You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. Today I'm talking to my colleague James Meek, a contributing editor at the LRP, who reported from Kiev for the Guardian in the early 1990s, and was for many years that paper's Moscow correspondent.

He also reported from Afghanistan and Iraq, when the United States and his allies, including

in the UK, invaded those countries. And his most recent book is a novel, To Calais in ordinary

time. He returned to Kiev the week before the Russian invasion

of Ukraine last week and wrote a series of posts from there for the LRB blog. In January, he wrote a piece

for the LRB on Vladimir Putin's relations with his neighbours, in which he asked what might a new

invasion of Ukraine by Russia look like. We now know the beginning of the answer to that question.

We're speaking on the morning of Tuesday, 1st of March, six days into the war, as a huge

Russian convoy is said to be approaching Kiev. Hello, James, and thank you for talking with me.

Hi. I said just now that it's six days into the war, but from one point of view, what's happening

now is the escalation

of a walk that's been going on for more than seven years now?

Yes, that's right. It began, of course, with, well, you can always go back further in time

to find a beginning of things. But I suppose you could say the starting point was a disagreement, a very sharp

disagreement within Ukraine between those people who valued closer ties with the European Union

and those people who felt with very much with Russia's

encouragement that any closer ties with the European Union would be hostile towards Russia

and meant that Ukraine would have to renounce its ties with with Russia this sort of zero-sum game approach of Putin's,

which was not really based in reality, but based in Russia's particular exclusive, exclusionary

politics. So the tension began to ratchet up in 2013 when the then Ukrainian president

generally seen as a sort of Russian stooge and an extremely corrupt individual, Viktor Yanukovych.

He for many, many months, insisted that he was going to go ahead with a closer partnership with the European Union.

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