The idea was that appeasement was really a solution,” says Plokhy.īut, although it did give European countries time to re-arm, appeasement did not prevent war. “There was a lot of wishful thinking involved, that no one wanted to go to war. In the 1930s, “Old Europe” meant Britain and France who, still recovering from the devastation of the First World War, saw the policy of appeasement as the best way to maintain peace in Europe. It is here, he believes, that the similarities between the lead up to 20 are most stark and most worrying. For Plokhy, the importance of the historical parallels is made more potent when one considers what he calls the “fruitless efforts” of “Old Europe” to find a peace settlement. His new book, The Russo-Ukrainian War tells the early story of the full-scale invasion of 2022 and also puts the conflict in historical context, delving into the events that culminated in the war. So the parallels between the annexation of Crimea and the Anschluss of Austria are very obvious.” Putin’s Russia obsessed with the annexation of territory and bringing Crimea ‘back home’. The Germans were obsessed with bringing together within the borders of one greater Germany. “In the case of Germany, that was World War One, in the case of the Soviet Union, that was the Cold War, and they are dealing with the question of the so-called ‘divided nation’. “The two countries lost the war,” he begins. Much in demand, Plokhy is speaking to me from Japan, where he is on a research trip. His writings, including The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (2014), The Gates of Europe (2015), and Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe (2018) introduce readers to a history that is rarely taught in the West and explain the region’s complex and difficult past. His books on Ukrainian history fly off the shelves as a domestic and international audience look to understand the history and culture of the country at the heart of the clash. Plokhy, 66, a softly-spoken academic with a wry smile, has become an international celebrity. For historian Serhii Plokhy, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, Putin’s invasion and the Russian state’s increasingly authoritarian, nationalistic and repressive policies at home raise obvious parallels with the historic monster of the 20th century: Nazi Germany. Now the Ukrainian army, with Western assistance, is in the middle of a crucial counter-offensive to throw the Russian occupiers out of their land. Waged in the fertile south and industrial east, the Russo-Ukrainian war has also decimated the Ukrainian economy. It has cost thousands of lives and spurred the largest movement of people in Europe – either within Ukraine or fleeing the country altogether – since 1945. When Vladimir Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022 it marked the bloody end of the post-Second World War European security settlement. In larger towns, blackened homes and factories bear the scars of brutal artillery assaults. Those making their way to the front line in eastern Ukraine pass abandoned villages and rusting Russian tanks. The road to Kramatorsk from Kharkiv is a silent highway of destruction. Scroll to the end for Plokhy’s interview on Ukraine: The Latest

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