How A Brave Ukrainian Town Rebuffed The Russian Invaders — A New Book Tells The Remarkable True Story

At first glance, Andrew Harding’s A Small, Stubborn Town appears to have nothing in common with Erich Maria Remarque’s great novel of World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front.

Harding draws on his reporting for BBC News in an acclaimed new nonfiction account of how a scrappy small town rebuffed Russian invaders in an early battle for the soul of Ukraine. Remarque turned the dross of his German military service into the gold of a classic of war fiction.

But A Small, Stubborn Town shows the “murderous absurdity” of Vladimir Putin’s war as plainly as All Quiet on the Western Front revealed the disillusionment of soldiers who had dreamed of fighting for noble ideals propagated by Imperial Germany.

Harding brings a you-are-there immediacy to his report on the fierce two-day battle for Voznesensk, a pretty rural town in the Mykolaiv region with a tactically key bridge. He summed up the significance of the fight for the BBC:

“Victory would have enabled Russian forces to sweep further west along the Black Sea coast towards the huge port of Odesa and a major nuclear power plant.

“Instead, Ukrainian troops, supported by an eclectic army of local volunteers, delivered a crushing blow to Russian plans, first by blowing up the bridge and then by driving the invading army back, up to 100km, to the east.”

Yet the battle has been overshadowed in America by the larger-scale dramas in places like Mariupol, Kherson, and Kharkiv. Interested in why it matters? I say more about the battle in my review of Harding’s remarkable book at @Medium.

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