In Conversation — Professor Serhii Plokhy, 16 May 2023

The Russo-Ukrainian War

Serhii Plokhy in conversation with Sir Richard Evans

Professor Serhii Plokhy

(Harvard University)

Tuesday 16 May 2023

6.30pm-7.45pm BST – Livestreamed

About this event

In this special event, Serhii Plokhy, Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University, will discuss his new book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, which is published by Penguin on 16 May 2023.

Professor Plokhy will be in conversation with the historian, Sir Richard J. Evans.

The Russo-Ukrainian War is the comprehensive history of a war that has burned since 2014, and that — with Russia’s attempt to seize Kyiv from February 2022 — destroyed the geo-political order in place since the end of the Cold War. Professor Plokhy traces the origins and the evolution of the war: from the collapse of the Russian empire to the rise and fall of the USSR, and on to the development in Ukraine of a democratic politics.

Our event takes place in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute London. The Institute champions Ukrainian culture and shapes the conversation about Ukraine in the UK and beyond. It explores Ukrainian perspectives on global challenges. The UIL is an independent charity registered in England and Wales.

Those joining this livestream of the event will be able to watch the conversation and discussion as it takes place, but we are unable to take questions from the online audience.

Speaker biographies

Serhii Plokhy is Mykhailo S. Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History and Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. He is one of the most widely known historians working today and the author of numerous studies on the history of Ukraine, modern warfare and the Cold War.

Serhii’s books include Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy (2018), which won the Baillie Gifford and Pushkin House Book Prizes; The Gates of Europe. A History of Ukraine (2015); and Lost Kingdom. A History of Russian Nationalism from Ivan the Great to Vladimir Putin (2017). Professor Plokhy’s extensive work on the history nuclear power and arms include Nuclear Folly. A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (2021) and Atoms and Ashes. From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima (2022). His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Richard J. Evans is is one of the world’s leading historians of modern Germany. From 2008 to 2014 he was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, and from 2010 to 2017 President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He served as Provost of Gresham College in the City of London from 2014 to 2020.

In 2000 Sir Richard was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust Denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of his book, Telling Lies About Hitler (2002), and the film Denial. Sir Richard’s many books include Death in Hamburg. Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830-1910 (winner of the Wolfson History Prize in 1989); In Defence of History (2001); and the trilogy: The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War (2003-08).

Sir Richard’s The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 (2016), is volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe, and was published in 2016. His most recent books include Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019) and The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (2020). In 2012 he was knighted for services to scholarship.