Greetings from Novorossiya: Eyewitness to the War in Ukraine

Name: Greetings from Novorossiya: Eyewitness to the War in Ukraine
Author: Pawel Pieniazek
ISBN: 0822965100

by Pawel Pieniazek

Paweł Pieniążek is a very young Polish journalist. He was beaten by Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych’s riot police in the early days of the Maidan, in December 2014. Nonetheless, he stayed in Ukraine, and after Yanukovych’s defeat and flight to Russia, followed his story to the Donbas. This is some of the best reportage from a little-understood war. Pieniazek’s stories reveal the tragedy of hybrid war in the age of post-truth: people are being killed in fact for reasons that are fiction. Paweł translates very well into English in part because he’s totally unpretentious. The prose is very clear, very fluid, there’s no ostentation. He has an old-fashioned journalistic respect for empirical reality. He’s Polish, which makes him not so distant from Ukraine geographically or linguistically, or culturally. He speaks near-native Ukrainian and good Russian. He had excellent access, but also a bit of distance because he’s still a foreign reporter. He’s extremely good at explaining things clearly and telling little stories that reveal the absurdity and tragedy of this war about which we know so little, a war which in fact threatens to unravel all of Europe.

Recommended by

Marci Shore

"Paweł Pieniążek is a very young Polish journalist. He was beaten by Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych’s riot police in the early days of the Maidan, in December 2014. Nonetheless, he stayed in Ukraine, and after Yanukovych’s defeat and flight to Russia, followed his story to the Donbas. This is some of the best reportage from a little-understood war. Pieniazek’s stories reveal the tragedy of hybrid war in the age of post-truth: people are being killed in fact for reasons that are fiction. Paweł translates very well into English in part because he’s totally unpretentious. The prose is very clear, very fluid, there’s no ostentation. He has an old-fashioned journalistic respect for empirical reality. He’s Polish, which makes him not so distant from Ukraine geographically or linguistically, or culturally. He speaks near-native Ukrainian and good Russian. He had excellent access, but also a bit of distance because he’s still a foreign reporter. He’s extremely good at explaining things clearly and telling little stories that reveal the absurdity and tragedy of this war about which we know so little, a war which in fact threatens to unravel all of Europe."

Ukraine · fivebooks.com