The rape of Ukraine continues while the world’s sympathies move on

‘Write and record’ was the dying instruction of the historian Simon Dubnow – shot by Nazis in the Riga ghetto – and two books recently emerging from Ukraine embody this spirit in spades. Now that the world’s anger and sympathies have largely moved on to the Middle East, they may do something to rekindle that earlier sense of outrage and remind the ‘caring’ classes of atrocities closer to home.

The first, Our Daily War, comes from Andrey Kurkov, the celebrated Russo-Ukrainian novelist and author of 2022’s Invasion Diary, a detailed on-the-ground account of Putin’s attack on his country. Kurkov’s new work, bookended by the Russian invasion and Alexei Navalny’s murder, seems not so much a diary as a series of dated articles, almost letters to the reader – sometimes a day, sometimes a fortnight apart – giving us news of what is happening in his country: ‘Every day I write and think about the war.