A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, death and defiance in Ukraine – ‘The mesmerising story of how in the face of a mighty army, ordinary people can say "No."' Mail on Sunday

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We overlooked the fact that, for many centuries, ‘great Russian culture’ belittled other countries and peoples, suppressed and destroyed them,” says Zygar. The heavily-armed Russians are expecting an easy fight - or no fight at all. After all, Voznesensk is a quiet farming town, full of pensioners. The cookie is set by CloudFlare service to store a unique ID to identify a returning users device which then is used for targeted advertising.

The author with one of the book’s heroines, Svetlana Martsynkovska. Photograph: Courtesy Andrew Harding Andrey Kurkov (Ukrainian author of “Grey Bees”):It would be wonderful if the story told in thisbeautiful little bookwere the author's invention. But alas,the story itself is pure truth. I didn’t steal these stories,” he writes. “But I did, sometimes, snatch at them, in the middle of an all-consuming war, from people who had too little time on their hands and far more urgent business to preoccupy them.” Once Harding seized the narrative, he never let go, recreating it through the eyes of 20 or so characters: be it grandmother Svetlana, who stood up to Russian soldiers as they seized her home for a HQ, or conflicted Russian soldier Igor Rudenko, who is Ukrainian and grew up on the Crimean Peninsula (“My soul hurts,” he said upon capture). But a plan is emerging, and there’s a chance it could save not just Voznesensk, but the rest of southern Ukraine.He said that when he spoke to Ukrainians about the country’s ongoing war effort, they said, “it’s frustrating, we’re very worried, we’re under no illusions now that this is going to be a slow, difficult, painful fight. But we have no other option”. There is an encouraging note about the positive effect of the war on Ukrainians' civic identity. This story has an almost happy conclusion but it is by no means the end, as the author points out with a well-chosen quote from Chekhov. We soon end up at the mythology incorporating Lenin and Stalin, and the all too real Holodomor of 1932-33, when an estimated five million people died (four million of them Ukrainian). A large scattering of poets and writers and their roles in reinforcing or refuting national stereotypes and ideas are considered throughout, too. It’s an emotionally charged run-through and Zygar impressively relates early formative history to recent political agendas (who owns Crimea, for example), even if some expositions get boggy at times, especially when the Russian Orthodox Church is thrown in.

Svetlana, a grandmother with arthritis, reacts in fury when Russian troops turn her cottage into their blood-soaked headquarters. In response to a question from a webinar viewer, about whether the US could still continue to support Ukraine to the degree required given the conflict in the Middle East , Harding said it was “a big worry for Ukraine”. With a long career as a journalist and filmmaker, and having worked in Ukraine for the past two decades, Zygar is assured in the second part of the book as it moves into contemporary history, beginning with Ukraine’s place in the shadow of the late Soviet Union and running up to the war.

This section of War and Punishment is loaded with details of the rollercoaster recent history between Russia and Ukraine, with Zygar attaching welcome memoirs to much of it. Plenty here will be familiar to anyone who has read any of the numerous books on Putin’s Russia (including Zygar’s own absorbing All the Kremlin’s Men). Where War and Punishment is particularly enriching, though, is in outlining the life and career of Volodymyr Zelenskiy before his emergence as a wartime leader. Zelensky’s past in TV and cinema poking fun at Ukrainian and Russian establishments features strongly, until, of course, he became part of the same establishment after election as Ukrainian president in 2019. Harding is an experienced BBC foreign correspondent and writes with such a lean style that he could almost be moving through Voznesensk with a camera crew in tow We are touched by the courage and dignity of Andrew Harding’s characters – qualities that the author must surely possess in equal measure’ – Andrey Kurkov It's March 2022 and Russian tanks are roaring across the vast, snow-dusted fields of Ukraine. Their destination: Voznesensk, a town with a small bridge that could change the course of the war.

In A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine (Ithaka, 2023), Andrew Harding tells the story of the battle for Voznesensk through the eyes of its participants - from commander "Formosa" to 32-year-old mayor Yevheniito the "archipelago of stranded, pensionless pensioners" like Svetlanaeking out a living and redefining their identities through war. Records the default button state of the corresponding category & the status of CCPA. It works only in coordination with the primary cookie. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.Mail on Sunday: “A mesmerising story of how in the face of a might army, ordinary people can sometimes turn and simply say, ‘No.’” Then again, it’s still very possible that the Ukrainians will make the kind of breakthrough that they have been pushing for. We always underestimate the Ukrainians, and it’s very difficult to assess and calibrate the role of courage and determination. Because while the Russians in some places are determined, in some places are well-trained, and in some places are adapting skilfully to changing situations, they are fundamentally a top-down conscript army that is suffering enormous losses of men and materials,” Harding said. A gripping work of reportage that tells the story of a pivotal moment in Ukraine's war, this is a real-life thriller about ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances with resilience, humour and ingenuity. The Russo-Ukrainian War & Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia: two takes on the conflict ]