Valeriia “Lera” Burlakova is a Democracy Fellow at CEPA. She is a Ukrainian journalist and former frontline soldier who fought the Russians from 2014-2017. Her war diary ‘Life P.S.’ received the UN Women in Arts award in 2021. She has worked as a journalist in Ukraine since 2008.
I See You Are Interested in the Darkness (Я бачу, вас цікавить пітьма), (The Old Lion Publishing House, 2020) by Illaryon Pavlyuk,
– There is no sense in this.
– Sense is not the main thing.
– And what is the main thing? – he turned to her.
– Choice.
Illarion Pavlyuk’s novel is a breathtaking story of a Ukrainian combat veteran who becomes a criminal psychologist and investigates a case of a kidnapped little girl in a small town.
I don’t really like detective stories, but I read this book in one sitting because Pavlyuk’s novel is anything but a detective story in the classical sense. This is an artistic exploration of the theme of human indifference, and of the price people are willing to pay for oblivion. And it is also a story about doing what you believe in, even when you are left alone with this belief.
Like Eating a Stone: Surviving the Past in Bosnia (Atlas, 2008) by Wojciech Tokhman,
A Polish journalist telling the stories of survivors in Bosnia, the process of uncovering mass graves – and the strange happiness of finding your children’s bodies.
This book is so focused on humans, their feelings, their loss, and their emotions, that the post-war Bosnia landscape is almost blurry. Everything that’s seen through the journalist’s eyes could happen in any country after a war. And for me, as a Ukrainian, this book has been important to read now, although it’s 15 years since it was written.
Yellow Butterfly: A Story From Ukraine (Red Comet Press, 2023) by Oleksandr Shatokhin,
Yellow Butterfly is a wordless story using a minimalistic color palette — white, black, and yellow-blue, the latter the colors of Ukraine’s national flag.
The story follows a young girl through a landscape of bombs, burnt cars, and barbed wire, through all the possible shades and forms of darkness, and yet allows the reader to discover some form of light and hope.
My five-year-old has read a lot of books about war — from those that tell the stories of heroic little planes, in verse form, to those in the form of children’s war diaries — both real and fictional. Some were good, and some not so much.
This book was the only one that gave us both unlimited topics to discuss on every page, to consider every aspect of war, and to share exactly what we both think without leading us. It’s great.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
War Without End: Deterring Russia’s Shadow War
Either Europe will continue allowing Russia’s shadow war to set the terms of escalation, or it will act now to prevent a larger war.
CEPA Forum 2025
Explore CEPA’s flagship event.
