Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival

by Luke Harding

It was Wednesday, a midmorning in May, when Finnish air traffic controllers noticed something odd. An unauthorized flight was taking place. A Soviet-designed Russian military helicopter had crossed the border from Russia into eastern Finland. The Mi-17 was flying between the towns of Kesälahti and Parikkala, over a landscape of glistening lakes and pine trees. It was an unexpected and menacing presence. The helicopter kept going for about four kilometers, Finland’s defense ministry said, before disappearing back into Russian territory. This was not the first time Moscow had violated Finland’s air space. The previous month an Ilyushin passenger jet had deliberately strayed over the medieval town of Porvoo. Finland’s neighbor Sweden had suffered similar breaches. Four Russian fighter jets had streaked above Gotland, a strategically located island in the Baltic Sea. A spy plane flew close to a Swedish naval base in the south of the country. And, back in 2014, one of Moscow’s submarines was found lurking in the waters off Stockholm’s archipelago. These incursions were not subtle. The Porvoo incident came the same day Zelenskiy addressed the Finnish parliament. He likened Ukraine’s military counterreaction to Finland’s own war against the Soviet Union eighty-three years earlier, when outnumbered Finnish soldiers fought back against Stalin’s winter invaders. It was Ukraine’s and Finland’s “fate” to share a border with Russia, Zelenskiy said. In case anyone had missed the message...