Introduction: Reflections from 2022

“Chess is war over the board. The object is to crush the opponent’s mind.” –Bobby Fisher

Clambering around the bombed ruins and smoking carcasses of Russian tanks in Lukyanivka, UN officials and global media reporters are trying to make sense of Russia’s “four-day special military operation” in Ukraine.

The history of wars in Ukraine is (sort of) like the playing of a chess game. Queens invade and knights defend. Pawns are sacrificed and Bishops swoop like black ravens over the fields of the dead. Kings plot and mutter in their castles, while enemies besiege their walls. The great difference is that in wars, the victors take away with them parts of the chess board itself, and assemble their own patch-worked boards for others to challenge them on.

The world watches on anxiously. Is this the start of World War III? Why are the Russians fighting to gain control of Ukraine, and why are Ukrainians fighting to keep control? Nobody wants things taken from them by force, as any mugging victim can tell you. But what is the value of this small region to Russia?

The journalist’s task is reporting events as they unfold. As I’ve gone along, though, I have become more and more captivated by that elusive “why” question. It’s easy to photograph and describe a burned out tank that is still glowing hot—it’s much harder to explain why it got here.

Once you ask the why question, you have to go digging for answers. Over the last 30 years or so, I have honed my investigative skills in both the present and the past. This book is my attempt to break into the vault of history and find the explanations that you need to understand why Vladimir Putin is now sending his ill-fated tanks to their fiery doom around Kyiv. I hope to weave a story, like the Bayeux Tapestry, but telling a narrative of a longer series of invasions and wars. If you follow me on this raid into the past, you will emerge with a heightened awareness of the dynamics of this little patch of land that armies have fought over across the millennia.

Pawn to king’s fourth. Our game starts, strangely, with Viking longboats.