“The war has begun. I will hardly be able to fall asleep, and there is no point in trying to calculate what has changed forever.” So wrote Yevgenia Belorusets from Kyiv in the early hours of Friday, Feb. 25, 2022, at the outset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Her diary entry on the war’s opening salvo was the first of around 40 that have now been collected and published together in “War Diary,” an essential document of the Ukrainian people’s experience of the conflict. Ms. Belorusets, a Ukrainian writer and photographer, was living in Kyiv when Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation.” She remained for more than a month. Greg Nissan worked with Isolarii to translate the text and edit the book version, a joint project with the independent publishing house New Directions.

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