Eywitness from Kyiv

Ponomarenko, Illia.  I Will Show You How it Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv.  New York: 

         Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.  ISBN: 9781639733873

The war in Ukraine was unavoidable for anyone paying attention back in 2022.  But the snippets that made it on national and local news were just that snippets, not the broader picture.  Illia Ponomarenko, a reporter for the Kyiv Independent, offers the reader a much fuller and richer experience of what was happening in Ukraine and especially Kyiv during the first months of the Russian invasion.

Illia Ponomarenko opens the book with being embedded with the 72nd Mechanized Brigade on a patrol outside Kyiv in March 2022.  His remembrance of earlier times spent with this unit in the Donbas area duing 2017 and other years sets the context for the most recent Russian invasion.  Ponomarenko then takes you back to December 2021 and sets the stage letting you in on how life in Kyiv was before the war and what people were ding and thinking.  He guides the reader through the time before the invasion and then the opening days in February and March when all was confusion and chaos.  Ponomarenko, his mother, and his roommate fled to western Ukraine and stayed with Illia;s girlfriend's parents.  But after a couple of days, Ponomarenko and his roommate Ivan return to Kyiv.  Ponomarenko continues reporting for the Kyiv Independent media service visiting the front-lines when possible, but also providing background information and home-front stories as well.  He brings the book to a close in May 2022 after Kyiv has been saved.

In I Will Show You How It Was, Illia Ponomarenko provides a first-person account of the opening days of the most recent Russian invasion of Ukraine.  This title will be of interest to anyone interested in Ukraine, recent European events, or life in a war zone.  A story that everyone should read!