24 February 2025 marked three years since the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has brought suffering to millions of people, with Russian forces committing war crimes and other violations of international humanitarian law. On this fateful day, Ukrainian writer and former president of PEN Ukraine Andrey Kurkov reflects on the impact of the war on Ukraine’s invaluable cultural heritage.
According to PEN Ukraine and partners, at least 186 cultural figures have been killed by Russian forces as of February 2025. Those killed included writers, translators, artists, musicians, photographers, and historians who played a key role in enriching and celebrating Ukraine’s culture and identity.
PEN International utterly condemns the violence unleashed by Russian forces against Ukraine and urges full justice and accountability.
Last works by Ukrainian writers
“My worst fears are coming true – I am inside a new Executed Renaissance,” wrote Victoria Amelina in the preface to the book I’m Transforming… Occupation Diary by the murdered Ukrainian poet Volodymyr Vakulenko. The book would not have appeared without Amelina. She was determined that Vakulenko’s voice would not be silenced.
After men in Russian military uniform took Vakulenko from his home in early March 2022, Victoria spent several months trying to discover his fate. Eventually, his body was found in an unmarked grave in the forest near the town of Izyum.
By that time, Amelina had dug up Vakulenko’s hand-written diary which he had buried under a cherry tree in his parents’ garden. She deciphered the text and prepared it for publication.
This diary formed the basis of the book and from it we learn about Vakulenko’s thoughts and feelings – what he worried about – while he and his son who has special needs lived under occupation. This was the last thing Vakulenko wrote in his life, his very last work.
Victoria Amelina’s book A Diary of War and Justice: Looking at Women Who Look at War was recently published simultaneously in the UK and France. This was Victoria’s last work. She did not even have time to finish it. She wrote it while searching for the body of Volodymyr Vakulenko. She was still writing it when she was mortally wounded by a Russian missile in Kramatorsk.
If not for the war – the Russian aggression – Vakulenko and Amelina could have written many more books.
Ukrainian culture is a major target
There is nothing more tragic than marking the anniversary of an ongoing war. An anniversary should be an occasion to sum up and reflect on results, but what are the results of this war?
They can be calculated in the hundreds of thousands of lost lives, in the endless destruction of people’s homes, gardens, vineyards, villages, cities, and the ruination of our forests, fields, factories and power plants.
The results of the war can also be calculated in the number of destroyed libraries, theatres, universities, schools, printing houses, film studios and museums.
During a war, the aggressor totally undermines the victims’ right to culture, to shelter, to life. Sometimes it seems that culture has become the aggressor’s main target – the victim they wish to hurt most because a nation’s culture sets it apart from other nations and simultaneously provides it with the motivation and strength to resist invasion.
It is precisely this function of culture – the preservation of identity – that has made Ukrainian culture a major target of aggression – and not for the first time.
Ukrainian artists were repressed under Stalin
As the war rages on, in universities and schools, Ukrainian youth study the tragic history of the writers and poets of the first ‘Executed Renaissance’: 250 young and active Ukrainian poets and writers who were detained by the Soviet authorities and then shot between 1937 and 1938.
The works that these murdered writers did not manage to write and publish remain in our minds as a kind of phantom of Ukrainian literature – cultural riches that we can only imagine.
In the same way, we imagine the phantom of Ukrainian architecture – hundreds of buildings that were never built because their potential creators were repressed. The phantom of Ukrainian fine art looms over us in the thousands of uncreated canvases of murdered artists.
This phantom element of Ukrainian culture grows larger with each day of the Russian aggression. Uncreated Ukrainian culture is beginning to outweigh created works as the list of cultural figures killed by Russian weapons grows longer – a list which now bears the names of more than 180 writers, musicians, artists, film directors and actors.
More than a thousand Ukrainian cultural sites have also been destroyed by the Russian army. But if there was a building, a painting or a monument, we may still have at least a photograph and the memory of what once existed.
The restoration of Ukrainian culture is needed
The destruction of Ukrainian cultural monuments has felt like an axe chopping away at my roots. I remember when a Russian missile hit the house-museum of Ukraine’s best-known naive artist, Maria Primachenko. I remember when another missile destroyed the museum of my favourite Ukrainian philosopher and poet, Grigory Skovoroda who was born near Kharkiv in 1722.
The ruins of the Mariupol theatre with people sheltering inside it – all destroyed by a huge bomb dropped from an airplane. Then there was the Odesa Cathedral, its roof split open to the sun’s rays by yet another missile.
It gradually became obvious that the bombs and missiles were not destroying historical buildings and their contents, they were trying to annihilate an entire culture. It has become clear that after the war, apart from the reconstruction of villages and towns, the restoration of culture will also be required. Ukrainian literature, music and cinema – they have all been bled dry by this war.
It pains me to write about this or even to think about it. This pain will remain. It will appear in the fabric of post-war Ukrainian culture.
Authors who survive will have to write books in lieu of their fallen colleagues as well as for themselves. We will all have to work much harder to fill, at least partially, the jagged empty spaces gouged into Ukrainian culture by Russia’s bombs and missiles over the last three years.
This article was first published in PEN International’s Newsletter on 24 February 2025 and is reproduced here with their kind permission.
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