The War Came To Us

Why you should read Christopher Miller's heart-rending book about Ukraine

The first time I met journalist Christopher Miller in Kyiv, I recognized him as a talented man who carried a weight on his shoulders. That’s because being a Western reporter in Ukraine who also cares about Ukraine can come with a unique set of challenges: You want to report on things honestly and accurately, but people can often misinterpret your efforts and get extremely testy about it.

Our first meeting happened not even a decade ago, and yet it already feels as though we were living in a different universe back then. Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine, which began in 2014 and morphed into a mass-scale invasion in 2022, has snuffed out and rewritten many lives. We have all lost something or someone or many someones. We are persevering.

You must always persevere for something. This is one of the reasons why Chris’ new book, The War Came To Us, is important.

The book isn’t just about the war, it is also an important historical document of the years leading up to it. It paints a particularly vivid, heartbreaking picture of the city of Bakhmut — the city so completely leveled by Russian fascists posing as “liberators” that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Bakhmut currently exists “only in our hearts.”

Chris taught English in Bakhmut over a decade ago ago, and from the first pages of the book, he brings the city to life again. A number of touching and hilarious details — from the women who wanted to set Chris up with their daughters to locals’ suspicion of his beard — remind you that human beings lived here. They had hopes, and plans for the future. They had families and friends. They had their history and their way of life. Russia tore all of that apart like a beast, because it could, and because Western security guarantees to Ukraine were not upheld.

The book is ambitious in scope. Chris masterfully weaves his observations of Ukrainians with political upheavals and controversies that shaped the country in the decade prior to Russia’s barbaric mass invasion. His prose is economical and reserved in tone, meaning that horrific events are described without melodrama — and thus hit harder.

It’s Chris’ capacity for both narrative restraint and warm-hearted, unpretentious observations of his surroundings that make him stand out among many chroniclers of modern Ukraine in both its horror and its glory.

Ukraine is not a place for the faint-hearted, and neither is this book. From the brutality of riot police to the mangled bodies of MH17 victims to the shrieking abyss of mass-scale invasion — all is observed in unsparing detail. A lesser man would have given up and left Ukraine long ago. Christopher Miller is tougher than that.

It would be impossible to list all of the startling vignettes that comprise the narrative, but one that will always stay with me features Anatoliy Turevich, the director of occupied Luhansk’s main morgue, overflowing with rotting, disfigured bodies in the fall of 2014, after Russia has successfully destabilized the Donbas region and unleashed war.

Turevich recites Hamlet while holding a human skull, and then, a bit later, says, “… the ghosts in these halls talk to me. So I know what is happening.” There is, of course, a price to pay for knowledge. Turevich is paying it. So is Chris, the narrator. So does the reader. Ignorance is comfortable in times like these, and it is understandable why so many people shrink away.

Yet to shrink away is to let Russia win. Screw that.

I had to take many pauses to breathe when reading this book, I am not going to lie.

Chris doesn’t gloss over Ukrainian politicians’ faults and missteps — descriptions of pensioners left behind in occupied territories at the start of the conflict made me want to cry, and I am rarely capable of crying these days — but his moral compass remains spot on. It was Russia that brought war and destruction to Ukraine. Now Russia is trying to finish the job and destroy Ukraine entirely, and if you’re looking for mealy-mouthed both-sideism, The War Came To Us is not the book for you.

If you’re a fan of Volodymyr Zelensky, you’ll be happy to know that yes, Chris does feature the Ukrainian president. While Chris is no political ass-kisser — a fact that has earned him a fair bit of angry criticism from some — he paints a moving and human portrait of Zelensky as a wartime leader.

Zelensky doesn’t have to try hard to be charming, but the image of him in his Bill-Pullman-from-Independence-Day moment on the morning of Russia’s full scale attack, banging his fist on the table at Ukraine’s first national security meeting of our collective new reality, is seared into my memory now.

In Kyiv, saboteurs tried to attack Zelensky that very day, while other traitors were busy giving up the city of Kherson to the Russians. This is how a new nightmare began for millions of people, and it is still ongoing. And Russia must be made to pay for it.

Most inspiring are the stories of fierce Ukrainian resistance featured in the book — from fearless fighter pilots taking off from destroyed airfields to the owners of fashionable restaurants feeding the troops, from civilians throwing themselves at tanks to doctors scrambling to save lives, up to their elbows in blood.

As heartbreaking as it is, this is a book about a people that have taken a thousand punches and remain standing. And even more importantly, these people love their country and each other.

Ultimately, Ukraine emerges both as a crucible and a mirror in this book. It tests you, and in doing so, reveals who you are.

It has revealed Chris to be a thoughtful, incisive, and compassionate writer and human being. As a native of Ukraine, I am grateful to know him.

I hope you read The War Came To Us.

The War Came To Us is published by Bloomsbury. It will be available on July 18, 2023. You can preorder it here.