A Firsthand Account of the Battle of Kyiv
BOOK REVIEW: I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv
By Illia Ponomarenko / Bloomsbury Publishing
Reviewed by: Ed Bogan
The Reviewer — Ed Bogan is a retired senior CIA Operations Officer with 24 years of experience in national security, intelligence operations, and policy. He is a two-time Chief of Station (COS) and three-time Chief of Base (COB), with extensive time as Acting COS and Acting COB across four other locations. Ed served five of his seven PCS assignments in three designated war/combat zones, and all of his Acting stints in countries in armed conflict.
REVIEW — Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, changed the world forever. For Ukraine, the invasion really began in February 2014, but it took so blatant a moment eight years later for the entire world to clearly see the truth of Russia’s long-standing intentions. Illia Ponomarenko’s I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv, relives the immediate run up to that fateful morning on February 24, and as well the momentous Battle of Kyiv that ensued. Ponomarenko’s meticulous and painful description of the period stirred up gut-wrenching emotions from the time and will quickly take any reader back to those harrowing days.
The book’s first half lays out Ponomarenko’s experiences in the three months leading up to February 24th, depicting his arc from skepticism regarding possible invasion, to ultimate acceptance. Recalling Russia’s December 2021 “impossible ultimatum” that NATO and the US relitigate European security contours in Russia’s favor, “a major turning point in the transition to war” without knowledge that Russia had already made their decision to invade, it was seen by most as just another in a long line of provocations since 2014. These provocations included multiple Russian military buildups on the border throughout 2021, resulting in nothing more than a Biden/Putin summit, which afterwards had felt like their point. From Ponomarenko’s perspective, these provocations were no different from any of those before them, an “endless ‘no war, no peace’ situation dealt to Ukraine, a non-healing wound…”
The US intelligence community reportedly notified President Biden of Russia’s invasion decision as early as October 2021 and began sharing with NATO partners what was coming. Europe was largely skeptical, and similarly, so were Ukrainian officials. If anything, this was more likely a continuation of Putin’s many previous policy extortion attempts. Even Putin’s July 20, 2021 article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” had been seen as just another shakedown, and not the ‘justification’ for invasion it turned out to be. Meanwhile, Ukrainian citizens went on living their lives. Other, less direct, indicators were out there. Anti-government protests in Kazakhstan in January 2022 resulted in a Collective Security Treaty Organization response to quell the unrest, demonstrating an ‘international coalition’ ready to back up Russian military obligations. And the next month the EU’s Josep Borrell had a telling, and publicly embarrassing meeting in Moscow with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, reinforcing Russia’s “street thug” over diplomacy attitude when it came to Ukraine.
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But following major cyber-attacks across numerous Ukrainian government websites in mid-January 2022, the likelihood of invasion started to settle in. Meanwhile, Russia continued to accuse Ukraine of genocide in the occupied Donbas region and started to talk publicly about the need for a ‘referendum’ on Donetsk and Luhansk formally becoming Russian territory. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed his nation them to remain calm, while drawdowns of foreign diplomats and their families began. Zelenskyy’s Chief of Staff, Andrii Yermak, called a meeting of Ukrainian journalists, including Ponomarenko, pressing for calm and claiming that everything was under control, going so far as to claim that the US didn’t understand the current threat, and was misinterpreting the moment.
During an early February meeting between the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, and the press, it was revealed that analysis suggested Kyiv would fall within three days following invasion, that pro-Russian leadership would be installed, a new legislature emplaced, and filtration (read concentration) camps established. Russia would absorb Ukraine and Belarus. At the same time the Guardian reported that the US had warned allies that Putin had decided to invade, very likely in the next several days. Der Spiegel reported that February 16 was the invasion date. More diplomats departed. Several airlines halted flights into Ukraine. Whiplash ensued across the city on whether an invasion was imminent, and February 16 came and went without incident. Uneasy calm set in again, with multiple indicators still suggesting something in the offing. A pontoon bridge had been established across a river on Belarus’ southern border, near Pripyat, Ukraine. Rumors circulated of large-scale blood drives in support of Russian soldiers massed on the border.
On February 17 all hell broke loose, with staged incidents across the occupied Donbas and Ukraine painted as the aggressor. On February 18, the Russia-installed ‘leaders’ of occupied Donetsk and Luhansk made public statements claiming that they were under threat from Ukraine. Mass mobilizations across the occupied Donbas began the next day, followed by more false flag provocations, with formal ‘defense agreements’ with Russia requested. Simultaneously, social media was saturated with news of more military buildups, with the tactical symbol “Z” beginning to appear on military vehicles moving forward. On February 21, the region’s ‘leaders’ formally requested recognition by Russia. This was followed by the now infamous televised Russian National Security Council meeting, followed by Putin’s fiery speech where he claimed the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk as part of Russia, with Russian tanks immediately moving forward into occupied territories. This was it. In Kyiv, the NATO liaison office was evacuated. Remaining US Embassy staff fell back to Lviv. Ponomarenko, now, fully accepted what was coming.
At 3:15 a.m. local time on February 24, Russia shut down civilian access to Russian airspace. Ninety minutes later, Putin went live on television again and declared he had no choice but to authorize a ‘Special Military Operation’. After 5 a.m., missiles begin to strike countrywide in Ukraine and the full-scale invasion had begun. Following the missile barrage, Russian attack helicopters breached Ukrainian air space, on the way to take Hostomel and Antonov airports outside of Kyiv, to facilitate rapid inflows of reinforcements in an effort to take the capital. Control over these airports changes multiple times in the earliest days of the fight. Ponomarenko fled Kyiv within 24 hours with his mother, taking her to the family home of his significant other, to a village on the Ukrainian side of the border with Moldova.
He knew he had to return to Kyiv, however. He was a war correspondent and would regret not returning for the rest of his life, had he failed to return. By day two, the Russians were on the very edges of Kyiv. Despite this, Ponomarenko made it back by nightfall on the third day. The city itself was desolate.
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Over the coming days there were fierce battles all around the periphery of Kyiv. After several days, however, it was clear Russia’s operation was not going according to plan. With March came the heaviest fighting around Kyiv, and Russia struggling mightily with logistics, including their infamous 64-kilometer-long tank column traffic jam. Heavy fighting around Bucha and Irpin, very close to Ponomarenko’s home, was ongoing. Chaos was normalizing and air strikes were constant. News of Kherson falling hit hard. In the East, the Mariupol Drama Theater was bombed. Ponomarenko’s hometown of Volnovakha was destroyed. And by mid-March, the Russians mostly had control over Bucha, Irpin, and Hostomel.
Ponomarenko writes of two journalist friends who volunteered for the Territorial Defense Forces (TDF), and shares their experiences, particularly early on in the first weeks of fighting. They were struck by how ordinary people came out to feed them and give them hot drinks in the cold weather, and separately, they were struck by how in their unit, made up of people from all walks of life across Ukraine were represented as equals, serving their country. Collectively, this was proof that Putin had radically underestimated Ukraine’s identity. That of a sovereign nation.
Four weeks into the war, Ponomarenko says it felt like Russia was weakening. Beyond the organized military and TDF, capable Ukrainian militia groups and foreign fighters were appearing in greater numbers. Ponomarenko began to sense that Kyiv would not fall and wrote a story saying as much. Hope re-emerged in Kyiv. “Millions of men and women in this country, from top officials to the military and regular people like us, made a moral choice,” he wrote. But it was also understood that this was only the beginning. By late March, Russia finally began to withdraw from the Kyiv region, signaling to everyone that Russia was beatable.
Ponomarenko began his book looking back from mid-March 2022, during a brief ceasefire to exchange the dead, reflecting on the then-ongoing Battle of Kyiv, and just how close Ukraine had come to losing it all. How, despite long odds, soldiers and citizens alike fought without support, “outnumbered and outgunned,” fiercely defending their capital. In so fragile a moment, had Kyiv fallen, it would have spelled the end of Ukraine. With Russia’s withdrawal from the region came the horrifying revelations of unspeakable atrocities in Bucha, defining the stakes of this fight for the world to see. Ponomarenko’s sober take is that ultimately, horror eventually dissolves. “Time will absorb all the horror and grief that had visited this land before.” As the book closes, he researches the name of a dead Russian soldier who was exchanged for a dead Ukrainian during that brief March ceasefire. The Russian was from several thousand kilometers east, but now dead, in Ukraine. For what? An aging autocrat’s fever dream of empire and Ukrainian erasure. Pointless, but worse, with good Ukrainians dying violently, indeed erased for all time, for no reason.
I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv earns a prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats
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