The leading historian of conflict says the atrocities in Ukraine are rooted in a uniquely brutal mindset that can be traced back centuries

Antony Beevor photographed for The Telegraph at his home in London this week Credit: Heathcliff O’Malley

David Blair Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator

Nov 30, 2025

To write about 20th-century warfare is to describe the heights of folly, pitilessness and tragedy. Sir Antony Beevor has been doing exactly that for the last four decades, immersing himself in some of the greatest calamities of all time: the Battle of Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin, the Russian civil war.

So as I go to meet one of Britain’s leading historians of war (he dislikes the term “military historian” because it neglects the ordeal of civilians in conflict) I am struck by how one country – Russia – has dominated so much of Beevor’s work.

That country is now waging Europe’s bloodiest war for 80 years, striving to subjugate Ukraine at unconscionable cost. On the day I meet Beevor, Vladimir Putin declares that he is “ready” to “keep on fighting until the last Ukrainian dies”, exposing his willingness to kill millions out of zest for conquest and the likely futility of Donald Trump’s efforts to end the bloodshed.

Beevor greets me with easy friendliness at the entrance of his elegant flat on the top two floors of a white 19th-century townhouse, beside a Pimlico garden square.

As he retreats into a small kitchen to make me a cup of tea, he explains how he has just returned from a conference in Oslo where Russia’s ambitions were the main subject of conversation. His London home provides an oddly tranquil setting for the grim subject I have in mind (his house in the Kent countryside near Canterbury would doubtless be still more idyllic and incongruous).

In Beevor’s living room, an exquisite Greek Orthodox icon of the Virgin and the Saviour hangs above the fireplace, and it opens onto two balconies with garden chairs looking out over the skyline. He moved here with his wife and fellow author, Artemis Cooper, during the pandemic in 2020 as they downsized from a house in Fulham. If she is in, I do not meet her.

Beevor, who turns 79 on December 14, speaks in clipped military tones and wears grey flannels and a blue blazer, looking and sounding just like the retired army officer he is. He takes an armchair beneath a gallery of pictures of slender birds. As the dusk falls over the rooftops, we turn to the European tragedy just four hours’ flying time away.

I begin by asking how much of a help history really is when it comes to understanding today’s crisis. “History is never a predictive mechanism,” replies Beevor. “Churchill actually was wrong when he said, ‘To understand the future we have to read about the past’. I’m afraid that was a little bit too glib.”

But history can explain the present. “It’s terribly important on the question of Russia and where the sheer brutality of the Russian army comes from,” he says.

“Some will argue that it goes back to the 13th century and the Mongol invasions. But then one has to remember how appalling the Thirty Years’ War [1618 to 1648] was in Europe, the difference being that we had the Enlightenment – and the Enlightenment actually had an effect. And then, in the 19th century, there was an attempt to, shall we say, civilise warfare with the [creation of the] Red Cross and attitudes like that.”

“With the Russians, the attitude has always been that conspicuous cruelty is a necessary weapon of war – and we’re seeing this in Ukraine.”

Those words strike me to the bone. Russian atrocities are not incidental or the work of malign individuals or even units; they are inherent in how Russia fights and has always fought.

It suddenly becomes clearer why Russian soldiers have pillaged and terrorised just about every Ukrainian town and village they have ever captured, murdering the men, raping the women and kidnapping the children. The mass graves in the Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin and the piteous list of 19,500 missing Ukrainian children show what it really means to be invaded by Russia.

Putin’s soldiers, adds Beevor, have often been brutalised by the “appalling” treatment they have suffered from their own comrades. While in Russia in the 1990s, researching his book on Stalingrad, he remembers learning how “there were up to 5,000 suicides a year amongst the recruits called up for military service – and Russian generals thought that was funny”.

Russian conscripts, then and now, kill themselves because they are not merely bullied but relentlessly persecuted and tortured by their fellow soldiers. And their generals frequently approve of what is, in effect, a hallowed tradition of tormenting newcomers.

Beevor heard from a diplomat about one Russian general who had a “favourite dining-out story”, describing how so many of his conscripts in Siberia were dying by suicide that he would make new arrivals dig rows of graves, since they would surely need them before long. The general’s punchline was: “And do you know – half of them deserted!”

Beevor continues: “The brutality with which [Russian] soldiers are treated produces what can only be described as a knock-on theory of oppression. Because they’ve been oppressed and treated badly, they then take it out, as we saw in 1945, on Polish women, Hungarian women and, above all, German women – and we’re seeing it again with Ukrainian women and with Ukrainian prisoners of war.”

In Berlin: the Downfall 1945, Beevor described how Russian soldiers would gang rape not just German women but the starving and emaciated survivors of concentration camps and slave-labour factories. “The Red Army soldiers were so out of control they were even raping the Russian women and Jewish women and Ukrainian women and girls who had been sent back to Germany for slave labour,” says Beevor.

Does he believe the Russians think there is something legitimate about cruelty in warfare? “They don’t give a damn about legitimacy, to be perfectly honest,” replies Beevor, with a hint of incredulity. “As far as they’re concerned, their phrase is, ‘Nobody judges a victor’.

“And that is very much their attitude, for example, in Ukraine: the massacres in Buchaand elsewhere were horrific. That may have also been propelled by anger and bitterness as they suddenly realised that they weren’t winning and having a walkover as they expected.”

I wonder out loud whether the invader’s moment of maximum cruelty is when the assault plan starts to go awry. “Yes, that’s very interesting,” says Beevor, noting how the Holocaust escalated from the use of mass shootings to gas chambers in 1942, which was the “time when the Nazis suddenly realised that they weren’t going to beat the Soviet Union”.

Beevor, one of three brothers, was himself born into a family shaped by conflict. His father, John, was a solicitor who served with the Special Operations Executive during the war. His mother, Kinta, grew up in a 16th-century castle in Italy, harvesting olives and grapes, meeting DH Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, who came to see her father, an artist, and her mother, a writer. At the age of 82, Kinta Beevor described her idyllic upbringing in A Tuscan Childhood, her only book.

If Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, had got his way, she may never have written this book and Beevor would probably not exist. As a naval intelligence officer, Fleming hatched a plan to parachute Kinta into Mussolini’s Italy in 1940 to spy on a naval base. Fortunately this operation never went ahead because Kinta happened to be pregnant with Beevor’s elder brother.

Between the ages of four and seven, Beevor suffered from Perthes disease, a childhood bone condition, which forced him to use crutches. “As a result, at [prep] school I was bullied,” he remembers, without a hint of emotion.

Next came Winchester and then Sandhurst where he studied under the renowned military historian – and later Telegraph defence correspondent – John Keegan. He then served as a cavalry officer in the 11th Hussars, which he loved, until defence cuts caused his regiment to be amalgamated with another in 1969.

He left the Army the following year and, despite having failed both English and History at A-level, took up writing in what he describes as the “innocence and arrogance of youth”.

Beevor is extremely modest about his early efforts. He began his career as an author by writing political thrillers in the 1970s, two of which were never published (“thank God!”) and three of which were, though he declines to reveal their titles (“I don’t want anyone looking them up on the internet”).

Even so, he describes this as “the start – and it started to get a bit compulsive”. It was his publisher who saw that he was a gifted writer, but fiction was not his strength, and proposed that he use his military background by venturing into history.

Beevor began with The Spanish Civil War, published in 1982, taking advantage of the fact that memories of this conflict were so painful and divisive that only a foreign historian could write the story objectively. Then came Inside the British Army, a portrait of the contemporary Army, published in 1990, and Crete 1941, an account of the capture of the island by German paratroopers.

Beevor achieved his breakthrough when he was commissioned to write a history of the Battle of Stalingrad at exactly the moment, in the 1990s, when Russia’s archives were being opened to foreign historians. “Timing is everything: I was just bloody lucky in timing,” he says.

In total, his books have sold nine million copies and been translated into 37 languages. Does Beevor share draft manuscripts with his wife? “Oh God yes!” he says instantly. “Artemis and I check each other, quite often just in an email, to know how someone else might react. We go through everything that the other has written.”

He married Artemis, the granddaughter of the politician, diplomat and diarist Duff Cooper, in 1986 and they have a son, Adam, and a daughter, Nella. There are no grandchildren but, in Beevor’s phrase, a “grand cat”.

Beevor once sent a draft to his late father-in-law, the historian John Julius Norwich. “There was rather a purple passage where I said, ‘One is tempted to compare something with something else’ and in the margin he had written, ‘This temptation should be firmly resisted’. And, of course, he was absolutely right.”

Beevor refers often and warmly to his Russian researcher, Lyuba Vinogradova, who also worked on Berlin: the Downfall and Russia: Revolution and Civil War. Today, the Russian archives are closed again and Beevor is banned from the country. Vinogradova lives in Cardiff, unable to return to Russia because she has a family connection with Boris Nemtsov, an opposition leader who suffered the customary fate of those who cross Putin when he was murdered in Moscow in 2015.

But Beevor will be returning to a quintessentially Russian theme with his next book, Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs, to be published in March. It focusses on how Grigori Rasputin, born in poverty and obscurity in Siberia, came to wield an extraordinary and utterly ruinous influence over Tsar Nicholas II – and, most notoriously, his wife.

He is fascinated by how someone born in a peasant village could have done so much to “bring down the greatest autocracy in the world”. Above all, the Tsar’s authority was weakened by rumours that Rasputin had inveigled his way into the bed of the Empress. “It was the fake news of that time,” says Beevor. “I think historians have always underestimated the importance of rumour.”

What people think today is increasingly influenced by artificial intelligence. When I ask Beevor if he would ever use AI for research, he recoils as if I had tossed a dead herring into his lap. “Certainly not!” he says emphatically. “I wouldn’t touch AI. I think it’s simply terrifying.” Beevor refuses even to use the internet for any research, except the simplest fact-checking. For him, historical inquiry must always mean reading original physical documents in archives. While writing Stalingrad, he spent months at a time in archives in Russia and Germany, a normal routine for his books.

However, just as Putin launched his onslaught against Ukraine in February 2022, Beevor was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a bone marrow cancer. Though no physical effects are visible, he has been undergoing chemotherapy.

“In many ways, things are a bit better because I’m now only on it once every four weeks as opposed to every single week,” he says. “But it does knock you back a bit. [In] the earlier stage, when you’re on thalidomide, you feel like roadkill. On the whole, things seem to be quite a bit better. But it’s going to be up and down and they may, I hope, let me off next spring for a month or two.”

He speaks in matter-of-fact tones with the sort of iron emotional control that must be necessary when you have spent years in archives reading of atrocity and catastrophe.

At some point the Ukraine war must end and hundreds of thousands of brutalised Russian soldiers will have to be demobilised. What will happen in Russia when the rapists, murderers and looters return home? “We’ve already been hearing anecdotal evidence of appalling crimes being committed,” replies Beevor. “One also has to remember that some of them were criminals in the first place and when they come back, even more embittered and all the rest of it, you can imagine.”

Once again, he dwells on Russia’s inhumanity towards its own forces. The high command has placed crematoria in Ukraine to avoid the trouble of burying their own dead or repatriating corpses. Putin has replaced his losses partly by the simple device of emptying Russia’s jails and forming convicts into “punishment” units to clear mines or launch suicidal attacks.

That tactic has echoes of the past. “They’ve certainly been using the idea of punishment battalions that Stalin actually copied from the Germans,” says Beevor.

Russia has probably suffered one million casualties so far: 250,000 dead and 750,000 wounded, according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. Yet, despite this colossal human cost, Putin remains bent on conquest.

Trump is about to send envoys to Moscow and he might yet join hands with Putin to impose a Russia-friendly settlement on Ukraine, rewarding aggression and risking another war.

How far might Putin go? “Nobody really knows what’s going on inside Putin’s head,” replies Beevor. “Is it a legacy element? Does he know that he might be dying and that he wants to do as much as he can to restore the Russian empire? There’s so much speculation about his state of health.”

He adds: “I think that Putin is desperate to get more territory back and this is why he wants to make sure that Ukraine is not going to be in a position to fight back, which is why he wants to reduce the size of the Ukrainian army and [force them to] give up key positions in the Donbas.”

Beevor predicts that Putin will press on with tormenting Ukraine regardless of any peace agreement. “He will certainly want to continue the war. Even if there is some form of ceasefire or peace negotiation, he will break that and blame it on Ukraine and the Europeans, and once again count on Trump wanting to be proved a peacemaker.”

“And Trump will agree with Putin that it’s the fault of Ukraine somehow, even when the evidence points in a totally different direction. So I don’t see the possibility of real peace.”

Beevor points to the ideologues on the fringes of Putin’s court – notably Alexander Dugin, a mystic and nationalist, and Vladimir Medinsky, a former culture minister – who believe in Russia’s right to rule the entire Eurasian landmass from Vladivostok to Dublin.

No-one can tell how far Putin agrees with them. But supposing he achieves what he considers to be victory in Ukraine, will there be another target? “I think that is distinctly likely,” replies Beevor. “I don’t think it’ll be Poland because the Poles really have re-armed and are effective. No, definitely his next move would be against the Baltic states.”

Beevor is instinctively wary of historical parallels, yet there is one that he will allow – and it should, I think, be carved in marble in every Western foreign ministry. “The British and the French could not believe, after the First World War, that anybody would be stupid enough to want another war. That’s why they underestimated Hitler and how far he was likely to go,” he says.

“We’ve seen a similar thing in the 2000s, with Angela Merkel and, to a certain degree, others. Nobody believed that anyone would want to have another ground war on the European landmass again.” But “we should have realised”, says Beevor, that under Putin the “sheer brutality of the Russian way of war could well be reapplied on the European landmass”.

Antony Beevor will be speaking about his new book ‘Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs’ at the Oxford Literary Festival in partnership with The Telegraph on March 25. Tickets: oxfordliteraryfestival.org; Telegraph readers can save 20 per cent with the code 26TEL20