In 1994, Ukraine gave up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal and signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty in exchange for security “assurances” from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Two decades later, in 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and launched a war in eastern Ukraine, breaking those very promises.

Kostenko provides an insider’s view of the negotiations, revealing the internal debates, international pressures, and strategic crossroads that Ukraine faced in the early stages of its independence. Based on documents previously unavailable in English, this book questions the decisions made and the consequences that followed. Was the complete and immediate destruction of Ukraine’s vast nuclear arsenal the strategically right decision for Ukraine? Could history have played out differently?

Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament: A History is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the roots of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the lessons the world must learn.

This bilingual Ukrainian-English collection brings together the most interesting experimental works by Mykola (Nik) Bazhan, one of the major Ukrainian poets of the twentieth century. As he moved from futurism to neoclassicism, symbolism to socialist realism, Bazhan consistently displayed a creative approach to theme, versification, and vocabulary.

Many poems from his three remarkable early collections (1926, 1927, and 1929) remain unknown to readers, both in Ukraine and the West. Because Bazhan was later forced into the straitjacket of officially sanctioned socialist realism, his early poetry has been neglected. This collection makes these outstanding works available for the first time.

Donetsk, the black gem of Ukraine—Eden and Sodom in one, a stew steaming with coal fever, Manifest Destiny of Europe‘s east: the reader is sent onto a double Odyssey of two adventurers, the fiery blacksmith Alexander and the elusive linguist Lisa, whose paths are destined to cross on the cusp of the war in the Donbas. Only one of them fathoms that their encounter goes far beyond its face-value purpose.

A thriller, a romance, a CV, a rose of historical winds, a song of crafts, an ontology of Eastern-Ukrainian mind in one, Carbon is told in polyphonic verse—a prayer for the beloved, anguished city, Donetsk.

Mountain and Flower is Mykola Vorobiov’s second book in English translation, presenting a selection of poems spanning more than fifty years of his poetic craft. The book begins with early poems from his first collection, Remind Me for the Road, to his most recent works. One of the founding members of the nonconformist literary group known as the Kyiv School of Poetry, early Vorobiov is known for his preoccupation with metaphor and surreal imagery. In his more mature poetry he reveals himself as a master of miniature, with considerable affinity to Japanese haiku where the perception of a fleeting moment constitutes the essence of his poems’ rationale. Nature reigns supreme in Vorobiov’s poetic oeuvre and it provides him with endless opportunity for creating startling images.

His intuitive connection to the surrounding environs is so penetrating and organic that his visions, however strange, come across as convincing and justified. There are hardly any references to Ukrainian realities (past or present) in his poetry. Vorobiov’s concerns hover around the issues of existence on all possible levels—plants, animals, humans, inanimate objects, and the universe. The poet is not interested in conveying the past; rather, he trusts his imagination as the ultimate source of creativity. Mountain and Flower attempts to penetrate the invisible that has no beginning and no end, and invites the reader to plunge into this mysterious unknown.

Volume 6 in the Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

This bilingual collection of essays celebrates Marko Pavlyshyn’s outstanding contribution to the study of modern and contemporary Ukrainian literature and culture. With its many methodological approaches and the variety of periods, authors and texts that it analyzes, the book reflects and builds on Pavlyshyn’s willingness to modernize our understanding of Ukrainian literature as an instrument of communication between authors, readers and the nation from the late eighteenth century to the present day.

Hopefully these essays will inspire readers and scholars to continue their journey through Ukrainian culture, in a context profoundly marked by the role of literary texts as agents of nation building and social evolution.

Don’t Touch the Bones, this remarkable second collection by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, shows its author hard at work to transform the experience of cultural losses—of lands, language, and legacy—into a poetry of remembrance, homage, and power. She inherited generations of memories and found an uncommon resolve to record the emotional life of her people, Jews only recently emigrated from Ukraine. Though she might be seen as a documentarian of loss, her voice is not hectoring but elegiac, bringing a ferocious lyricism to what might otherwise be the repressed micro-histories, lost narratives of exile, and heirlooms of desperation and diaspora.

Her poems rake the oracle bones of her family’s flight from persecution, reading in their fissures a dialogic language both of sorrow and determination. —Garrett Hongo, author of Coral Road

In A New Orthography, the Serhiy Zhadan focuses on daily life during the Russo-Ukrainian war, rendering intimate portraits of the country’s residents as they respond to crisis. Zhadan revives and revises the role of the nineteenth-century Romantic bard, one who portrays his community with clarity, preserving its most precious aspects and darkest nuances.

The poems investigate questions of home, exile, solitude, love, and religious faith, making vivid the experiences of noncombatants, refugees, soldiers, and veterans. This collection will be of interest to those who study how poetry observes and mirrors the shifts within a country during wartime, and it offers solace as well.

Volume 5 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

This is a study of a multicultural city in times when all norms collapse. Ola Hnatiuk presents a meticulously documented portrait of Lviv’s ethnically diverse intelligentsia during World War Two. As the Soviet, Nazi, and once again Soviet occupations tear the city’s social fabric apart, groups of Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish doctors, academics and artists try to survive, struggling to manage complex relationships and to uphold their ethos. As their pre-war lives are violently upended, courage and fear shape their actions. Ola Hnatiuk employs diverse sources in several languages to tell the story of Lviv from a multi-ethnic perspective and to challenge the national narratives dominant in Central and Eastern Europe.

Persephone Blues offers a selection of poems by one of the leading Ukrainian writers of her generation, Oksana Lutsyshyna. In the poems collected here “experience is a means of entombment.” Gender is no longer a measure of strength; neither is youth. Sometimes the dead can see each other again; love goes through its motions, while we remain in the animal kingdom. Inviting and potent, these poems suggest Ovid’s transformations continue unfolding around us with unexpected rapidity.

Author of four novels and four volumes of poetry, Lutsyshyna is currently a lecturer in Slavic Literature at the University of Texas at Austin.

In this Ukrainian bestseller, now available in English for the first time, Yaroslav Hrytsak examines the first three decades (1856–86) in the life of Ivan Franko, a prominent writer, scholar, journalist, and political activist who became an indisputable leader in the forging of modern Ukrainian national identity. Hrytsak does so against the background of small communities—Franko’s family, his native village, his colleagues, the editors of periodicals for which he worked, and the revolutionary circles with which he interacted—during a time when multi-ethnic Habsburg Galicia evolved into several modern nations.

This volume will remain a recognized standard for the study of the history of Ukraine and East Central Europe.