Śniadanie pachnie trupem. Ukraina na wojnie

Zbigniew Parafianowicz was in Kyiv when the war broke out. He saw saboteurs captured in the street, civilians hiding in the metro and the battlefields outside the capital. Then Kharkiv: he was following the writer Serhiy Zhadan, from whom he heard: “If, God forbid, the Ukrainian state ceases to exist, there’s no point living.” His prediction threatened to come true; in spring 2022, Kharkiv began to resemble the cities razed to the ground by the Russians in Syria. It was on Kharkiv that the first thermobaric missiles and phosphorous bombs fell during the invasion. “Teenagers, snatched from school desks,” notes the reporter, “explained to me that the worst thing was to be hit in the belly, the neck, or the region of the pelvis or thighs. Then the chances of surviving were lowest.”

The symbols of resistance: Hostomel Airport, which was meant to be the bridgehead of the Russian landing on Kyiv. Mariupol and the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, defended by the Azov regiment and the Marines. The symbols of the invaders’ crimes: the torture chambers in Bucha and Irpin, Izyum and mass graves in the forest. Thousands of citizens vanished without trace.

At the same time, we can find in Parafianowicz’s book reconstruction of incidents from the months preceding the invasion. Conversations with diplomats, military figures, reliable sources. They were unanimous: everybody knew that war was coming, but no one believed it would break out. Breakfast Smells Like a Corpse is a book that was published eight months after the Russian attack, but is the result of the author’s twenty-year-long fascination with Ukraine. It is required reading: you cannot write a story about the war that Putin’s Russia declared against the civilised world without knowledge of this book.