SERHII PLOKHY

It’s a measure of our time, in June 2025, that immediately upon talking to Serhii Plokhy the issue of his own travel to Oxford’s Encaenia ceremony arises, and whether he is a full US citizen and whether, as a Professor at Harvard University, he is concerned about possible problems at the border.

He is a full US citizen he says, and he does not think there will be a problem. But, he says later, the situation at Harvard is currently ‘surreal’. ‘My black humour has led to me joking with colleagues that at least now I have a secondary conflict to balance the other one, the war between Russia and Ukraine…’

He is referring to the Trump administration’s confrontation with Harvard, which began in April with an announced defunding intention and then escalated on 22 May when the US Department of Homeland Security informed Harvard that its certification to host international students had been revoked, a decision that Harvard is fighting in the courts.

Plokhy, Mykhailo S Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History and Director of Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute, received an Oxford University honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at the University’s Encaenia degree ceremony on Wednesday 25 June 2025.

He is a renowned historian of Ukraine and Russia, and of disentangling truth from lie concerning Ukraine’s claim to be a nation state separately from Russia’s claim that Ukraine is naturally part of a greater Russia.

He has also in recent years become a global expert on nuclear accidents. His latest book Chernobyl Roulette: A War Story (2024) narrates how Russian troops quickly came to Chernobyl when they invaded Ukraine from the north in February 2022, and how the Ukrainian managers of the infamous site of the nuclear accident of 1986 behaved with extraordinary resilience and calm to try and minimise the possibility of further radiation leakage, a particular role being played by a heroic foreman called Valentyn Heiko.

Plokhy’s next book, already at the press for October release, is called The Nuclear Age: An Epic Race for Arms, Power, and Survival and reflects on the global state of nuclear facilities and technology.

‘There are 440 nuclear reactors in the world. Every single one is a potential dirty bomb if attacked.’

This subject matter seems appropriate for a man who grew up in Zaporizhzhia, a city in Ukraine's south and host to Europe’s largest nuclear reactor.

‘When Russia was attacking the immediate vicinity of that nuclear facility, I do not think that the real risk of that situation was being understood by the rest of the world, despite the subject being discussed.’

The site is occupied by Russian soldiers and remains a high risk.

The day we speak is also the day President Trump said he would decide within two weeks whether or not to directly participate in Israel’s attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, the focus being that the US has a particular bunker buster bomb that could be used against Iran’s mountain-recessed enrichment site at Fordow. Before the draft of this interview was complete, the bombing took place.

‘…if you trust what is basically the Israeli intelligence saying that Iran is close to a nuclear bomb, which I really don't know whether one can trust, but if you trust it, if this is true, that's a new phenomenon.

‘…Highly enriched uranium, if it is on any of the sites where there might be an attack, that is a type of nuclear bomb with consequences that may go beyond any previous bombing. It’s very dangerous, and that's what I am concerned about. But another thing that is being discussed is that the facility is so deep in the mountain [at Iran’s Fordow nuclear site], that the American bunker buster bombs, they will not do the job. What can do the job is actually a thermonuclear device, so then you are talking about a nuclear bombing of the nuclear site. And that's another thing that is on the table, and I just think that this is horrible.’

He adds that there was a similar debate in the 1960s, whether to try and prevent China from acquiring a nuclear bomb. ‘As an historian, I can say that it’s always the same narrative. Panic at the idea of another state acquiring nuclear weapons, but then when it happens the power dynamic shuffles and there is no nuclear war. But if you bomb a nuclear site where there is enriched nuclear material, then that is a direct route to a nuclear war.’

We return to Plokhy’s remarkable backlist of publications, 17 books and countless essays and other media. His first book, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine was published by Oxford University Press in 2002, and he says that his migration to other publishers subsequently was purely because of finding the right editors for his subjects.

‘The Cossacks book was really about early modern religion, and Oxford had the right editor. It was a good experience.’

He then wrote a series of books about Ukrainian identity and nation-building, coming forwards in time and eventually tackling the end of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

He says his favourite three books, if asked for a short list to recommend to an Oxford alum, would be in order, Nuclear Age, Forgotten Bastards and Lost Kingdom.

He’s referring first to the forthcoming October book on the state of nuclear proliferation, mentioned above, The Nuclear Age: An Epic Race for Arms, Power, and Survival, which will be published by WW Norton in the US and Allen Lane in the UK (right).

Secondly, he refers to a thoroughly entertaining and original narrative about the US establishment of airfields on Russia-controlled Soviet Ukrainian territory around Poltava during World War Two, with Stalin’s agreement. This title is called Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen Behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance (Allen Lane, 2019).

Finally, Lost Kingdom: A history of Russian Nationalism from Ivan the Great to Vladimir Putin, published in 2017.

The Forgotten Bastards book is one we return to because it sheds some light on the apparent reversion of the west towards authoritarianism.

The code names for establishing the American airfields on Soviet soil were Operation Baseball and Frantic, with B-17 Flying Fortresses flown in from bases in Italy in early 1944. There are photographs of US airmen fraternising with local women, and no doubt it was an exciting cultural encounter to a degree.

But the moral of the story, extensively evidenced by Plokhy's scholarship, is that despite the western allies cooperating with Russian to combat Nazi Germany, and despite the good faith of numerous individuals on both sides including the Russian, nonetheless the cultural and political divide proved to be unbridgeable.

The collaboration between the US and Russia quickly fell apart, anticipating the rapid switch from Grand Alliance to frosty Cold War. The trapped US airmen started to call themselves ‘the forgotten bastards of Ukraine’, while the local women who made friendships with US servicemen were harassed for years afterwards by the Soviet secret police.

Given how deeply US and Soviet Russian identities differed then, how extraordinary is it, seen historically, to see President Trump appearing to want to be closer to Putin and Putin’s Russia?

Plokhy’s answer is extensive, and he prefers to talk about symptoms of globalisation and in particular populist authoritarianism, by no means restricted to the US.

‘It is this element in US politics which is new, yet you can trace it back to the Great Depression’, he adds, and that ‘this narrative has been widely experienced by many other countries, not just the US under Trump.’

‘Authoritarian leaders, they find it's much easier to communicate with each other, … they understand each other, they understand what can be done, what not can be done, that democracies are very messy things to deal with.’

Turning to Russia, we skip over the immediate present and return to his third choice of book, Lost Kingdom (Allen Lane, 2017).

The book predated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by fully half a decade and yet landed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its hybrid war on Ukraine’s eastern borderlands.

At the end of the book he asked, with eery premonition, ‘Is Russia to become a modern nation-state, or will it remain a truncated empire, driven into ever new conflicts by the phantom pains of lost territories and past glories?’

The world has seen many empires come and go, but he argues in the book that Russia’s situation is peculiar because it has determined to believe a foundation myth that is simply not true.

He begins the book with Putin’s erection in central Moscow in 2015-16 of an 18-metre high statue of Prince Vladimir, who ruled Kyivan Rus’ from 980 to 1015, who accepted Christianity and ruled over a vast territory.

‘Putin has pushed this older idea that Prince Vladimir stood at the head of a Russia that naturally includes Belarus and Ukraine…yet that’s simply not true,’ says Plokhy.

‘By European standards Russia is a young state. Its history as an independent polity began less than 600 years ago in the 1470s, when Ivan III challenged the Mongols and called himself Tsar.’

What happened then and since is that Russia developed a powerful Kyivan myth of origin ‘that distinguished Muscovy from its immediate Mongol past and nourished its self-image as heir to Byzantium.’

In the book he later cites British historian Geoffrey Hosking to try and land the difference between Russia and other empires, to try and begin to disentangle why Russia is currently so determined to liquidate Ukraine as an independent nation state, a matter that still confounds numerous politicians unwilling to comprehend the history of the matter.

Hosking said, ‘Britain had an empire, but Russia was an empire - and perhaps still is.’ The pre-and post-Soviet ‘Russias’ have occasioned a new dialogue that has to do with a seemingly eternal question, what is Russia?

Part of Plokhy’s answer: ‘Russia today has enormous difficulty in reconciling the mental maps of Russian ethnicity, culture, and identity with the political map of the Russian Federation.’

For Ukraine and its allies, he says that all eyes are on Europe because with America appearing to withdraw into some sort of isolationism, ‘the former understanding of ‘the West’ is shrinking. It is fragmenting. So we don’t know what will happen.’

But, he adds, 'if Europe now allows Russia to prevail in Ukraine it will confirm Russia’s view of itself as a newly restoring empire'. That at least explains why suddenly NATO summits seem to be held monthly, and why there is so much anxiety coursing through the veins of Europe.

Again returning to history, Plokhy notes that when Poland was banging on the door of NATO [they joined in 1999], the rest of the world thought they were delusional because history had ended and the Cold War was over. ‘It turns out that the world was delusional and Poland was exactly right…’ History was never over, as Francis Fukuyama had argued so famously. It would soon reassert itself.

Going back to another lesson of Forgotten Bastards, he notes that when the Germans bombed the US aircraft while they were on the ground, revealing manifest weaknesses in Soviet air defences, ‘the Americans are trying to save people. The Red Army is actually trying to save airplanes and sacrifice people. That's the moment coming from 1944. It’s no different now. The principle reason why Russian soldiers fight is because if they don’t, they face torture, prison or death.’

This is a particularly difficult lesson for the West right now. Reluctant to increase spending on defence for wars they don’t want to fight, Russia just keeps fighting Ukraine with a resolve that has caught out numerous commentators.

‘The current war has taught me a lot that previously was only observable as history. It’s the enormous ability of an authoritarian regime to silence everything else and to mobilise the population and use it fully as a resource. Throw into the battle and lose as many people as you want; dealing the lives of your own people, not just of whom you attack and whom you occupy, things like that, that's the big thing about the Russian regimes, whether they're communists, whether they're Tsarist, whether there is a presidential rule. It’s a consistent historical truth where Russia is concerned, and particularly destructive.’

Plokhy is interviewing from his book-clad office on campus at Harvard. Reverting to local affairs and the US government’s confrontation with Harvard, he says that he is more hopeful now than a while back, because the courts still appear to have some sway and Harvard has lost no time in defending itself in court.

‘The battle for the values of education and enlightenment is important, not just for Harvard, not just for the United States. It's of global importance how it will all turn out. It is a global institution.’

He remains hopeful.