The War Came to Us

May 8, 2023
War correspondent Miller’s heart-pounding debut describes in gritty detail the frontline fighting and key events preceding Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. After witnessing the Kremlin’s takeover of the Crimean Peninsula and the battle between Ukrainian soldiers and Russian separatists for Donetsk airport (“a mess of spattered blood, shattered glass, and mangled steel”) in 2014, Miller crisscrossed the country and landed major scoops, including his discovery in Ukraine’s Donbas region of a trove of execution orders—the “first hard evidence of war crimes” committed by Russia’s proxies in the fight. After the war broke out in 2022, Miller traveled under enemy fire to the cities of Mariupol and Bakhmut, where he mingled with survivors hiding in the basements of damaged buildings, and to Kiev, which was under aerial assault from drone attacks. Miller vividly illustrates the risks correspondents take (at one checkpoint, “a hulk of a man with a snarling face sat me down and screamed at me for an hour.... And he told me he was going to kill me unless I confessed to being an American spy”), but readers hoping for insights into the historical and cultural fault lines underscoring the conflict will have to look elsewhere. Still, this is frontline reporting at its finest.