The inside story of Ukraine's bravery and defiance in the face of Russian aggression, from the conflict's leading journalist.

When President Putin ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine, he unleashed a terror which struck at the very heart of Europe and broke the world order that had been in place since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Financial Times reporter Christopher Miller has been embedded in Ukraine for 13 years and is one of the few journalists who knows Ukraine inside out, who was at the frontline in Crimea and who reported from bombed out Mariupol.

This book takes the reader from the coal-dusted, sunflower-covered steppe of the Donbas to the heart of the Euromaidan revolution camp in Kyiv; from the Black Sea shores of Crimea where Russian troops stealthily annexed Ukraine's peninsula to the bloody battlefields where warlords ruled with iron fists; to the destruction and terror wrought by Russian bombs in Bucha, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and beyond.

This is the story of modern Ukraine and its transformation, as told through the lives of Ukrainians, their fears and struggles. It is Ukraine in all its glory: vast, weird, exhilarating, defiant, resilient, trying to escape the long shadow of its former imperial ruler while fighting to build a new future.