Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today is an historian

whose desire to make sense of the past has been inspired by painful personal experience.

Olesia Kramachuk was born in Leviv, Western Ukraine, in the dying days of the Soviet Union.

She witnessed the birth of an independent Ukraine and exploited

the newfound freedom to pursue her studies abroad, choosing to focus on the complex history of

Eastern Europe. In 2014, Olesia watched from London as Vladimir Putin responded to the

Maidan Revolution in Kiev by annexing Crimea and installing pro-Moscow proxies in the eastern

Donbass. And so began a war which had already cost 14,000 Ukrainian lives before Russia's all-out

invasion launched a year ago.

Now, back in 2014, the West directed words of condemnation towards Moscow, but did little else.

Putin's Russia remained a key economic partner.

Olesia's older brother, Volodya, volunteered to fight on Ukraine's Donbass Front Line, and he was killed in action in 2017. Out of the pain and grief,

she resolved to tell the world about her brother and Ukraine's struggle for freedom. She wrote a play,

then a book, weaving personal stories together with the context and history. And then came February 24, 2022, a full-scale Russian invasion,

the existential threat to Ukraine made real. In the year since, the world has seen the strength

of Ukraine's will to resist. Western nations have pledged to help with money and weapons.

But even now, do Ukraine's allies understand really what is at stake

in this war? Well, Alessia Krametschuk joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk. 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?

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