Captain Ukraine

Here's your Book Description - same copy-paste rules apply, tags and all: HE HAS BEEN HIDING FOR THIRTY-SIX YEARS. AT 4 A.M. ON THE TWENTY-FOURTH OF FEBRUARY, HE STOPS. Andriy Kovalenko was born two days after Chernobyl in a hospital in Kyiv his mother almost did not survive reaching. His parents fled west that autumn - to a third-floor apartment on Chicago Avenue, to a Greek Catholic cathedral, to a quiet life as a paramedic on Box 14, to the small careful invisibility of a man who can lift a Toyota off a woman's femur and would rather his partner not have to look. Then Russian armor crosses the Ukrainian border, and Andriy decides he is, at last, going home. In a town called Berestovo on the morning of April 14, 2022, a journalist with a phone records sixty-two seconds of footage that ends Andriy's life as a secret. Within hours he is on every screen on Earth - the man in the sunflower-yellow suit and the deep-blue cape, the Ukrainian flag on his chest, walking out of the smoke of a tank shell as if he had taken nothing more than a step. A Twitter account in Kyiv gives him a name. He embraces it before the smoke has cleared. But the war is bigger than a video, and invulnerability, Andriy will learn, is not a power. It is a debt - paid by the people standing on his left and his right when he moves. By a Ukrainian sergeant who was a baker in February. By a paramedic in Chicago who has been watering his houseplant for fourteen days. By a woman in Lviv whose mother was a music teacher in Mariupol and who cannot, yet, fall in love with a flag. And four kilometers from the agricultural complex outside Pidlissya, on a barn roof, a Russian major in an unmarked dark uniform watches everything through a thermal scope, files a report to a man in Moscow named Reznik, and writes…