When President Putin ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine, he unleashed a terror which struck at the very heart of Europe, shocked the United States and broke the world order that had been in place since the fall of the Soviet Union. Politico reporter Christopher Miller has been embedded in Ukraine for 12 years - reporting for some of the world's leading media outlets. He is one of the few journalists who knows Ukraine inside out, who was at the front-line in Crimea, who reported from bombed out Mariupol and watched as Ukraine partied, overthrew governments and sheltered from Russian bombs in Kyiv. 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. Readers are transported to the smoke-filled rooms where oligarchs, revolutionaries, warlords, gangsters, journalists, and activists are shaping Ukraine. They plot, toil, drink and dance, and at the frontlines, they fight and die.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.