It was during the autumn of last year that Kalle Kniivilä went to Ukraine.
For three weeks, he met people in Kiev and Lviv and collected their stories for the book depicting Ukraine's thirty-year history of independence.
- Ukraine is not just war and conflict, I wanted to see the country from the inside and let the Ukrainians themselves tell about how they see their country, what has changed and in what way Ukraine has become different from Russia, says Kalle Kniivilä, journalist and author.
What do the people you met say?
- Everyone perceives it as "that now it is someone from outside who is coming and threatening to take our country, threatening our home, and it is the Russians who are going to leave here, not us", says Kalle Kniivilä.
The biggest driving force for the Ukrainians is to take back their country, says Kniivilä, and continues:
- What the war is really about is the very existence of Ukrainian identity.
What Russia and Putin want is to annihilate the Ukrainian identity, he says.
See the interview in the clip above.