Essays from the UKRAINE War

Andrey Kurkov is Ukraine’s greatest living writer, and he is absolutely one of my favourite authors. All his books are set in Ukraine and have a certain mystical, unreal, and darkly humorous element to them. But since the Russian invasion, Kurkov has devoted much of his time not to fiction writing but to making sure the world knows what is going on in his homeland. He has travelled extensively and given lectures and been interviewed by global media.

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Three Years On Fire is his third book on the War. It is a series of essays (some of them already individually published, some new…) that track events from the period April 2024 through to March 2025. He obviously has his take on world events as they impact his country, Trump’s re-election and the subsequent manoeuvring with Russia, but the bulk of the book is about the experiences of everyday Ukrainians trying to come to grips with what is happening around them. The essays are written with Kurkov’s customary dry (and black) humour.

From the cities to the trenches, he captures the patterns of survival – the sad rituals that follow a death (either on the front line on more locally after a bomb casualty), the rare bursts of joy that sometimes appear out of nowhere, the unexpected humour found in life under stress, and the quite enormous financial burden of war. It is a deeply moving record of national endurance in the face of evil.

Children in a contested border area wear bulletproof jackets to go to school, soldiers write Japanese haiku (why, no one quite knows); professional entertainers go into battle; and the mother of a young soldier killed at the front uses his (meagre) compensation money to build a rehabilitation centre for veterans. Roses bloom across Ukraine in quiet tribute to a florist killed in battle and remembered by those who once bought his flowers.

The Dnipro River seemed to slow when the first missiles fell, but this was only because of the lack of commercial and pleasure traffic on it. In one city thousands of citizens refused to leave even though the infrastructure of the city had been 90% destroyed by shelling and bombing. They clung to hope.

Three Years on Fire is very well worth reading not just to understand the horrific impact of war on individuals but also to wonder at Kurkov’s writing.