In wartime: stories from Ukraine

I. Memory wars

Weaponising history

Thumbelina in Donetsk

"Our history is different!"

"How can this be?"

Pickling and planting to victory

Chernobyl : end and beginning

ll. Western approaches

Lemberg to Lviv

Ruthenes and Little Russians

Nikita at the Opera

Stalin's chicken

The history prison

The Shtreimel of Lviv

The Scottish Book of Maths and all that

Tourists and the Tower of Death

lll. Fraying edge

The Bessarabian ticket

Winds of change

Bones of contention

Jumping ship

"A patriot of this land"

Conchita Wurst and the old idiots

The deep hole

Kilometre Zero

IV. Eastern approaches

The coal launderers

The Welsh and the wild east

The view from the Terricone

Getting to yes

Empire and virility

Crimea : because he could

V. War zone

First blood

Tsar v. Cossacks

The Wolf's Hook Club

From Amazonia to New Russia

Leaving home

Surviving Sloviansk

Towns at war

The war poets

VI. Escaping the past

Defining optimism

Askania-Nova and the Zebra of death

"A hundred years of crap"

Not dead yet.