Olesya Khromeychuk: The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister

Abstract

Míla O’Sullivan reviews Olesya Khromeychuk’s timely memoir. According to O’Sullivan, the book is most valuable for portraying Russia’s war in Ukraine from the everyday human perspective against the background of Ukraine’s hierarchical position between the West and Russia. By providing this perspective, it is a vital contribution to the scholarship on epistemic imperialism that highlights the harmful knowledge and misunderstandings permeating the Western debates that get most things wrong about this ten-year war. The book also provides a way that allows the readers – scholars or otherwise – to make sense of their own personal perspectives and positions in this knowledge production and reception. O’Sullivan concludes that Khromeychuk’s memoir is thus both a challenge to the persistent structural inequalities in explaining Ukraine’s fate and a helpful guide to structural change that would allow for understanding Ukraine and emancipating its agency in our scholarly or public debates.