Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Saka.

My guest was raised and educated in Ukraine when it was one of the constituent parts of the Soviet Union.

One of Sury-Ploughy's formative experiences was living through the fear that gripped his community

when a blast at the Chernobyl nuclear plant spread dangerous

levels of radioactive dust across northern Ukraine. Ploughy was a gifted student. In 1991, as the

Soviet Union was in its death throes, he went to study in North America, and he never came back.

For the past two decades, he's been at Harvard

University, a professor of history specializing in the complex past of Ukraine, Russia, and the

Soviet Union. And, perhaps influenced by that early experience in Chernobyl, his most recent book

focuses on nuclear power and the dangers that have accompanied

humanity's efforts to harness the atom for both military and civilian use. Now, of course,

he's watching his former homeland attempt to defy Vladimir Putin's invasion force. He's also

been listening to the concerted Russian effort to rewrite

history, to undermine the legitimacy of Ukrainian identity and nationhood. So how does a historian most

effectively fight back when the past is weaponized? Well, Serti Plohi joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you for having me.

You are a Harvard historian. You've lived in the United States for a long time, and yet you were raised

inside Ukraine. So is it possible for you to bring a dispassionate historian's eye to what is

happening in Ukraine right now, or is it far too

personal?

That's what I'm trying to do, to bring this dispassionate analysis and help understanding of what

is going on from the historical perspective. But it's extremely close to home in personal terms and in terms also

of the kind of history that I study and studied and wrote about. Never I thought that it would

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