The tired truism that journalism is history's first draft does not quite apply to covering war-or not usually, in any case. In those battles that I've fought in and those that I've reported on, as soon as the gunfire ebbs and soldiers start passing out the post-firefight cigarette or candy bar-or whatever corporeal ritual they're engaging in to remind themselves that they're still alive-invariably, they begin to tell stories. They huddle in small groups urgently talking about what just happened, trying to bring order to the violence and chaos they've experienced.
If history becomes the final battlefield on which a war is waged, Yaroslav Trofimov's Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence might bethe opening salvo in the struggle to define what has happened in Ukraine over the past two years, even as the war continues.
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