Quotes from Anna Reid

One of the most oft-quoted records of the siege, scribbled in pencil over the pages of a pocket address book, is that kept by twelve-year-old Tanya Savicheva: 28 December 1941 at 12.30 a.m. – Zhenya died. 25 January 1942 at 3 p.m. – Granny died. 17 March at 5 a.m. – Lyoka died. 13 April at 2 a.m. – Uncle Vasya died. 10 May at 4 p.m. – Uncle Lyosha died. 13 May at 7.30 a.m. – Mama died. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.

Scratch a Russian, as the saying goes, and you find a Tatar.

Towards the end of the fifteenth century, invaded from the east in its own turn, the Golden Horde fell apart, and the northern princes stopped paying tribute and ruled independently again. But by then the habit of violent, Asiatic-style despotism was there to stay. Scratch a Russian, as the saying goes, and you find a Tatar. Whereas northern Rus fell to the Horde, southern Rus went to the Lithuanians.

Shelling, many felt, was actually worse than bombing, since bombardments were not preceded by an alarm. From 4 September to the end of the year the Wehrmacht's heavy artillery pounded Leningrad 272 times, for up to eighteen hours at a stretch, with a total of over 13,000 shells. (...) The rumour that some shells were filled only with granulated sugar, or held supportive notes from sympathetic German workers, was a soothing invention.

At this period, too, Leningraders resorted to their most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from the underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. (Tannery processes had changed, they discovered, since the days of Amundsen and Nansen, and the leather remained tough and inedible.)

George Bush, had he been around at the time, would undoubtedly have joined this chorus in favour of the status quo, his only contribution to Ukrainian independence being the infamous 'Chicken Kiev' speech of August 1991, in which he urged Ukrainians to stay loyal to the Soviet Union. But at least Bush knew Ukraine existed.

The best surviving key to Rus greatness is Kiev's Santa Sofia Cathedral, built in 1037 by one of the greatest Riurik princes, Prince Yaroslav the Wise. From the outside it looks much like any other baroque Ukrainian church, its original shallow Greek domes and brick walls long covered in gilt and plaster. But inside it breathes the splendid austerity of Byzantium.

Built to celebrate Yaroslav's father Volodymyr's conversion to Christianity, Santa Sofia was intended as, and remains, a place of huge political and spiritual significance. Under the tsars, pilgrims came in millions. (A mournful early graffito reads, 'I drank away my clothes when I was here'.)3

Despite these unpromising beginnings, Volodymyr must at some point have decided that to keep pace with its neighbours his empire needed an advanced religion.

In 988 Volodymyr ordered that the old thunder-god Perun be dragged down to the river and beaten with sticks, and herded the Kievans into a tributary of the Dnieper for mass baptism. 'Some stood up to their necks,' wrote the chroniclers, 'others to their breasts, and the younger nearer the bank, some of them holding children in their

By choosing Christianity rather than Islam, Volodymyr cast Rus's ambitions for ever in Europe rather than Asia, and by taking Christianity from Byzantium rather than Rome he bound the future Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians together in Orthodoxy, fatally dividing them from their Catholic neighbours the Poles.

I even – sign of the true convert – grew to like salo, the raw pig-fat, eaten with black bread, salt and garlic, that is the national delicacy and star of a raft of jokes turning on the Ukrainian male's alleged preference for salo over sex.

The bottom line is that 'Russia can either be an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both.'19 If Ukraine does not stay independent, in other words, Russia will not remain a democracy, so Ukrainian independence is as much for Russia's good as Ukraine's. Russians, of course, have some difficulty taking this concept on board.

Today, Polish-Ukrainian relations are rather muted – surprisingly so given their long and scratchy common history.

The number of ethnic Poles left in Ukraine is tiny, and Poland has no leverage over Ukrainian affairs. Whereas Khmelnytsky tried to play off Muscovy against the Poles, today's Ukraine balances Russia against America.

Ukraine might be an economic joke, a place to make cracks about, but it is also a vital buffer-state. With Ukraine independent, the Russian border stays 600 miles to the east and Poland can convincingly call itself part of Central, not Eastern, Europe. Were Ukraine – or more likely Belarus – to lose its independence, Russia would be back glowering over the frontier wire, and Europe's centre of gravity would shift away westwards.

Poland was the first country to give Ukraine diplomatic recognition, the day after the independence referendum of 1 December 1991.

Poles ended up looking so oriental, in fact, that at the battle of Vienna in 1683 Jan Sobieski had to order his troops to wear straw cockades so as to distinguish them from the enemy Turks. With serfdom and Sarmatism

All his family were miners: during the war even his grandmother had worked down the shafts, losing the fingers of her left hand under the wheels of a runaway trolley-car. Though he had gone into a white-collar union job after college, he still thought of himself as a miner, a shakhtyor – in Russian the word still has a faint heroic ring – too. But beyond that Alexey wasn't too sure what he

Did I know that Donetsk used to be called Yuzovka, after a Welshman, John Hughes, who opened the first foundry on the site? Did I know that Donetsk was twinned with Cardiff?

Ukraine's Russians are fairly recent arrivals. They came in waves that mirrored the empire's belated industrial revolution: at the end of the nineteenth century, with the first industrial boom; in the 1920s and 1930s, with the Five-Year Plans; and again after the war. By 1989, according to the last Soviet census, they made up 11 million of Ukraine's 52 million population. In the Donbass coal basin, equidistant from Kiev and Moscow, they form a majority.

Ukrainian politicians' worst nightmare is Donbass separatism, the fear that one day eastern Ukraine will want autonomy, or even bid to rejoin Russia.

Initially garrisoned with Tatar mercenaries called 'kazaks' or 'free adventurers', they soon attracted runaways of every class and nationality – escaped serfs, indebted nobles, defrocked priests.

Khmelnytsky's Pereyaslav Treaty had not, in the Cossacks' eyes at least, made Ukraine east of the Dnieper part of Russia, but simply given it Russian protection. Though subject to increasing Russian interference, the Cossacks still chose their own hetmans (subject to the tsar's approval), ran their own army, and collected their own taxes.