Anna Reid

When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, he planned to capture Leningrad before turning on Moscow. Stubborn Soviet resistance forced him to change tactics: with his forward troops only thirty kilometres away, he decided to surround the city and starve it out. Over the next two and a half years, three quarters of a million Leningraders - almost a third of its civilian population - died o...

The Ukraine is one of the most neglected countries in the world. It has a population of 52 million - larger than Britain's - and a land mass the size of France; it also has Chernobyl and after Russia the largest nuclear power. The word "Ukraine" means "borderland" and for most of its history the lands that make up present-day Ukraine have been a collection of other countries' border regi...