A Brief History of a Long War: Ukraine’s Fight Against Russian Domination
written by Mariam Naiem
illustrated by Yulia Vus and Ivan Kypibida
2025
translated by PE Omelianenko Liliia Serhiivna
2026

This book¹ is only 106 pages long but it still took me a couple of weeks to read. It covers a lot of heavy ground about a national conflict spanning centuries including massacres, genocides and government corruption. The plotting is structured around the story of a young woman living in an apartment complex in Ukraine, dealing with nights broken up with bombings and spending long hours in crowded bomb shelters, interspersed with stories about the history of the region that led to this situation. The historical instances are painful though distanced by time while the continuation into the current time period strikes even harder and is all the more important for it. This is about history and current events and the aphorism, “those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it”, at least on a macro-level, because many of the individuals do know their history but are still very much doomed to repeat it.

In some ways, this book is similar to Games Without Rules in that it presents the history of a how a current conflict grew from historical roots. It doesn’t have the humor that lightens that book and it flattens the history into a conflict between the good guys and the bad guys, but it is, as the title proclaims, a very brief history of a very long conflict, so there’s obviously only so much nuance that’s possible in the space, but it suffers from that shortness. That said, it’s still introducing a lot of important history that I didn’t have before, or did have but without the context that this provided.

In some ways, this book is similar to Power Born of Dreams in that is about a current living person is surviving the trauma of a modern day genocide that’s still being fought to see whether it will succeed or not, whether this person and their culture will survive or not. It’s desperately hopeful in the way that people must be in order to continue trying to survive.

Overall, this book is an excellent introduction to how the Russian invasion of Ukraine came about and where that war stood as of the book’s publication in 2025. It’s very useful background full of important knowledge, but it’s sure not easy.

1. Whenever I talk about a nonfiction graphic novel I run into the problem of what to call it, because “novel” implies fiction and this is a nonfiction history complete with citations and a bibliography. But it’s also fully illustrated and the current term for this kind of publication if a “graphic novel”. ↩︎