THIS WEEK
Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes, said Bertolt Brecht. Make that two lands. Alexei Navalny, most likely murdered by agents of Vladimir Putin in the Russian Arctic “corrective facility” of Polar Wolf, had that rarest of qualities, moral courage. Few alive can hope to match his resilience and good humour in the face of impending death. The Russian invasion of Ukraine also seems to have brought out the best in Volodymyr Zelensky, the leader who has come to symbolize Ukraine’s resistance. The former television satirist refused to abandon his post as a column of tanks advanced towards Kyiv and Putin’s death squads went looking for him. The Showman by Simon Shuster, reviewed for the TLS by Lawrence Freedman, describes a complicated character: “stubborn, confident, vengeful, impolitic, brave to the point of recklessness, resistant to pressure, and unsparing toward those who stood in his way”.
Two years on Zelensky’s army is running low on men and munitions: a war of attrition favours the invaders. Ukraine’s “rock star” poet Serhiy Zhadan, whose collection of new and selected poems has been translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, rises to the occasion:
They didn’t explain that death is local,
It doesn’t run out of the hospital yard.
It is of little interest to anyone
not part of the funeral procession.
Our reviewer Linda Kinstler writes: “if today the interest of Ukraine’s western partners appears to be waning, it is in part because they do not see themselv
