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. I surround myself with the war and allow its horrible mass to pass through me.’ That ‘mass’ is one Kurkov has digested for the reader with notable self-discipline. Thoughtfulness nearly always prevails over anger; the pieces are flawlessly structured; the tone is devoid of self-pity.

Those looking for horror will of course find it here. Kurkov tells us, page after page, of the rape Russia is inflicting on his country. In the occupied territories, locals are forced through filtration camps, and those with the wrong tattoo or ill-advised social media posts are ‘according to some eyewitness accounts… killed immediately’. When the corpse of the children’s writer Volodymyr Vakulenko is finally found, it’s clear he hasn’t been shot in hot blood by the enemy but executed: ‘Two bullets from a Makarov pistol were taken from Vakulenko’s body.