal TV news channel Dozhd, and the author of a bestselling book on Putin’s vertical system, All the Kremlin’s Men, based on interviews with well-informed insiders.

He has been covering Ukraine for two decades. He has spoken to its presidents and oligarchs, and once spent weeks writing at a friend’s house in Bucha, the pleasant Kyiv garden suburb where in spring 2022 Russian troops executed hundreds of civilians. His Ukrainian friend, Nadia, now refuses to talk to him; despite his condemnation of the war, and feelings of shame, she thinks he is an “imperialist”, he tells us.

His latest work, War and Punishment, is a pained attempt to prove Nadia wrong. It begins and ends with a confession. “I am guilty,” Zygar admits. He apologises for not reading the signs earlier, for failing to see how deep-rooted cultural and historical prejudices fuelled what he calls Russian fascism. “It’s time to get off the needle,” he writes. The drug is the “myth of greatness” and Russocentric exceptionalism.

Zygar’s book is lively, brisk and written in the present tense. It explores Russian attitudes to Ukraine over the past 350 years – a sorry tale of big brother chauvinism and oppression. He seeks to demolish, myth by myth, the “imperial mindset” that led to the current conflict, Europe’s biggest since 1945. These colonial ideas continue to shape how most Russians think about Kyiv, with Moscow cast not as aggressor but victim.

Putin’s own, addict-like misreading of history explains his decision to attack Ukraine, Zygar argues. In summer 2021 Russia’s president published an essay setting out a manifesto for war: that Ukraine was never a state, people, or community. Instead, he claimed that Russia, Belarus and Ukraine were part of an ancient spiritual and cultural space, with their joint origins in the ninth-century princedom of Kyivan Rus.

According to Zygar’s sources, Russia’s ex-culture minister Vladimir Medinsky wrote the text. It closely reflected Putin’s own obsessions. Two figures played a role in shaping the president’s views. Both were the sons of historians – the oligarch Yuri Kovalchuk, Putin’s friend and de facto number two, and Andrey Fursenko, a former education minister. Their fathers were members of Leningrad’s Soviet history institute.

As Zygar tells it, Putin and Kovalchuk cooked up the invasion during the Covid pandemic. They quarantined together at the president’s residence in Valdai, and discussed how to retrieve Russia’s lost empire. “Their habits and philosophical outlook are in perfect harmony, consisting of a bizarre mix of Orthodox mysticism, anti-American conspiracy theories and hedonism: palaces, haute cuisine and rare wines,” Zygar notes.

There were compelling reasons why Putin thought his martial plan would succeed. He believed the west to be weak. The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan had humbled the Biden administration. Putin had a low opinion of Boris Johnson (a “fatuous airhead”) and Emmanuel Macron (a “bumbling amateur”). He respected Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, but knew her to be a “lame duck”, in Zygar’s brutal summary.

Putin also clocked that Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s personal ratings were slipping, following his emphatic victory in Ukraine’s 2019 presidential election. Zygar writes well on Zelenskiy’s extraordinary career: from student performer to celebrity entertainer and globally feted leader. After playing Ukraine’s president in the show Servant of the People, Zelenskiy decided to become the real president – a joke that turned serious.

A native Russian speaker, and the son of Jewish academic parents, Zelenskiy hired a tutor to improve his Ukrainian. By way of preparation for meeting Putin, he read All the Kremlin’s Men. The research was in vain. Putin never forgave Zelenskiy after the comedian did a TV sketch poking fun at Alina Kabaeva, a gymnast and Putin’s alleged mistress.

When they held talks, Zelenskiy’s charm and humour failed to work on Putin, a man “made of kryptonite”. Zelenskiy tried to end the war that began in Donbas in 2014 and to reach an understanding over the status of the eastern provinces that Russia partly gobbled up. Putin wanted Ukraine to recognise his two puppet “republics” – a move that would allow Moscow to control Kyiv’s political destiny, and to veto its attempts to join Nato and the EU.

Zygar rips apart the claim that Russia and Ukraine were co-founded. This, it turns out, was an invention by a 17th-century propagandist and Prussian monk, Innokenty Gizel, who was more politician than scholar. He wrote a “tendentious” book to boost Muscovy’s support for the Orthodox religion in Kyiv, and to diminish the influence of Catholic Poland. It became the standard text for Russian thinkers for the next 300 years.

It was a similar story with Crimea. Once home to Greeks and Scythians, the peninsula was a part of Genghis Khan’s all-powerful empire, to which Moscow tsars paid tribute. It became a Russian possession after Catherine the Great defeated the Ottoman Turks and repressed the local Cossacks and Crimean Tatars. She abolished the Zaporozhian Host – a democratic forerunner of the Ukrainian state – and gave its land to her favourite courtiers.

It wasn’t until 1898 that the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, head of Ukraine’s first government, pointed out that Russia’s version of the past was bunk, and that Kyivan Rus led to Ukraine, with its democratic traditions. The Moscow princes submitted to the Mongols. Their Ukrainian counterparts in western Galicia – long a part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – did not.

The pattern of anti-Ukrainian persecution repeats from one era to the next, in Zygar’s haunting telling. The imperial authorities locked up Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national bard, for writing “outrageous” poems in the Ukrainian language. In the 1930s Stalin purged dozens of prominent Ukrainian writers and cultural figures, a group known as the “Executed Renaissance”. In 1979 Moscow tried Vasyl Stus, a dissident Ukrainian poet.

In June a Russian Iskander missile hit a crowded pizza restaurant in the eastern city of Kramatorsk. Thirteen people died. One of them was Victoria Amelina, a brave and brilliant Ukrainian novelist and children’s writer, who had been documenting Russian war crimes. In March 2022 she wrote: “Now there is a real threat that Russians will successfully execute another generation of Ukrainian culture – this time by missiles and bombs.”

Zygar has written a fine book. And yet he is unlikely to find the forgiveness he craves, so long as Russia denies Ukraine’s basic right to exist. Moscow – the violent, bullying neighbour for so many centuries – continues to kill and maim Ukrainian civilians, including the best and brightest.

Luke Harding’s Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, shortlisted for the 2023 Orwell prize, is now available in paperback from Guardian Faber