A review of Yaroslav Trofimov, “Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence” (Penguin Press 2024)
Yaroslav Trofimov’s “Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence” offers a comprehensive and gripping account of the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The invasion shocked the world, but Ukraine’s ability to withstand the Russian military onslaught was, for many, even more shocking. As Trofimov reminds us, some in Western capitals who didn’t expect Ukraine to endure favored a quick Russian victory, such as a senior aide to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz who reportedly told Boris Johnson: “If this is going to happen, the best this is that maybe it should happen quickly. … Maybe they won’t resist, and maybe our problems will be solved.” But resist Ukraine did, and Trofimov’s book is indispensable for those who want to better understand why and how Ukraine resisted and ensured its survival in the first year of the war.
The book skillfully presents a threefold analysis: a factual account of the critical first year of the war that leaves no important event from the period unaddressed; an insightful analysis of key policy decisions—in Ukraine, in Western capitals, and in Russia—that shaped the course of the war; and a sensitive journalistic report that, through interviews and personal stories, humanizes the war by introducing ordinary Ukrainians—both civilians and members of the military—making ordinary and extraordinary choices.
The bulk of the book’s 48 short chapters, organized in 11 roughly chronological parts, deal with the period from just before the February 2022 invasion, including last-ditch attempts at diplomacy, to the first anniversary of the invasion. The epilogue touches on events of the following several months, including the failed Prigozhin mutiny, the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam, and the start of Ukraine’s summer 2023 counteroffensive, while the first chapter situates the current war in the broader history of Ukraine-Russia relations since Ukraine’s reclaiming of its independence in 1991.
From the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Trofimov rightly points out, “Russia expected Ukraine’s independence to be nominal at best, just like that of nearby Belarus.” Ukraine’s authoritarian president, Victor Yanukovych, who took the reins in 2010, might have “delivered” Ukraine to Russia as a vassal state, as a sovereign country only in name, but his presidency came to an early end with the victory of the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests, in which Ukrainians mobilized against Yanukovych’s last-minute decision to pull out of a free trade and political association agreement with the EU and to pivot Ukraine toward Russia.
With Yanukovych abandoning his post and fleeing to Russia, a pro-Western government took power in Kyiv, while in Moscow Vladimir Putin seemed to throw in the towel on a strategy of political cooptation. Instead of continuing to rely on the many nonmilitary levers of influence Russia still had in Ukraine—from a sizable Russia-friendly portion of the electorate and pro-Russian political parties, oligarchs, and information and media networks—Putin chose open aggression. The 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and Russia’s role in the proclamation of “people’s republics” in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region are critical events to consider in any account of the 2022 invasion (even if they are treated very briefly, as they are by necessity in Trofimov’s book) because they constitute the first round of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine aimed to prevent Ukraine from slipping out of Russia’s control for good.
This earlier aggression tested the waters—the reaction in Russian society was enthusiastic, creating a permissive environment for the 2022 war against Ukraine. The West responded with only mild sanctions and refused to provide any weapons to Kyiv, Trofimov reminds us. Could the February 2022 escalation have been prevented if the West had responded differently to the first round of Russia’s aggression in 2014? We will never know for sure, but we do know that appeasement didn’t work.
“No way they would invade with so few men,” Trofimov quotes from his conversation with a Volodymyr Zelensky adviser in early February 2022. Zelensky’s leadership has been criticized by some in the West and as well as in Ukraine for his not doing more to prepare for the invasion. Whether the Ukrainian leadership should have done more to prepare is a valid question that will continue to be debated for some time, but the fact noted by Zelensky’s adviser has broader significance for understanding the war, including Putin’s decision to invade and his failure to achieve his goal. Why, as Trofimov reminds us, did the Soviet Union invade Finland, a country with a population one-twelfth that of Ukraine, with more than twice as many soldiers as Putin sent on his intended blitzkrieg to take over Ukraine?
The imperialist lens through which Russia viewed Ukraine was both the driver of the Russian invasion and an obstacle to its success. Putin, seemingly convinced by his own propaganda that Ukrainians were incapable of autonomous action that could be more effective than Russia’s, imagined that most Ukrainians were at heart yearning to be united with Russia and thus were ready to greet Russian soldiers as liberators who had come to free them from the “Nazi junta” in Kyiv. Given their embrace of this outlook, Putin and the Russian leadership did not expect to face the determined and effective resistance that the Russian army faced once it rolled into Ukraine. The bulk of Trofimov’s book takes us through the trials, tribulations, and heroism of Ukrainian people as they surprised Russia—and the world—by standing up to the invading force.
Different chapters take the reader through both well-known developments that received much attention in Western media, such as the defense of Bakhmut, the battle for Kyiv, the siege of Mariupol, and the liberation of Kharkiv and Kherson, and events less known to casual observers, such as Russia’s defeat in Voznesensk, Terny, and Lyman, and Ukraine’s loss of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. No event of importance from the first year of the war seems to have been omitted from the 48 chapters, and the book serves almost as a contemporary encyclopedia of that year.
As a blend of journalism and contemporary history of the first year of the war, Trofimov’s book shares an approach with other recent books such as “Invasion” by Luke Harding and “The War Came to Us” by Christopher Miller, although Trofimov’s book covers a greater number of specific developments from this period. The large number of developments covered makes Trofimov’s coverage of each event necessarily brief, and readers interested in diving deeper into specific events could turn to books such as Illia Ponomarenko’s “I Will Show You How” for the battle of Kyiv, Andrew Harding’s “A Small, Stubborn Town” to learn how soldiers, civilians, and volunteers prevented the Russian army from taking over the small but strategic town of Voznesensk, Serhiy Zhadan’s “Sky Above Kharkiv” for resilience and defiance of residents and defenders of Ukraine’s second largest city, or “Chernobyl Roulette” by Serhii Plokhy for the Russian occupation of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant during the early stages of the war.
While Trofimov’s book is already a historical account, given that the war will soon be reaching the three-year mark, several broader themes of enduring importance carry throughout the book, making it relevant beyond just understanding the developments of the first year. With these broader themes, the book stands between journalism and books on the war written by scholars for a popular audience, such as Serhii Plokhy’s “The Russo-Ukrainian War,” Michael Kimmage’s “Collisions,” and Jade McGlynn’s “Russia’s War.”
One theme is the persistent pattern of Western reluctance to provide Ukraine with sufficient weapons and other military hardware. The recent news about the Biden administration possibly clearing the way for Ukraine to launch long-range Western weapons deep inside Russian territory is not a new development but part of the pattern Trofimov’s book highlights: The West, fearing escalation with Russia, has delayed and resisted providing Ukraine with much-needed weapons, only to eventually come around. The price of this pattern of Western indecision has been the loss of Ukrainian lives and arguably also, as Trofimov’s book suggests, lost opportunities for Ukraine to prevail on the battlefield when it had momentum and Russian forces were disorganized. The summer and fall of 2022 is one such period discussed in the book, after Russia was humiliated by its forced withdrawal from northern Ukraine around Kyiv and driven by Ukrainian forces from around Kharkiv. It wouldn’t be until January 2023 that the U.S. and Germany finally agreed to send Ukraine modern tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, even though Ukraine had asked for these back in May, a request that was rejected. “If these weapons had been supplied in August, when Russia’s military was stretched thin, they could have ensured a strategic Ukrainian victory and possibly ended the war,” Trofimov writes. Instead, Western delay gave Russia time for its large mobilization in the fall of 2022 and for the digging of defensive positions in the south.
Another of Trofimov’s important themes is the complexities of personal responses to the war. Trofimov discusses cases of collaboration as well as resistance, and the individual stories Trofimov recounts show how the border between the two is sometimes blurred. A woman with a teenage son seeking to move to the Russia-occupied part of Kherson region after the liberation of the city is driven not by support for Russian rule but by the desire to reunite with her husband, who was tending to a bed-ridden relative on the occupied left bank. Villagers fearing Russian reprisals first beat up but later fed and gave water to Ukrainian soldiers escaping from behind enemy lines in the Kharkiv region at the beginning of the war. Always painful and often too quick were decisions to stay or to leave the approaching Russian advance that would separate families and profoundly affect lives. Decisions to come back from a comfortable, in some cases luxurious, life abroad to fight for Ukraine and decisions to avoid having to fight posed equally difficult dilemmas. Trofimov doesn’t try to explain or judge these choices, instead introducing the reader to circumstances people face, and letting us ponder the choices Trofimov’s subjects made.
The book also sheds light on the interplay between political and military considerations in war planning in Ukraine. Trofimov argues that unlike in the early days of the war, when Kyiv’s political leadership didn’t try to influence the military command’s decision-making, politics returned after the danger of Kyiv’s fall had been averted, and “the war was being run at the weekly meetings of the [high command, but] with Zelensky making the strategic decisions.” Military experts and ultimately historians will likely debate whether decisions such as the holding of Bakhmut, the launching of the summer 2023 counteroffensive, or the ongoing Ukrainian operation inside Russia’s Kursk region were the best calls given the circumstances in which they were made. One gets the impression from the book that Trofimov would have backed the military over the political leadership in decision-making about the events of the first year. Even those who may disagree with this stand should appreciate the fact that the book highlights how political and military cost-benefit calculations may not always align. The book’s reminder that “nobody loves losers” (the title of one of the book chapters, using a quote from an interview with Zelensky) also highlights a bitter and unfair reality: Western support for Ukraine is not a given because Ukraine is fighting a brutal and unprovoked invasion and its people defend the same values the West claims to uphold, but that Western support depends on Ukraine’s repeatedly “proving” itself to earn it.
Finally, another broader theme of enduring importance that the book addresses is the fate of peace negotiations. Trofimov’s account serves as a reminder that all previous rounds of negotiations—from the first one held in Belarus just days after the invasion to the ones held in Istanbul in the spring of 2022—reveal that what Putin wants is Ukraine’s capitulation, not a just peace. Unable to conquer the entire Ukraine, Russia demands, in addition to a chunk of Ukrainian territory, a demilitarized Ukraine left outside of NATO and without effective security guarantees. In the last round of bilateral negotiations held in Istanbul in the spring of 2022, Russia demanded a veto on any military intervention on Ukraine’s behalf if it came under attack again after it agreed to become a neutral state. That this is not a recipe for lasting peace is clear to the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian leadership, and others may understand it better after reading Trofimov’s book. In one of the conversations with Zelensky that Trofimov recounts, Zelensky compares Russia to a whale that swallowed two regions and now wants to freeze the conflict: “Then it will rest, and in two or three years, it will seize two more regions and say again: freeze the conflict. And it will keep going further and further. One hundred percent.” Putin has yet to take any step that would show that his intentions toward Ukraine are different from Zelensky’s assessment.
– Oxana Shevel is an associate professor of comparative politics in the Department of Political Science at Tufts University and the director of the Tufts International Relations Program. Her most recent book (co-authored with Maria Popova), “Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States” (Polity, 2024), examines the root causes of the Russia-Ukraine war. Published courtesy of Lawfare.
