Kyiv was still a city at peace,” Yaroslav Trofimov writes about the afternoon of Feb. 23, 2022, the day before Russian forces invaded Ukraine. The sun was shining, the bars were full; he saw no scenes of panic buying at the shops or snaking lines at the ATMs.
But like the title of his new book, “Our Enemies Will Vanish,” Trofimov’s depiction of an idyllic Kyiv only emphasises the brutal realities of the ensuing war. Trofimov is the chief foreign-affairs correspondent at The Wall Street Journal and the author of two previous books, “Faith at War” (2005) and “The Siege of Mecca” (2007). This time, as a Kyiv native, he has an intensely personal connection to his subject. “It felt wrong to wear on the streets of my own hometown the vest and the helmet that I had donned hundreds of times in Iraq, Afghanistan and other war zones,” Trofimov writes, driving past locations from his Soviet-era adolescence, including the cinema where he watched Fellini films and the botanical garden where he had his first kiss.
Long before the invasion, Vladimir Putin had depicted Ukraine as an “artificial” country that ultimately belonged to Russia. His territorial ambitions were further inflamed during the pandemic, when he spent months of self-isolation “reading the wrong history books,” as Trofimov acerbically puts it. (Trofimov has yet another personal connection to Putin’s war: His colleague, Evan Gershkovich, has been detained by Russia for nearly 300 days, awaiting trial on charges of espionage that The Wall Street Journal and the American government steadfastly deny.) Trofimov is candid about his own feelings of outrage toward Russian forces: “How dare they, I thought.”
“Our Enemies Will Vanish” is clearly not an outsider’s account, though as an experienced reporter, Trofimov mostly avoids the twin temptations of personalising and pontificating, instead hewing closely to what he sees. He also provides some requisite historical context. The real start date of the war, he says, was eight years before the 2022 invasion, in 2014, when Putin declared that eastern and southern Ukraine should be known as Novorossiya, or “New Russia,” and seized control of Crimea and Donbas.
From those early victories, Putin took the wrong lesson. In 2022, Moscow expected to wrap up the whole operation in 10 days — which might very well have happened, had Putin been satisfied with restricting Russian efforts to eastern Ukraine, instead of setting his sights on the entire country.
A limited war “would have likely elicited only limited Western reaction,” Trofimov writes. “It could have also been won relatively quickly, causing a political crisis in Kyiv and a possible collapse” of the Ukrainian government under Volodymyr Zelensky. Most of the book chronicles his travels throughout Ukraine during the first year of the war, lingering especially on the chaos of those early weeks. The desire for stability is a constant, Trofimov finds, fueling fearful collaboration with the Russians in some cases and fierce resistance in others. The book’s title is a line from Ukraine’s national anthem: “Our enemies will vanish/Like dew at sunrise.” Trofimov clings to this rousing sentiment, even if the war reporter in him is constantly reminded that conflicts never work out that way. “A long, grueling fight lay ahead,” he writes at the end of the book. It’s a sober, plain-spoken assessment that doesn’t tell us all that much — which is also what makes it honest.