Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev was imprisoned from 2015 to 2017 in a concentration camp set up by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk. He spent most of that time in Izolyatsia—a defunct insulation materials factory that the Russians converted into a torture camp.

In The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, Aseyev’s story exposes Russia’s brutal actions against Ukraine, long before the war began in 2022. Torture, isolation, rape, and psychological abuse have been routinely deployed by Russians against Ukrainians since 2014 in what can be described as a genocidal war. Aseyev’s moving story is also a reflection on how a person can survive atrocities and return to the world to share their experiences while maintaining their humanity.

This memoir is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the price of truth in the occupied Donbas.

This first English-language synthesis of the history of Dnipro (until 2016 Dnipropetrovsk, until 1926 Katerynoslav) locates the city in a broader regional, national, and transnational context and explores the interaction between global processes and everyday routines of urban life. The history of a place (throughout its history called ‘new Athens’, ‘Ukrainian Manchester’, ‘the Brezhnev`s capital’ and ‘the heart of Ukraine’) is seen through the prism of key threads in the modern history of Europe: the imperial colonization and industrialization, the war and the revolution in the borderlands, the everyday life and mythology of a Soviet closed city, and the transformations of post-Soviet Ukraine. Designed as a critical entangled history of the multicultural space the book looks for a new analytical language to overcome the traps of both national and imperial history-writing.

This study situates the stance of the United States toward Ukraine in the broader context of international relations. It fills an important lacuna in existing scholarship and policy discourse by focusing on the complex trilateral—rather than simply bilateral—dynamics among the U.S., Ukraine, and Russia, in 1991–2016.

This book brings together for the first time documentary evidence and declassified materials dealing with policy deliberation, retrospective articles authored by former policymakers, and formal memoirs by erstwhile senior officials. The study is also supplemented by open-ended interviews with former and returning officials.

A story collection featuring acclaimed, award-winning contemporary voices from Ukraine.

Kateryna Kalytko’s sophisticated poetry volume, Nobody Knows Us Here, and We Don’t Know Anyone, deals with separations and changes, hinting at the ongoing war in Ukraine. One can intuit that the characters, succinctly depicted, are Crimean Tatars, Jews, or the displaced citizens of Ukraine, refugees from the occupied territories.

However, these departures and partings, acute alienation and pain that permeate the poems, could also be read as elements of a more philosophical and global matrix, relevant to any region and each and every human being. Losses, wars, and abandoned houses in Kalytko’s poetry are elevated to the realm of the universal myth of home and its loss, akin to the banishment from the garden of Eden. Kalytko’s visual images are stunningly detailed, and her poetic language rich and exuberant.

Volume 11 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

In this heartfelt collection of poems, Marianna Kiyanovska honors Holocaust victims by telling their stories of horror, death, and survival in their own imagined voices. The poems share the experiences of ordinary people facing the unbearable events that led to the Babyn Yar massacre in Kyiv, using a first-person, captivating, and sometimes alienating approach.

Conceived as a tribute to those who fell, the book raises complex questions about memory, responsibility, and how we remember those who witnessed evil that borders on the unspeakable.

CARBIDE explores the underbelly of the Ukrainian smuggling industry. The protagonist, Tys, a merciless yet loving parody of Ukrainian nationalism, concocts a hairbrained scheme to dig a tunnel from the imaginary western Ukrainian city of Vedmediv to Hungary and force the European Union to grant Ukraine admission by smuggling its entire population into a member-country. Hilarity inevitably ensues, along with danger, when Tys, the would-be ‘Moses of Ukraine’, recruits a gang of local smugglers, including a latter-day Icarus determined to fly over the border and a femme fatale who traffics human organs. This timely novel offers a funny, yet tragic take on increasingly urgent topics such as the meaning of borders, nationalism, and European identity.

This novel tells the story of Haba Habinsky, a refugee from Donbas, who has moved to Kyiv at the beginning of the Ukrainian-Russian war. His physical displacement–​​and subsequent conscious adoption of the Ukrainian language–puts him in a state of disorientation, during which he is forced to question his beliefs. This novel illustrates how people undergo radical transformations and how these changes affect their interpersonal relationships and cultural identification.

Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love is Rafeenko’s first novel translated into English, which was shortlisted for the Shevchenko National Prize in 2021.

In this exceptional collection of dispatches from occupied Donbas, writer and journalist Stanislav Aseyev details the internal and external changes observed in the cities of Makiïvka and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

Aseyev scrutinizes his immediate environment and questions himself in an attempt to understand the reasons behind the success of Russian propaganda among the working-class residents of the industrial region of Donbas.