The Arts of War
Ukrainian Artists Confront Russia
So many in the world of foreign affairs and military expertise miscalculated how the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine would play out. Like Vladimir Putin, they could only image Russia rolling over Ukraine in a matter of weeks. Once again, as has happened so many times throughout history, a smaller but spunky nation has held off far more powerful marauders. The experts simply did what experts do. Rather than consider spirit, the will to resist, and other intangibles, they counted what turned out to be under-maintained Russian tanks and under-provisioned Russian soldiers. They might have done better had they counted the number of Ukrainian hip-hop groups.
The world seemed taken aback when President Volodymyr Zelinsky quipped that he didn’t need a ride, he needed ammunition. Zelinsky spoke for millions of his compatriots. Ever since independence, Ukrainians—especially those too young to have memories of life in the Soviet Union—defined themselves through an increasingly vibrant cultural scene. The arts mattered.
Like many of my colleagues, I underestimated the Ukrainian will to resist. Having watched postindependence Ukrainian culture develop, I should have known better. Raucous anti-regime demonstrations at ballet performances, unending Ukrainian-language rock performances proclaiming freedom, and ever expanding Ukrainian literary and theater scenes offered signs of a deep-seated will to resist. Having at least a passing knowledge of these developments should have helped me appreciate how the war would be fought.
Before continuing, I need to make clear that none of the cultural developments chronicled here offset the unending traumas brutally imposed by Russia’s war on Ukraine. The hardships and horrific losses inflicted by the war will cast a long, tragic shadow over Ukraine for decades to come. The arts can’t win a war; they can and will shape the peace, however.
The stories contained in this volume trace Ukrainian artistic expression during the war’s third year. Collectively, they tell of resilience and the consolidation of a new Ukrainian culture. Events reviewed from the war’s first year revealed a powerful impulse for cultural survival and resistance to the Russian threat. These trends matured during the war’s second year, as the arts emerged as a powerful sign of Ukrainian resilience. The essays here speak of strengthening cultural expression. In other words, the arts have moved over the past three years from supporting survival to shouting resistance, from encouraging to securing a new cultural foundation.
Survival
Survival remained top of mind for the Ukrainian arts community, as for all Ukrainians, during the hours, days, and weeks following the 2022 Russian invasion. Cultural figures and institutions immediately set out to do what they could to help their country resist the invading Russians while the demands of war shut down prewar activities.
Theater and dance companies directed their costume departments to sew uniforms, camouflage netting, and first aid supplies. Puppet theaters set up programs to help traumatized children push aside their fears. Cultural institutions in western Ukraine welcomed counterparts fleeing from eastern Ukraine into their creative communities. Classical musicians in Kyiv and Kharkiv performed in metro stations converted into makeshift bomb shelters. Famous rock groups came together on YouTube to perform songs airing anger at the Russians; street artists took their spray cans out to add poignant patriotic murals to cityscapes. Artists in disparate genres discovered that they could play a role in helping Ukraine survive by being themselves.
Unprecedented international collaboration to save Ukrainian artistic achievements took shape in a matter of days. These joint international and Ukrainian partnerships supported a massive effort to move Ukraine’s cultural artifacts to safety. These programs have grown over the past three years into one of history’s largest cultural rescue missions.
The international theater community came together to launch the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings initiative, commissioning playwrights to write new works about the war. These commissions support the authors and, through translation projects, bring dozens of new Ukrainian plays to audiences around the world.
Universities established residences for Ukrainian writers; publishers in the West brought out dozens of new works in translation. Dance companies—such as the Dutch National Ballet Academy—invited Ukrainian dancers to join them during these early days, as did Budapest circus schools. Established Ukrainian rock singers, musicians, dancers, and opera stars toured Europe and North America at various times to raise money for the Ukrainian war effort at home.
These activities took flight with remarkable speed, enabling the arts in Ukraine to survive the opening salvos of war. There was little time to spare. Russian commanders understood that this was a war about culture as well as territory. Their troops savagely attacked and pillaged libraries, museums, art galleries, theaters, and concert halls wherever they went.
Resistance and Resilience
By summer 2022, the existential focus on survival transformed into a culture of resistance as both sides settled in for a long war of attrition. A vibrant club scene returned to Kyiv. The Lviv Organ Hall, taking advantage of its safer location further from the front, booked international touring classical musicians. The Lviv National Ballet staged full-length performances. Theaters and concert halls opened new seasons in accordance with regulations imposed by martial law (including limiting audiences to the size of a venue’s bomb shelter).
The 2022 holiday season marked a turning point, as puppet theaters in Kyiv and Lviv mounted special shows and holiday concerts in Kyiv and Odesa attracted enthusiastic audiences. Each new production represented a statement of defiance to the Russian invasion.
Writers and visual artists found ways to express their hostility to the Russians as well. Powerful wartime poems, short stories, novels, and films took shape. Professional and amateur artists converted the detritus of war left behind by the Russians into pieces of art. The reuse of captured Russian war wreckage reached an apogee of sorts in June 2023, when composer Roman Hryhoriv stepped onto the stage of St. Andrew’s Church, Kyiv’s Baroque jewel box, to perform his new concertino for MRLS BM-27 Uragan missile and chamber orchestra.
Some in the arts highlighted past and present-day achievements in defiance of President Putin’s declaration that there is no such thing as Ukrainian culture. Music enthusiasts, for example, created databases for classical and electronic music, offering aficionados one-stop shops to discover Ukrainian musicianship. Rock stars integrated traditional folk music and instruments into their shows. Ukrainian music in all its forms made its way onto Western concert stages, where it never had been before.
Major book, film, and theater festivals returned to Kyiv by the war’s second year, and art galleries around the country presented shows focused on Ukrainian themes. In Kharkiv, among the most punished frontline cities, enthusiasts found spaces tucked away in corners protected from direct attack to present art and photography exhibits.
Collectively and individually—as chronicled in my previous two collection of essays—Ukrainians proclaimed that they had a vibrant culture of their own. One that was thriving despite continuing Russian efforts to deny and destroy its accomplishments.
Strengthening
The artistic trends of the war’s third year chronicled here mark a further evolution of the Ukrainian cultural scene. If the arts focused on survival at war’s beginning and on resistance and resilience in the months beyond, these stories represent a consolidation of those achievements into a strengthened contemporary arts scene.
As the story about teenage playwrights working with New York theaters reveals, a generation of artists coming of age from the beginning of the war is making its presence felt. These newcomers are redefining several genres, ranging from rappers such as Skofka and poets such as Oksana Rubaniak to playwrights Taya Fedorenko and Uliana Klimchuk.
They can do so because new institutional arrangements, like Kyiv’s Film.UA studios and Lviv’s Jam Factory Art Center, are proving capable of supporting their work. Some already existing groups, such as Kharkiv’s Theatre na Zhukah (Theater on the Beetles) and Kyiv’s DVRZ Design Days, have broadened their focus to encourage greater cooperation within their artistic communities. As with Kyiv’s Theatre of Playwrights, the infrastructure supporting cultural creativity has deepened during the war.
International partners and funders, such as Germany’s Goethe Institute and the British Council, are part of the robust support for Ukrainian culture. Of perhaps greater significance is the fact that Ukrainian works are finding new champions. Ukrainian plays appear regularly on London and New York stages and have enjoyed success as far away as Buenos Aires and Hong Kong. Internationally renowned artists, such as Alexei Ratmansky in dance and Ruslana in music, have generated renewed interest in Ukrainian creativity. Ukraine’s cultural ecosystem stands ready to support a robust cultural scene once peace arrives.
Ukrainian artists are creating works worthy of continuation. Artistic organizations throughout Ukraine are supporting noteworthy projects. Lviv National Opera ballet company premiered an ambitious new work, Light from the Shadows, grounded in Mykhailo Kotsyubnytsky’s monumental folklore-based novel, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Catherine Penkova’s Legends of Kyiv, opening at the Theater of Drama and Comedy on the Left Bank, celebrated the capital’s long and distinguished history. Radu Poklitar’s outstanding Kyiv Modern-Ballet Theater has continued to produce stunning new works throughout the war. Dmytro Moiseev’s exquisite feature film Grey Bees, based on Andrey Kurlkov’s novel, similarly took shape despite the exigencies war. These works—and many more—are certain to remain part of the standard Ukrainian repertoire into the future.
The stories recorded here, from the third year of war, celebrate a creativity which transcends the necessity of survival, the desire to resist, and the ability to regenerate. This has been a year when the arts in Ukraine have demonstrated their capacity to deepen and extend their reach in new directions. It simultaneously has been a year of untold hardship, deep trauma, and shocking destruction throughout Ukraine and Ukrainian society.
If the arts offer a powerful counter-story to the ongoing combat, it is because, as Iulia Bentia and Pavlo Shopin report in their examination of wartime theater, art responds “to the new reality, participates in various ways in relevant public discussions that try to understand the drama of modern war, and creates a safe space for common emotional reliving a new tragic experience.” As these essays remind us, we should always include the arts in our thinking about the present; and the future.
Blair A. Ruble, The Arts of War: Ukrainian Artists Confront Russia. Year Three (Stuttgart/ New York: Ibidem Verlag and Columbia University Press, 2025), pp. 135-140
Blair A. Ruble is former Director of the Kennan Institute and currently serves as Secretary of the Kennan Institute board.