this is bbc news, the headlines: president putin's delivered a fiery state of the union address as he seeks to justify his invasion of ukraine. he blamed the west for the year—long war accusing it of trying to make ukraine into an anti—russia. he said the existence of his nation was at stake. president biden has been giving a speech of his own in poland. he said ukraine's struggles was a generational conflict forfreedom. addressing a cheering crowd in warsaw, mr biden said that, as he put it, president putin's lust for power and land would fail. emergency teams in southern turkey have been carrying out more searches of the rubble after another earthquake on monday, just two weeks after two massive quakes devastated the region. buildings weakened by those

first tremors finally collapsed. the 6.4 magnitude quake struck close to the border with syria. now on bbc news, it's hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. in vladimir putin's mind, ukraine is a fake state manipulated by the west. his effort to drag it back into the russian world began long before his all out invasion a year ago. back in 2014, he showed his contempt for kyiv sovereignty in crimea and the donbas. ironically, putin's denial of ukraine's identity has strengthened what he set out to destroy.

my guest is olesya khromeychuk. writer, historian and sister of a fallen ukrainian soldier. even now, do ukraine's allies understand what the stakes really are in this war? olesya khromeychuk, welcome to hardtalk. thank you so much for inviting me, stephen. it's a great pleasure to have you in this studio in london. and you live in london. you're the director of the ukrainian institute here in london. you're an historian of ukraine and eastern europe. and yet, i am sure that a lot of your mind is in ukraine.

what kind of a distance do you keep from the daily reality of your homeland being at war? perhaps only physical distance, i suppose. the distance that, i suppose, would take 2a hours or so to cross, because at the moment we can't fly to ukraine any more, and it takes about 2k hours to get to my hometown now, which the journey that usually would take me 2.5 hours to fly to my hometown, lviv. but, no, i very much am in my mind, in my heart, in ukraine with the people of ukraine. and, over the last year, i feel like i've become a full time ukrainian as well, because i'm a scholar of ukraine and i am ukrainian, and a lot of people have sought the knowledge of people or expertise of people who know about ukraine. have you been back very much since february 24th, 2022? no, i only went back once. i went back in september. i was a little bit uncomfortable going back without a good reason. i didn't want to be a liability for people who are defending my country.

but in september i went back. i really wanted to see people, to talk to them, to visit my hometown, to visit the capital, and that's what i did. i went for a very brief visit. here's what people might already be puzzling over as we get into our conversation. why would somebody who clearly is so driven by a need to explain ukraine's history, who cares so very much about her country, why did you choose to leave ukraine a long time ago? long before the all out invasion, long before putin's annexation of crimea in 2014. as a very young woman, you chose to leave your homeland. why? the choice wasn't mine. i was 16 at the time. it was my parent's choice, and it was one that they found very, very difficult to make and, believe me, that was the last resort for them. we were the sort of family that would never want to leave ukraine, never wanted to leave lviv, where we lived, where we settled, where i had a really, truly wonderful life. i acted in theater. i went to journalism school.

i considered doing the profession that you have at the moment. so, yeah, it was a very difficult choice, but one that was dictated by the reality of the situation of the 1990s. my parents became economic migrants. unfortunately, the situation in ukraine was such that the corruption was very difficult to fight, and they made that very hard choice. you studied and then found professional work in the uk. volodya, your older brother, he did live abroad for quite a while and he chose to go back. and of course, volodya's life and death have become central to the work that you have done, not least the book that you've written, called the death of a soldier told by his sister. what was different about volodya that drove him to go back when you and your other brother didn't? it's a very good question, but not so easy for me to answer. volodya is, was, a complicated man, not always easy to know what exactly drove him.

but he spent 11 years in the netherlands. that's where he lived. so, in western europe as well. but at some point he just got really tired of the life of an immigrant. it's a difficult life. and he thought, "ok, i'm having a hard life in the netherlands." i may as well have a hard life in ukraine instead." at least i'll be a home." and so he moved back in 2010, and we kept having these conversations. he couldn't understand why i put up with the life of an immigrant. i suppose the obvious difference is that i left when i was 16. he left when he was already in his 20s. so, he was nine years olderthan i am. and, yet, i also sense in you a complex relationship with the adopted country that you have, the united kingdom. before we even get into the way that the west responded to the war, here's something you wrote about your feelings about being in the uk. "there's something in the way that ukraine has long been perceived in the west that i recognize in my own personal

experience, being an immigrant and a woman, it has always been a struggle to have my voice heard." i guess you've always had that conflicted feeling about being away from ukraine in the west. yes, it's inevitable for people who leave their homeland. i suppose, i struggled for a while. i wanted to fit in like like all of us do, especially as a young person. and then i understood that living in between is fine. to have two homes is a privilege. so when i say, "i go to ukraine," i say, "i go home." when i come back to london, i say, "i'm coming back home." but did you, in a sense, think that there was a lack of, not only knowledge of, but, care about ukraine in the west? because this is, in a sense, getting to the point of your brothers fighting and your brother's death. were you sitting in london thinking, "you know what, putin ordered the annexation of crimea, sent his forces into crimea in 2014." "he sent forces into the donbas to work with the sort of puppet insurgents in the east of ukraine and the west, beyond some harsh words of condemnation, has done nothing about it." and did you feel that was

because either they were ignorant or they just didn't care? it's a combination of reasons. i think there was lack of knowledge and lack of will to acquire that knowledge, i think, for a very long time. and it might still be true to this day. we, you know, we choose credible voices not based on the experience or the knowledge that they have, but based on our idea of whose voice is credible. that is the point i was making in the article that you were quoting. this way for a young woman, for instance, who's an immigrant, it's quite difficult to have her voice heard. and ukraine is perceived as a sort of young state, you know, without years and years of statehood, which we perceive as reasons for credibility. so, often, so, let's go back a little bit in time in during the orange revolution or during the maidan protests, where did the journalists go to report on ukraine, on what was happening in ukraine? to moscow, not to kyiv. this is changing now. i think there's a realization that we can't just listen to an imperial center that doesn't actually know the peripheries. we need to go to places

which have experiential knowledge of what's going on to them, and we need to trust them with that knowledge. but it's onlyjust changing now. did you try to persuade your brother volodya not to sign up, to volunteer? he didn't need to go. he'd done his military service. but did you try and persuade him not to volunteer to go to the front in 2015? when he took that decision to join the ukrainian armed forces out of his own volition, there was no point trying to persuade him to change his mind. but i did try to persuade him not to go back after his first deployment. he finished his first deployment. he served for a year and a half. and i did say, "look, maybe it's time that you give your civilian life a go again." but he had a very different opinion. he told me that even though i'm a historian, even though i've been studying wars in general and this war in particular, i don't understand that this is a european war. itjust happened to start in eastern ukraine. and he was right. he could see something from the trenches that i couldn't see from london. you do write candidly

in all sorts of different ways about your relationship with your brother, about the complex feelings you had about his fight in ukraine. and this is difficult. i wonder whether there's a little bit of guilt about something that he said to you when he was on the front line? he said that he thought you should come and visit, "come and see the front line," he said, and you refused. you said, i'm quoting now, "i'm nota medic. i'm not a soldier. i'm not a war reporter." what use would i be at the front?" but then you say, "the truth is i did want to see it up close." but you didn't go. yeah, no, and i still stand by that opinion and that choice that i made then. it's partly why i didn't go back this year a lot, because i dislike war tourism. i think if you are going to go to a country as a tourist... but you wouldn't be a tourist, i mean, you are ukrainian. we've established the depth of your feelings for your country. this isn't war tourism. this is you and your people. the people on the front line risked their lives

every second of the day. to have them protect someone who doesn't need to be there would not be very sensitive. i did what i could to understand the reality of the front line by talking to the veterans, by interviewing women who have served in the ukrainian armed forces, by being as close to it as i possibly can without putting others in danger. i think it's important to have a look at volodya. he took some selfies or some video images of himself on the front line that you got access to. let's just take a look at him and his words when he was serving very, very close to the enemy's front line in the donbas. this dates back to 2017

when the fight was raging in the donbas and ukrainian forces were losing many, many men and, ultimately, volodya lost his life. when you first saw those images, how did it make you feel? heartbroken, but also it was in some ways wonderful to have that memory of my brother and to have that way to continue that encounter with him. i don't know. i don't know who he recorded those videos to. he didn't seem to have sent them to anybody. perhaps for us to look at now. i think he said in one of the exchanges you managed to have with him when he was serving, he said, "i've changed. i am now a warrior." did you get a sense of what he meant by becoming a warrior? yes. well, it's important perhaps to mention that he was an artist before he was a civilian. he had done his service as a conscript in the 1990s,

as a young man, but he chose not to stay in the army. he had an opportunity to stay in the army at the time. he was quite disillusioned, actually, by the army. i mean, this was the �*90s and the army wasn't exactly in a great state. it was... suffered from corruption and from soviet legacy and so on. but when he decided to join in 2015, i could see that he found the sense of self that i've not seen before. and i think i understand it a lot better now that i see so many of my friends, civilians, join the armed forces. there's a very clear sense of purpose. they know that this is a way... this is a very meaningful way to defend their statehood, to defend the lives of their compatriots, and to protect ukraine from this absolutely unprovoked, brutalaggression. you are an historian, but you are also now a playwright and an author, because i guess the way you... one of the ways that you chose

to deal with the grief, the overwhelming grief, of losing your brother was, was to write about it and actually put on a stage play as well. were they driven partly by an anger that people at that time, because again, you're writing this before 2022, that people were not actually in the country, you'd adopt the uk aware really of what was going on? frustration, perhaps. yes. and just desire to wake people up and remind them that the war is still ongoing. that it's claiming a lot of lives, notjust the military, but civilian lives as well. that people are still living in occupation, and occupation, we already knew at the time what it was like. it's now that the world is discovering what the russian troops leave behind. mass graves, torture chambers and so on. but we were already aware of, say, a concentration camp in donetsk, so called izolyatsia. you know, i really wanted to tell people to pay attention to this forgotten war.

and i realize that it is seen as a very complex war. people find it really difficult to separate the russian propaganda that claimed that it's an internal conflict, that it's just ukrainians fighting amongst themselves, and the reality and the factual information on the ground. so, i thought using the sort of individual personal story, universal story of grief, might be a way to explain what this war is about to to the general public. it's intensely personal. and it's of course, it's a human story that resonates with so many people. i just wonder whether in your grief, you could also, if the word exists, humanize the enemy, because the enemy that volodya had been fighting was by and large an enemy from within ukraine. they were people who lived in the far east of ukraine, in the donbas, who had been brought up with the russian language and who, some of them,

wanted very actively to be part of that rebel movement that was called the donetsk people's republics. now, they were ukrainians, too. i wonder if you were able to give them a humanity. so, there was some ukrainians and some collaborators, russian proxies, and there were still a lot of russian citizens, fsb officers. there was the russian army that didn't have the insignia. no doubt there were russian military personnel on the ground. but, as i say, there were thousands of ukrainians fighting in those battles as well. that is also true, although my brother, when i spoke to him regularly said that we know we're fighting the russian army, just the world doesn't want to speak of it openly. we decided to pretend that we believe that they are pretending not to be there, if you see what i mean. so, one thing to remember is that there was no separatist movement in eastern ukraine or, indeed, in crimea before russia engineered it. so, there wouldn't have been a war. there might have been

tensions as there are tensions everywhere. there are tensions in the uk as well between different regions and different groups. but there certainly wasn't a pre—condition for any military conflict until russia invaded. until russia occupied crimea in 2014 and then began the aggression in eastern ukraine in 2014. and that is something that we really need to discuss in depth now and see why we turned a blind eye to it for so long. why would it not?.. why did we continue to pretend that somehow russia can be perceived as a broker of peace at various so—called peace agreements at which ukraine, at which russia essentially held a gun to ukraine's head? we accepted all of this in the west in the international community. russia was the aggressor, not the peace broker. now, the book came out at least was finished before the 2022 invasion, but it still now is being sold and indeed bought and read

by many, many people after the february 24th invasion and one year on, i'm wondering whether you feel, as you look around not just the united kingdom, but european capitals generally, whether you feel that the publics in europe now fully understand what is at stake in this war? so, i wrote most of the book and the first edition of the book before the full scale invasion. the edition that you hold in your hand is an updated edition, and i wrote several chapters since the full scale invasion. so i tried to make sense of precisely what you're asking, essentially, why did it take such huge loss of life and such a brutal genocidal war, a full scale war, for the world to start paying attention to what is going on and what is at stake? that this is an existential war for ukraine, but it is also a war against the values that we hold dear in the international community, in the democratic world. and when you hear, for example, german chancellor 0laf schulz,

who has now committed, of course, tanks to ukraine, when you hear him insist that, "fundamentally nato, and we in germany, are not at war with russia," and when you hear emmanuel macron say, "in the end, it is clear our objective is not to humiliate russia." when you hear messaging like that, does that make you worry that, in the end, europe doesn't quite get it? you're asking a lot of questions in that one question. so, we're not. the west isn't that war with russia. that is precisely how russia wants to portray it. and when we heard vladimir putin recently talk about, you know, he's essentially there fighting against the us and the west, because it is very humiliating to admit that he is losing ,his army is losing, on the battlefield against ukraine. so that is how he wants to portray this war, that

somehow this is a proxy war. right. but in reality, this is the war against ukraine and it's a genocidal war. your book actually opens, the preface opens, with the words of your brothers saying, "understand, this is europe's war which happens to be taking place on ukrainian soil." no, no. he said a european war, that happen to start in eastern ukraine, but it's essentially against the values of the democratic world. against human rights that we stand by. against the order that we know and cherish and want to protect. that is true. that is what russia is attacking. but it is fighting a war against ukraine and is fighting a war on the ukrainian soil and killing ukrainian citizens. do you find yourself able to feel any sympathy, to have any understanding of perhaps some of the russian troops who have been, in essence, forced to go and fight in that war? some of those russian families who have chosen not to protest on the streets about this war because they feel it's too dangerous? how do you feel about the russians, the enemy on the other side of this

conflict? it's a very difficult question. i tried to discuss it in one of the chapters. one of the chapters is called the enemy. and i try to sort of grapple with the feelings that i have. i have family in russia that stop talking to us quite a long time ago. that is either silently agreeing with what the leadership is doing or not even silently or explicitly agreeing with the actions of putin. but do i have sympathy? no. those who are ignorant and decide not to know what the situation in ukraine is like, they're also making the choice. by now, i think there's so much information that its very difficult to believe that it hasn't penetrated russia about the war crimes that have been committed by the troops. more than 300,000 draft dodgers left the russian federation. i haven't seen them

protesting in peaceful cities of western europe to which they left. 20,000 russians have been arrested for expressing dissent, criticizing the war... in a country of 140 million people. sure. but are you saying that every russian, in your view, has an obligation to dissent, therefore risk arrest. that, in your view, there is a right to judge every russian on that basis? how about those who can do so in london, in berlin, in paris, in new york and elsewhere? i don't see mass protests. i haven't seen them. how about the cultural elites who are so worried about so—called cancel culture against russian culture? how about them saying, protesting and saying do not use the images of alexander pushkin in occupied cities, and do not make that poet into a symbol of death and destruction and occupation? where are these voices that speak about this war being absolutely criminal?

you're a historian. you look back, but i'm sure, in this case, you also look forward. what kind of ukraine do you think will emerge from this terrible war? the sort of ukraine that was willed into being in 1991, to start with, and by generations before that. but let's remember that in 1991, over 90% of the population voted in the referendum to confirm the independence of ukraine. the choice that the parliament took in august 1991. so very clear choice in every single part of ukraine, including crimea. the sort of ukraine that people on the maidan in 2014 willed into being. the one that isn't corrupt, that will never stand authoritarian regime. that is prosperous, that is free, and the values freedom above everything else. but it's going to be a deeply traumatized society. indeed. i think you met one soldier when you returned, and he said many people don't know how

to relate to me any more. they look at soldiers and they worry that any of us could be killers at any moment. i mean, that's something that ukraine is going to have to live with for a generation and more. yes. so, that meeting took place a while ago before the full scale invasion. of course, now, so many more people have gone through the trauma of fighting... the trauma is so much deeper. indeed, yes. and i think it will take generations to heal. and we all need to support ukrainians in that process of healing. and one way to ensure that that process of healing begins is ensuring justice. it's making sure that war criminals are punished. and that notion of putin's to deny ukraine's identity, its very existence. can you confidently say that you know that can and will be defeated? that ukraine will emerge from this stronger, not weaker? absolutely. i mean, we already see how strong the civil society is, how it's proved to be able to defend itself with not very

much apart from defiance before the international community found the will and the courage to support ukraine militarily, politically, economically, to the degree that ukraine has been asking for, because we can see these delays, they continue, right? so, ukrainians had to rely on themselves. and the other thing that gives me faith that it is going to be a much stronger society is because we're driven by love, not hatred. the love for our country and each other. 0lesya khromeychuk, it's been a pleasure having you on hardtalk. thank you very much. thank you. hello there.

we're seeing a change to cooler weather on wednesday, even with some rain around as well. now, it has been really dry for many central and eastern parts of england this month. we started the week with temperatures as high as 17 celsius. but things are changing because we've got this cloud that's moving up from northern france to bring some showers, and that's ahead of this thicker band of cloud that's bringing the rain on that weather front there. that's going to continue to push its way steadily eastwards, and then following on from that, this is where we get the cooler air coming in from the atlantic. and we start the day with temperatures around about 5—6 celsius with a lot of cloud around. we've got the rain across eastern scotland that will move away, sunshine and showers will follow wintry over the hills, perhaps, and a cool wind for northern ireland, sunshine and showers here.

more cloud for england and wales, could keep some rain across some northern and eastern parts of england, may well turn a bit brighter with some sunshine, but again, some showers for wales, the south west and later the midlands. and for all of us, it's a bit cooler, the temperatures typically around nine celsius or so. now we've got cooler weather because we're changing the wind direction. instead of that very mild south—westerly that we started the week with, it's more of a north westerly wind turning northerly across england and wales as we head into thursday. around the top of that area of high pressure, some weather fronts will bring some wetter, windy weather across the north, but we've still got some rain to clearfrom overnight across southern parts of england. that cloud could be very slow to break up, other parts of england, of wales seeing some sunshine, more cloud coming into scotland and northern ireland, wet and windy weather coming into the far north of scotland. temperatures could make double figures in scotland and northern ireland, but it's chilly 8—9 celsius for england and wales. that high pressure is not really dominating just yet. instead, we've got this weather front, an area of low pressure sliding down through the north sea. now, there's not

going to be much rain left on that weather front. it's a band of cloud, most of the rain dying out, we'll get a northerly wind following on behind, maybe a bit of sunshine coming back into scotland and some sunshine perhaps towards wales and the south west of england. probably quite a bit of cloud on friday, although it won't be quite as cold, those temperatures generally around 9—10 celsius. so we've got some wet weather around the middle part of the week, that's going to introduce something a little bit colder. but then with high pressure building through the rest of the month, looks like we're back into dry weather.

this is bbc news. i'm sally bundock, with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. defiance at the duma — vladimir putin defends his invasion of ukraine, saying his nation is at stake. a very different message in poland — president biden says moscow's lust for power and land would fail. the former isis bride shamima begum is to find out if she's won her appeal against being stripped of her british citizenship. and — nearly 60 years after his death, the family of malcolm x say they're going to sue the cia and fbi.