A short but moving account of the resistance of the people of Voznesensk to Putin’s unthinkable invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The town occupies a key strategic location on two rivers between Crimea and Kyiv, and its residents knew that. Ordinary people fought alongside the Ukrainian army’s 180th brigade to stop Russia’s drive to the center of the country and they successfully held the Russians off. Harding’s account, pieced together later through interviews with the town’s defenders, recreates the disorientation of defending against Russian combatants brainwashed to believe they are rescuing the Ukrainian people from the “nazis” who govern them. He manages to condense decades of Russian and Ukrainian history into a manageable narrative that becomes a microcosm of defiance in a war that threatens to drag on, despite the heroism of the Ukrainian people. Even as they resist, they are also “becoming haunted by the notion that this conflict may never end, and by the fear that Russia’s capacity to absorb suffering and its unflinching willingness to continue inflicting it, will eventually enable [Russia] to grind out some kind of victory” (134).