Soviet POWs cover a mass grave after the Babi Yar massacre, October 1941. Photo by Johannes Hähle, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons The history of Ukraine is complex and written in blood. It has been said that about one quarter of the population of Ukraine died violently in the 20th century – in two world wars, a civil war, two famines and under a communist dictatorship. The present war is only the latest episode in a long and tortured history of the way the country, highly fertile and with few natural barriers, forms the borderland between Russian imperial autocracy and...