Large men in military-style clothes (colour: dirty olive), with toys hanging from their military-style rucksacks: an elephant, a hello kitty, a capybara. Those little people who have given the men those tokens of hope, where are they now? In Warsaw, unlearning their mother tongue? In Kharkiv, under bombardment?

On the way from the city of Dnipro to Zaporizhzhia, clouds and stormy weather dissolve. It’s the south, it’s mid-June, the days are long, and the crops mature steadily under this unapologetic sun. We spot the islands of tender poppies in the fields. Along the highway, there are friendly bus stops decorated with mosaics: flowers, summer fields, and even Zaporizhzhian Cossacks (once). We are driving homeward.

Warding my home is a military checkpoint protected with anti-drone netting. For a skilful drone pilot, diving into this net tunnel is no big deal. Our car is waved in by the servicemen — tenderness, tiredness, strength.

The billboards in Zaporizhzhia feature military recruitment campaigns and advertisements of the coming-soon event with the matriarch of Ukrainian literature. We drink coffee next to the philharmonic. My former home is to the right. I don’t go to look into my former windows this time, not up for a heartbreak. Instead, I take K. for a walk in the socialist city, the 1930s constructivist neighbourhood where time has thickened and refused to move forward. It would provide a suitable setting for Kira Muratova’s film, with half-mad characters emerging in cracked windows, cats hiding behind the columns of a terraced C-shaped building. Parked pickup trucks with roof-mounted electronic warfare are the only new addition.

We take a taxi to the right bank of the Dnipro. We walk to Khortytsia, first glimpsing the island from the arch bridge. On 6 June 2023, Russians blew up the Kakhovka dam downstream, and countless lives were lost to the flood. Water receded from under the Zaporizhzhia hydroelectric power station, or DniproHES, exposing the legendary Dnipro rapids.

I grew up by the Dnipro which had already been transformed by the Soviet industrialisation. The Dnipro of my childhood is the river shackled by the cascade of the hydroelectric power stations, the river made to overflow and flood its historic banks. The river whose might was exploited to power the Soviet project. Magnificent, mine. I loved it.

For the first time, I encounter the river more reminiscent of what it once had been, before the dams. It appears shallow now. The new banks are overgrown with willows. Flocks of birds nest on the rocks.

We sit on the rocks too, me in red, K in white, our pale, defenceless faces absorbing the sun. It burns. The hum of drones and explosions is a constant, as is the melody of steppe wind and the buzzing of insects in high grass.

We absorb the alien landscape. One thing about it is unchanged: it spells freedom, as it always used to.

PS: My snapshots can’t convey the brutality of the Soviet relationship with nature imprinted on the DniproHES; the overwhelming power of Khortytsia over those of us who’ve grown up climbing Scythian sculptures all over the island; the loss of the landscape that was the one home we knew, and the humility in the face of its ongoing transformations; the grief, always grief in its evolving forms, turning into love and duty and vengeance and into grief again — our perpetual engine and the new home we found at the end of the world.

PPS: I write a lot about Zaporizhzhia and people who have defended it in Apocalypse Baroque: Tales from Ukraine at War. Hopefully, in a more structured manner.

But there was more: the natural backdrop that moved into the foreground of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings was striking and completely out of this world. The botanical precision of Ophelia I perceived as a fantasy, as I had never encountered this emerald tinge of vegetation. The dramatic light in Our English Coasts or The Blind Girl seemed fairy-tale-like, almost cartoonish, an obvious exaggeration loaded with religious symbolism.

On my second day in the UK, I rushed to the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at Tate and revelled in the artistry and artifice of those paintings. On the third day, I started to look around. It struck me very soon that the greenery of London’s parks had an intense emerald tinge; the light over the Thames was often overdramatic.

During my year-long MA in Victorian Studies, I confirmed that the Pre-Raphaelites invented nothing. What appeared from afar like a crafty fabrication turned out to be a window onto the specific qualities of a landscape and a specific national sense of place. It is a construct, no doubt, as Bourdieu has helpfully taught us, but it is no less rooted in physical reality, in the natural environment.

When INDEX came to the Poltava region last weekend, there was a sudden realisation that the Ukrainian Romantics invented nothing, too. They wrote the national landscape into existence, but the national landscape also wrote them. In the bucolic village of Opishnya, we were immersed in Taras Shevchenko’s imagery, the lines which pretty much everyone in Ukraine knows by heart: ‘A cherry orchard by the house. / Above the cherries beetles hum. / The plowmen plow the fertile ground…’ etc., etc.

There it was, the vast expanse of hills and fields, dotted with ponds and the textbook cherry orchards, that blossoming, rich, fertile land, the quintessential image of Leftbank Ukraine.

‘Sorry to hit a sour note,’ a friend said as we were taking in the view. ‘I’m thinking about the Holodomor. When you see these fields, it is impossible to imagine that this soil would not yield a harvest and feed those who work on it. The famine here could only be mandame.’

Here, the abstract knowledge enters your body, and it’s visceral. The perversity of whole villages starving to death on the most fertile soil of the continent. This was the land most affected by Stalin’s man-made famine, which took millions of Ukrainian peasants’ lives in the 1930s. This was the land Hitler eyed as Lebensraum for his race.

My friend and I kept quiet. Sheep were grazing nearby.

I was thinking about the black-earth lands to the east and south that were being mined, burnt, flooded, and blanketed with plastic from fibre-optic drones.

Then I heard the distant sound of air defence at work. Sound travels far across the vast fields of Leftbank Ukraine.

We have assembled stellar contributions:

- illuminating conversation with Serhii Plokhy on Chornobyl’s role in Ukrainian politics, current nuclear challenges for international security and law

- eye-opening perspective on Soviet nuclear programme and its punitive aspects by Orysia Kulick

- essay on Polish political mobilisation in response to Chornobyl by Kacper Szulecki

- personal piece by Yaryna Grusha on the ‘Chornobyl children’ and how the disaster shaped their life trajectories

- rich conceptual essay on Chornobyl as a hyper event by Adrian Ivakhiv

Yana Kononova’s haunting collages of the industrial sites, bridges, and landscapes of Zaporizhzhia draw a visual parallel between past and present colonial violence as the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant remains occupied by Russia.

I’m convinced this issue will become essential reading for anyone trying to understand not just what happened forty years ago, but why Europe’s security depends on grasping these patterns now.

None of this would exist without the exceptional work of our managing editor , whose precision and dedication are powering the journal, and proofreader Anna Lordan, whose care and attention strengthened every page.

Access the issue here: https://www.londonukrainianreview.org/

Print copies will be distributed in London on 1 April at the event 40 years on: Chornobyl’s legacy and European environmental security (hope to see some of you there, I’ll be chairing).

Do also subscribe to - the journal’s monthly newsletter - to get regular updates on Ukrainian culture.

I have also published a couple of articles in the past few months which might be of interest:

• An op-ed in The Guardian for the anniversary of the full-scale invasion.

• ‘Queer Belonging and Ukraine’ in the Arrowsmith

• A piece in Ukrainian for PEN Ukraine’s focus theme ‘To be in the world’, published by Suspilne Culture

Last but not least, this has happened: Extraordinary Books announced my book, Apocalypse Baroque (due in September). I’ll keep you posted (cool face emoji).

In its fifth season, the podcast revisits the speakers of its early 2022 episodes to see what almost four years of the full-scale war did to them hehe (coughs). I was privileged to be among six Ukrainians invited to reflect on their trajectories and choices.

It’s a podcast produced with passion and care. Val and Maks created a space where I could ruminate on those things that actually mattered for me personally, like INDEX and writing. You can listen to our conversation on Spotify or the Ukrainska Pravda website. Below are some of the quotes the Ukrainian Spaces team picked for our episode.

And thanks for being here, for reading and listening. Hope you are with your loved ones on the longest night of the year.

This scene must inspire awe in the outsiders. It illustrates the sheer incomprehensibility of living through war for a decade and a half.

Yet, amidst the explosions, I was also arguing with my friend whose emotions I misconstrued. This aspect of my afternoon must seem familiar to anyone anywhere on planet Earth. We cried and hugged and went for a glass of wine.

There’s this funny feeling lingering over my conversations with the most sympathetic external observers of our war: as Victoria Amelina put in her last book, Ukrainians became war for the outsiders, yes; heroes or victims or something in between, our humanity disappeared from the radar.

We are war: nightly attacks on our cities, fear for our loved ones on the front, endless grief, bottomless guilt, forever fury. High-pitched existential shit, tragic, unasked for. With this part of the Ukrainian existence most outsiders are comfortable thanks to its profound strangeness, its inapplicability to the world of small or large grievances of people living in peace.

However, Ukrainians have not got a warcation from those day-to-day experiences bougie western writers and film makers like to agonise over. We are war, but we are also office workers, lovers, and caretakers; we get divorced; receive bad news from the hospital; raise children; support friends struggling with addictions; watch our parents wither.

When drones start attacking the cities of today’s war-siders, they will still have to deal with the everyday mess that makes up their very human lives; the mess which now prevents them from paying attention to Russia’s genocide in Ukraine. But on top of remaining a messy human, they will become war and deal with that as well.

Apart from that, during the next thirty days, INDEX is running a closed ceremony for this year’s Victoria Amelina Fellowship and the presentation of a German-Ukrainian Society with Franziska Davies, opens the new cycle of the Veteran Fellowship and the exhibition of the illustrator Mykola Leonovych who is currently missing in action, participates in a dozen partner initiatives, supports the work of current fellows and residents, and designs new programmes for 2026 (you can read more in our newsletter). In addition to leading this feisty institution and managing its tiny team of four brilliant women and one adorable dog, I fundraise to keep INDEX afloat, edit the new issue of the London Ukrainian Review, travel between Kyiv and Lviv, and go on advocacy trips abroad.

This activity notwithstanding, I’m sometimes introduced as a writer (genuine thanks to everyone who remembers me as a woman of letters, not spreadsheets). Indeed, writing is the engine of my life.

How do I find time to write?

My friend, a brilliant author and editor Mariia Shuvalova has found it for me. For about six months, she has been organising one-hour online writing sessions in the morning for her friends. As Mariia knows too well from her own experience, these women are too busy saving the world to find time for the one practice that fills their life with meaning. She has gently persuaded us that we can afford one hour of writing on a weekday.

Mariia knows what she is doing. Peer pressure works. Planning works. Mariia magic works. Our survivors’ guilt can be put on pause for an hour. Thanks to these sessions in no small part, I have finished my creative nonfiction book, Scheherezade Goes to Izium: Tales from Ukraine.

We thought that this magic should work for the many, not the few. So, we are opening up bimonthly writing sessions on YouTube. The first one is scheduled for Monday, 8 September. Join us and write, now.

The two Ukrainians pause by the grave of Leonid Kravchuk, the first president of Ukraine, now most often remembered for giving away the country’s nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees from the US, the UK, and Russia.

‘How could you, Leonid?’, the friends chuckle bitterly.

One way to be buried in Baikove Cemetery is to bribe the city authorities, preemptively or posthumously, via designated persons; another way is to make an outstanding and indisputable contribution to the political nation of Ukraine.

The two Ukrainians are visiting the fresh graves of Viktoriia Roshchyna (journalist born in Zaporizhzhia in 1996, tortured to death in Russian captivity in Taganrog 27 years later) and David Chichkan (anarchist artist born in Kyiv in 1986, killed while defending Ukraine in the Zaporizhzhia region 39 years later).

Would you like to be buried in a place where you were born or in a place you died fighting for? Is there a place you have fought for? Have you ever fought in your life? Why?

When considering one’s burial ground, it is only natural to think of one’s ancestral home. What if this place has been occupied or lies dangerously close to the creeping frontline?

It is wise too to think of those who will be coming to the grave for solace. Today in Ukraine, one is often survived not only by one’s friends and life partners but also by one’s parents. What if one’s parents, friends, and loved ones have all been displaced by the war and ended up thousands of kilometres apart?

Where would you like your body to be buried so that your soul ultimately finds peace? What if there is no body left to bury? What if there is no place left for peace?

**

The day after visiting Baikove Cemetery, I travel to my parents’ home in Zaporizhzhia, where my parents no longer live. In a different life, I would have loved to be buried in the city where I was born and grew up. In this life, there’s nothing left for me in Zaporizhzhia.

Except for the river, which taught me to swim. After the Russians destroyed the Kakhovka dam downstream, the Dnipro has receded, revealing its rapids and banks, uncannily wide, covered with young, tender greenery.

Except for the air that no longer shimmers with the chemical exhaust from dozens plants that have been put to rest by the war. This new air smells of summer, steppe, and water.

Except for the city that has so much sky in it. The fast arrows of its wide, straight, uncluttered streets have made me hungry for movement, unafraid of stepping forward.

Except for the horizon that is boundless, expansive, and free.

Except for the mural David Chichkan helped create next to the Zaporizhzhia railway station. It shows the exit fire blooming at the end of a rocket launcher’s tube. The artist signed it ‘a flower for the occupier’.

There might be no peace left for us in this life, but there are things worse than the absence of peace. Having nothing to fight for is one such thing.

We have been blessed with a great many things worth defending.

In June, Russia launched a record-breaking 5337 kamikaze drones against Ukraine, resulting in hundreds of civilian casualties. Below you can see what a kamikaze drone looks like. Despite Russia’s escalating attacks, the U.S. has decided to halt shipments of Patriot missiles and other weapons to Kyiv.

Being Ukrainian feels lonely most of the time.

Being Ukrainian also feels maddening.

While the rest of the world has successfully moved on from taking note of a genocide perpetrated against your people, you can’t help but take note of a certain trouble about to hit the rest of the world. Pointing to the black cloud, captured so poignantly in Oleksiy Sai’s installation for the Burning Man, you keep screaming, ‘It’s already here!’ into the void.

The Sky News excellent podcast The WarGame which simulates Russia’s attack on the UK elicits surprising emotional reactions. To be frank, I’ve been mentally preparing for the bombing of London for at least three years. While living through Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I thought I’d feel nothing when the war spills over my country’s borders. Yet listening to a simulation of a strike on the Oxford Circle, I cried angry tears and muttered ‘You are so dumb’ into the collective face of my beloved UK-based friends and colleagues.

You have been warned so many times. You have waxed your ears and now the blasts in the heart of your capital will take care of your hearing issues.

I hope this rehearsal will help me keep my cool when the attack happens. If I am still alive then, I hope to master some generosity of spirit and make myself useful. And since I’m currently still around, I’ll reiterate for the benefit of my sleepwalking friends: instead of treating meaningful solidarity with Ukraine as a charity project, you need to build a coalition with us and do it for your own sake. The wording used by the Black Studies star Fred Moten in The Undercommons aptly conveys the message:

coalition isn't something that emerges so that you can come help me, a maneuver that always gets traced back to your own interests. The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it's fucked up for you, in the same way that it's fucked up for us. I don't need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly.

The quote ends with even stronger language which, as the head of a cultural and research institution, I’m obliged to omit.

Like the lives of children around the world, the lives of young Ukrainians who graduated in June 2022 had been disrupted first by the pandemic; what followed was not a rebuilding of normality but the all-out genocidal escalation of Russia’s war against Ukraine. The war had been part of those teenagers’ childhood since the age of eight. Yet in May 2022, they believed they would emerge from it victorious, and that it would happen soon.

Emerge from the war, they have not. Victory seemed within reach in the spring of their graduation year, after the Ukrainian Armed Forces had liberated the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions; but it has been delayed by the inadequate international response to Russia’s aggression. Some of the 2022 graduates have already enlisted in the army. Some have left the country. Their defiant graduation message is both a fly in amber and a mirror held up to adults. We not only allowed the murderous aggressor to invade the young Ukrainians’ childhoods in 2022; we have also failed to stop the bloodshed and to bring Ukraine victory, thus restoring their faith in justice.

Wars disproportionately affect the most vulnerable. Children are seven times more likely than adults to die from explosion-related traumas, their smaller bodies being more prone to suffering multiple injuries, including deadly head injuries. ^[1] According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) report from April 2025, 701 children have been killed and 2032 injured in Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. ^[2] During the preparation of this issue, Russian missile and drone attacks have increased, making April 2025 the deadliest month for children since June 2022, with at least nineteen children killed, seventy-eight injured.

‘Maths is the queen of sciences and wars’, notes Ukrainian poet Olha Olkhova. Yet how do we compute grief from the loss of lives barely lived? How do we measure the desert left by such a loss?

In a leafy Kyiv neighbourhood hit by Russia with a North-Korean KN-23 missile on 24 April 2025, a makeshift memorial of toys and flowers stands next to a flattened residential building. The site is framed by the carcasses of burnt cars and the shattered windows of nearby houses. Kyiv’s essential chestnut trees are blooming, their battered ‘candles’ lit in mourning. Coming back to maths, thirteen civilians were killed in the strike, eighty-one injured. Coming back to grief, the body of seventeen-year-old Danylo Khudia was found under the rubble. While the rescue operations were ongoing, dozens of his schoolmates kept vigil at the site, hoping for a miracle, in vain. The alliance of Moscow and Pyongyang shattered their world.

Read my editorial for the June issue of the London Ukrainian Review here.

Justice.

A country of 40 million which has, for eleven years since the annexation of Crimea, defended itself against the aggression of a state of 140 million while the world turned a blind eye to Russia’s violations of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and international law. A country whose society responded to the full-scale aggression with full-scale resistance, amassing a nearly million-strong army from yesterday’s civilians. A country whose people have been shattered by the abduction of their children, destruction of their cities, and the uncovering of civilian mass graves in the liberated areas. For Ukraine, the quest for justice is existential. In the words of the human rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk, “people who lived through hell [...] need to restore their belief that justice is possible, even if it is postponed”.

To pursue justice for her people, another Ukrainian woman turned from novelist to war crimes researcher and traveled across her country taking pictures of bomb craters in children’s playgrounds, uncovering torture chambers in de-occupied territories, and recording the testimonies of survivors. Survive herself, she did not. Her name was Victoria Amelina. Having documented countless Russian atrocities in Ukraine, she became a victim of one. Her testimony lives on, becoming a verdict for her killers.

I started reading the manuscript of Victoria Amelina’s book Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary on a train in late 2023, five months after its author was critically wounded in a Russian missile strike on a pizza restaurant in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk. My task: with two of Victoria’s closest friends, Tetyana Teren and Yaryna Grusha, and her husband Alex Amelin, I was to prepare for publication the text which was left unfinished at the time of her death. Mid-February, the book was released in the UK and the US.

Ukrainians know too well that unpunished evil proliferates. Before our eyes, Russian impunity for the crimes of the past – from the execution of Ukrainian cultural avant-garde and peasantry in the 1930s to the repressions of the Sixtiers’ dissent – breeds its genocidal war against Ukraine in the present. Victoria realised this better than anyone. Her book documents not only the most recent Russian attempt to erase Ukrainian identity by killing its cultural figures, such as the tortured and murdered children’s author Volodymyr Vakulenko. After the liberation of his home village, Victoria dug up his buried diary of occupation and passed it to the Kharkiv Literary Museum. Her book also sheds light on the Soviet regime’s destruction of the generations of Ukrainian culture makers in the 1920s and 1960s, for which there has never been a reckoning.

“What weapon do we choose to pursue justice in the hardest times? A laptop, a camera, international law, storytelling power, or an M777 howitzer?” Victoria asked herself and her readers. Using her newly absorbed knowledge of international law and her boundless empathy, the writer returned to storytelling. Standing next to her were Ukrainian women whom she called her sisters: human rights lawyers and soldiers, journalists and museum workers. They evacuated Ukrainian citizens and heritage from affected areas, documented Russian atrocities, advocated for justice internationally, and enlisted in the army. Their stories, alongside those of victims and survivors, had to be told.

Victoria Amelina was clear-eyed about the chances of putting the perpetrators on trial. She wrote to one of her heroines, Oleksandra Matviichuk, “Despite all our efforts, we still might lose. And if we lose, I want to at least tell the story of our pursuit of justice”.

By the time Victoria’s book was published in February 2025, the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine had registered nearly 160,000 Russian war crimes. Since the frontline and occupied territories are difficult for Ukrainian law enforcement to access, this unfathomable number is still incomplete. The sheer volume of Russian atrocities means that, for many Ukrainians, telling their story and being heard is the only form of justice attainable today.

Victoria Amelina had written about two-thirds of her book when Russians took away her life. The editorial group assembled the rest from fragments with minimal intrusions, making such intrusions explicit to the reader and commenting on the empty pages never to be filled.

Looking at Women Looking at War has become a testimony in its content and its form. In the absence of vision and will among the institutions designed to uphold international law, the book not only speaks of justice but enacts it by telling the stories of Russia’s genocide and Ukrainian resistance. While the post-Second World War global order crumbles, Victoria Amelina’s voice keeps cutting through the darkness. With its lucid words and forced silences, her book belongs to eternity.

To open the event, I read her poem, which Larissa Babij had translated (kindly, urgently) upon my request the night before. Here it is:

I would like to begin this conversation with what usually comes at the end of a public talk: the why and the what for questions.

So why do Ukrainian writers document Russia’s war? According to Iryna Starovoyt, writing has become a defensive weapon we wage against violence and oblivion. In her afterword for Ostap Slyvynsky’s book Ukrainian Dictionary of War, she notes, ‘One means of protection is self-reporting. Another — something we can do to oppose the chaos and irrationality of war — is to collect and compile the records’.

As the head of INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange, I would add that we report, collect, and compile records for justice: not the type of justice that will be enacted in court rooms and prison cells but the kind that will determine how Russia’s war and Ukraine’s fight are perceived today and remembered tomorrow.

The epistemic justice, in short.

This is precisely the kind of justice that is lacking when questions like ‘who started the war in Ukraine’ somehow surface in public debate. This is precisely the kind of justice that people in rooms like this one – not in the trenches, not in torture chambers, not in underground drone factories – are well equipped to ensure.

Now, let’s concentrate on the how question. There are three obvious ways in which to arrange a survey of approaches to literary documentation. The first and obvious one would be by genre: Ukrainian writers have recorded wartime experiences in poetry and nonfiction prose.

Documentary poetry has become a wartime literary phenomenon – not, however, without precedents. In his introduction to the anthology Men Who March Away, Ian Parsons writes about the ‘marvellous congestion of language’ he finds in some of the poets of the First World War.

This ability of poetry to congest, capture experience with the utmost economy of means, has made it a vehicle uniquely suited for bearing witness to Russia’s war. The conditions under which the writers are obliged to work are not conducive to the appearance of the long form – it seems that its arrival is destined to be much anticipated and constantly interrupted in Ukraine.

Amidst the daily labour of survival, between bombings, funerals, and volunteering, what emerges instead is, in the words of Yuliia Musakovska,

The author takes us by the hand and leads us away from the respectable issue of literary devices (the discussion of metaphors and aesthetics) to documenting civilian graves in the playgrounds of Mariupol, dug by the residents under Russian shelling in March 2022 (read the poem in full).

Another Ukrainian poet, Kateryna Mikhalitsyna, comes to the site of a Russian missile attack on Lviv in July 2023 and turns her gaze to the trees with ‘third-degree burns’, stripped of their leaves by the blast wave. ‘who will listen to these trees?’, Mikhalitsyna asks. ‘who will call them as witnesses in court?’ The Ukrainian poet gives these non-human victims of Russian war crimes a chance to testify and to be heard – by us.

Similarly to poetry, Ukrainian nonfiction prose delivers reports on experience. Diaries of the invasion, such as Oleksandr Mykhed’s Language of War, incline towards the dry, the factual, the unadorned. Why would you decorate an open wound? Serhiy Zhadan’s Sky over Kharkiv takes a high note as it reports from the city on the very edge of the abyss, the city wounded as if a monster was biting into its flesh, the city fighting for its life regardless. Olena Stiazhkina’s Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary is a love letter to another Ukrainian city captured early on by the very same monster and a reminder that unpunished evil spreads.

**

Another way of structuring the talk about documentary literature would be by resistance strategies of particular writers: advocating for Ukraine abroad, volunteering in Ukraine, or enlisting in the army.

Some Ukrainian writers – mostly women with children – have been forced to flee abroad and become Ukraine’s advocates there. In the volume of essays We Who Have Changed, Kseniya Kharchenko describes her escape with her young son from Kyiv to Austria: ‘Fatigue had given way to complete focus. […] I navigated my way through the five rows of cars, miraculously fitting into four lanes of the then Peremoha Avenue. Bridges were being blown up behind us – return route seemed to be vanishing quite literally before our eyes’.

Free to leave the country under martial law, Ukrainian women writers spend days on trains, in buses and in planes, to reach Europe, North America, South Africa, and Australia, trying to take wax out of the ears of international audiences. As poet Iya Kiva writes,

(translated by Amelia Glaser and Yuliia Ilchuk; read the poem in full).

And despite the overwhelming feeling of futility, the writers keep ‘flipping through words’, banging on doors, explaining the significance of Ukraine’s resistance not only for Ukraine but for the rest of humanity.

The second strategy is remaining to work in Ukraine. Authors opting for it tend to supplement their routine with trips to the de-occupied and frontline regions organised by PEN Ukraine as well as volunteering in the rear. Thus, Ostap Slyvynsky’s lexicon Ukrainian Dictionary of War emerges from conversations that took place at the Lviv railway station, on the Polish-Ukrainian border, and in temporary shelters for the displaced. This book foregrounds an essential feature of Ukrainian documentary writing: the disintegration of the narrative into scenes, flashes of experience, and mere word entries.

It would be disingenuous to say that, in the third year of the all-out war, writers in Ukraine only deliver aid to the front and interview war crimes’ survivors; we also drink wine, come to charity concerts, and raise children. All the while, the horror of war climbs inside us like ivy, extending new roots with each flash of news on our screens. Halyna Kruk’s poem nails the responsibility of witnesses:

As Uilleam Blacker notes in translator’s foreword, Kruk is saying that the point of literature is not to afford an escape from reality or to soften it, but to be able to confront reality in all its high-resolution sharpness and then to be able live with what we have seen’. Averting our eyes we can’t afford.

The third strategy of Ukrainian writers is, of course, to defend their country not only with words but with arms. As poet and marine Yaryna Chornohuz who has been in the army since 2020 puts it,

(translated from Ukrainian by Victor Shepelev; read the poem in full)

A gap between the creative pursuits of art and the relentless labour of fighting for survival emerges in the 24-year old poet and recently wounded soldier Artur Dron. I’ll read four lines from his poem ‘Evac’ translated by Yuliia Musakovska:

Kateryna Zarembo, a writer, academic, mother of four, and combat medic, notes, ‘During the rotation, the writer in me dies. It's impossible to be a writer and a medic at the same time’. Between rotations, she posts brief sketches, filled with the thickening details of frontline circumstance and character, which, in a work of fiction, would be unacceptable. Due to the nature of the medic’s work, these records are filled with ends without beginnings, bodies ceasing to be whole, lives just ceasing, and with love that doesn’t cease, that stitches the country together.

Through this sketchy documentary writing, the readers are made to confront the truth: that the world they knew has ended too, and that this new reality requires them to change. In the all-out war, nothing stays the same for long, all things are always changing. Cities turn into rubble. Forests turn into deserts with tree trunks sticking out of the battle-hardened earth like missiles. Missiles stick out of it, too. And as a line from Artem Azoyan’s wartime poem reads, the names of people you know turn into street names.

**

Because the final way of structuring a talk about documentary literature in Ukraine is, of course, by outcome.

Has the Ukrainian writer documenting the war so far survived or has she not?

PEN Ukraine together with INDEX, Memorial, Zmina, Institute for National Memory, Lemkin Society, Ukrainian Heritage Monitoring Lab has launched an initiative called Ukrainian Culture Makers Killed by Russia. We document the losses among photographers and artists, composers and actors, museum workers and choreographers, librarians and writers whose lives Russia has cut short. The number of deaths since the full-scale invasion that we have verified so far is 189. It is but a fraction of the total number, because of the lack of access to the occupied territories where the worst atrocities occur.

This project started from a literary portrait of Victoria Amelina, a writer whose book Looking at Women Looking at War has just been published posthumously. It was my greatest honour to help prepare it for publication within the editorial group of four which included Tetyana Teren, Yaryna Grusha, and Alex Amelin.

In addition the these opening remarks, the recording of the HURI event includes my reading of the piece ‘Scheherazade Goes to Izium’, dedicated to Victoria Amelina’s memory, and a discussion of her documentary book.

Scheherazade would not shut up. There is a maniac in the room who will chop off her head at dawn. But she has a secret weapon of her own — her magic memory, a bottomless depository from which she draws tale after tale, one thousand and one tale altogether, and maybe infinitely more. The maniac must find out how the story ends. Therefore, he doesn’t. Scheherazade must tell her tales to stay alive.

Scheherazade is of course us, the Ukrainian writers who struggling to pass the story on. Sometimes, they die struggling. Then, their colleagues step in to tell the story, and so it goes.

A journalist asked me yesterday what the future of Ukrainian literature was. My answer currently is, ‘If we survive the genocide, our wartime writing could teach the outside world a lesson. If we don’t, it would testify that we once were’.

You can read ‘Scheherazade Goes to Izium’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood from Bucha’ here if you subscribe to European Voices. If you are a paid subscriber of my substack and would like to have a read, please drop me a line in the comments.

Three years later, Ukraine is holding out against Russia’s neo-colonial violence. The London Ukrainian Review sheds light on the country’s resistance strategies and explores global challenges through the prism of Ukraine.

In 2024, we have delved into three major themes - Environment, Crimea, and Justice - showing how the processes unfolding on Ukrainian soil reshape the present and futures of communities globally. Below, I suggest my editorial pick of ten pieces that reflect on the history, culture, and society of Ukraine from a variety of standpoints, document Ukrainian experiences of living through Russia’s genocide, and offer us unique lessons from the frontline of the fight for freedom and sovereignty. At the same time, these pieces published in 2024 contribute to a wider effort to imagine and create better societies worldwide.

Visuals accompanying the three issues present work by prominent contemporary Ukrainian artists Kateryna Aliinyk and Anna Zviagintseva and Crimean Tatar photographer Emine Ziyatdinova.

1. Kateryna Mikhalitsyna’s poems documenting Russia’s war against the environment in Ukraine, translated by Hanna Leliv, in LUR 1 (2024)

The bird observing the devastation brought by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam, the house of an artist uprooted by the flood, the trees stripped of their leaves by a blast wave: in Mikhalitsyna’s poems ‘(the fish speaks)’ and ‘(witnesses of war crimes)’, more-than-human characters testify about Russia’s war crimes. Read here.

2. An essay ‘Vertical Occupation’ by Svitlana Matviyenko in LUR 1 (2024)

While imagining the war’s clear end might feel therapeutic, Svitlana Matviyenko seeks to shake our imaginations into envisioning the forms of coexistence and mutual care in the world of radioactive colonialism, where the end of occupation is delayed to the point of never. She introduces the concept of ‘vertical occupation’, the deep pollution of the environment from the ground waters to the air we breathe, which will persist long after the invaders are pushed out of Ukraine. Read here.

3. An Interview with the co-founder of Stop Ecocide International Jojo Mehta in LUR 1 (2024)

In a conversation with environmental policy analyst Anna Ackermann, Jojo Mehta explores how the impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has galvanised legal discussion of ecocide. They touch upon the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and its implications for the introduction of ecocide as the fifth crime of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Read here.

4. An essay ‘De-occupying Crimea in the Western Mind’ by Rory Finnin in LUR 2 (2024)

For the eightieth anniversary of the Soviet deportation of Crimean Tatars, the London Ukrainian Review dedicated its second issue of 2024 to the Russia-occupied Crimean peninsula and its Indigenous people’s ongoing fight for justice. Exploring the legacy of Crimean Tatar autonomy in the aftermath of World War I and its progressive governing body, the Qurultay, Rory Finnin releases the history of the Black Sea peninsula from the grip of Kremlin obfuscations, and envisions a future, free Crimea within Ukraine. Read here.

5. Emine Ziyatdinova’s family history: ‘Deportation, Homecoming, and Belonging: Three Crimean Tatar Stories’, translated by Larissa Babij

The stories of three Crimean Tatar women, Emine Ziyatdinova’s paternal grandmother, mother, and the author herself, revolve around their relationship with Crimea and its history. The essay is based on multiple interviews with her family which Ziyatdinova recorded between 2008 and 2022 as well as her personal memories. Read here.

6. Mariia Shynkarenko’s essay ‘Crimean Tatars’ Story of Recognition’

Crimean Tatar resettlement in their ancestral homeland was marked by a failure of the Ukrainian state to recognise and restore their Indigenous rights. As Shynkarenko notes, the repatriates ‘found themselves in a newly independent state, to which they had no prior connection or affinity. Similarly, Ukraine, taking its first steps in state- and nation-building, did not have the capacity or knowledge to develop a strategy of engagement with Crimean Tatars’. It was only after Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014 and the Crimean Tatars’ remarkable resistance that Ukraine joined the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and recognised Crimean Tatars’ indigeneity. And it was too late to become a decisive factor in opposing Russian aggression. However, the hope for the peaceful and democratic future of Crimea after liberation depends on the recognition of Crimean Tatar self-determination and autonomy within Ukraine. Read here.

7. An essay ‘The Long Exile: A History of the Deportation of 1944’ by Martin-Oleksandr Kisly, translated by Larissa Babij in LUR 2 (2024)

The mass deportation of Crimean Tatars in May 1944 is rooted in Russian settler colonialism which Martin-Oleksandr Kisly traces to the subjugation of Crimea by Catherine II. Eighty years after the grievous crime against the Indigenous people of Crimea, Crimean Tatars are under Russia’s occupation and banned from marking this historic date. Read here.

8. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk interviewed by the Kharkiv-born and Australia-based writer Maria Tumarkin

The third issue of the London Ukrainian Review in 2024 is dedicated to justice. It explores how impunity for Russia’s crimes of the past breeds its genocidal war against Ukraine in the present. As Oleksandra Matviichuk explains, we need to break with the ‘stereotypical’ post-World War II ‘approach to justice, where the latter is considered unattainable as long as we are in the midst of war’. New technologies and transnational collaborations enable us to pursue justice even when Russia’s genocidal war is far from over — and thus help bring an end to the impunity which enabled it. Fighting for justice while fighting the war, Ukraine can set a precedent which will reform international law thus benefiting societies globally. Read here.

9. ‘Art for Justice: What Ukraine’s Artistic Heritage Teaches Us about Russian Imperialism’. An essay by the co-curator of the international blockbuster art show ‘In the Eye of the Storm’

There has never been a reckoning with the centuries of Russian colonial violence against Ukrainians and other subjugated peoples of the Russian Empire. This violence has long encompassed an epistemic dimension. Moscow has appropriated the colonised nations’ heritage, obliterated their institutional traditions, and erased their place in the world’s cultural history. When a country’s cultural and intellectual contributions are attributed to its imperialist neighbour, that country disappears from the mental maps of the global community and ignoring its fight for sovereignty and independence becomes all too easy. Katia Denysova’s essay, ‘Art for Justice: What Ukraine’s Artistic Heritage Teaches Us about Russian Imperialism’, shines a spotlight on the restoration of justice in art history. Read here.

10. ‘The shards of our pain keep calling us to battle’: Two Poems by Vasyl Stus, translated by Nina Murray and Bohdan Tokarskyi.

Vasyl Stus was an extraordinary Ukrainian poet and dissident who died in a labour camp in Russia three years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Bohdan Tokarskyi notes in his introduction to the poetry translations, Stus was ‘uncompromising in his pursuit of justice and the truth’ in his life and art.

Read in full here.

You can support the work of the London Ukrainian Review here.

More than 360 people, including children, spent 27 days there without food, fresh water, sanitary facilities, medication, or oxygen. 10 of them died. 7 more were executed by the Russians on the streets.

On the walls of that torture chamber, you see children’s drawings next to the calendar counting the days in captivity - next to the list of killed Ukrainians - next to the list of those who died because of the conditions in the basement. Next to the national anthem of Ukraine scribbled in a child’s handrwiting.

When Yahidne was liberated, most of the locals jumped into evacuation buses and left, because every house in the village was damaged by the heavy fighting. Yet when volunteers started fixing roofs and windows, the villagers returned. My friend Anna says it’s because their experience is so extreme it can’t be shared outside of the community.

To an extent, it feels true of many Ukrainians living in Ukraine today. We stick together. Our experience is so extreme we barely understand each other, let alone the outsiders. Communication with those who come to meet us in Ukraine and on our own terms can also be strained, but I am grateful for their effort. We need them to know. They need to act based on this knowledge.

When you hear about peace talks and Ukrainian territorial concessions again, think about Yahidne and what Russian occupation means for Ukraine.

The trip was organised by PEN Ukraine and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine as part of the Crimea Global conference. The photos are by Anastasia Mantach.

You can read the London Ukrainian Review here. It includes five perspectives on justice: by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviychuk; by the ex-serviceman who has survived Russian captivity and is working in the Ministry of Veterans Yevhen Shybalov; by the art historian who co-curated the eye-opening and legacy-restoring exhibition of Ukrainian modernism Katia Denysova; by Nina Murray and Bohdan Tokarskyi, the translators of Vasyl Stus, a dissident Ukrainian poet killed in a Russian labour camp six years before the collapse of the Soviet Union; by the human rights lawyer Kateryna Busol. The subtle and subdued photography is by one of the key contemporary Ukrainian artists, Anna Zvyagintseva.

The journal is open-access and published by the Ukrainian Institute London in partnership with the IWM (Vienna) and Academic Studies Press.

Many things much more significant do and don’t take place in a parallel universe. For example,

• V.A. finishes her book herself, travels the world, and raises her powerful voice to fight for justice. A Russian missile doesn’t kill her. We don’t spend night hours editing her drafts.

• Activist O.S. fights developers and local kleptocracy to preserve the capital’s cultural heritage. His legs are intact because his vehicle doesn’t run over an anti-tank mine.

• Young academic M.S. opens her publishing house. Her husband earns shitloads of money in IT. He doesn’t enlist. She doesn’t spend all her resources on procuring drones and helmets.

• Translator O.K. keeps translating from ancient and modern languages the likes of Aristotle and Karl Jaspers. A Russian soldier doesn’t fire from a rocket launcher at a private house in Irpin setting ablaze its resident, translator O.K.

• D.D. raises her two kids, a disabled son and a daughter who looks like Burton’s Wednesday, with the support of her large family. Her husband’s sushi kiosk grows into a restaurant. D.D. finishes her PhD. She doesn’t have to flee from Zaporizhzhia to the Czech Republic and start everything from scratch.

• M.M. works as a journalist. She doesn’t imagine dead kids when she revisits a village school every two months for her documentary.

• A.S. writes for theatre, performs, and produces films that win international awards. He doesn’t have a tic. He doesn’t spend 2.5 years of his twenties on the frontline.

• V.C. lives.

• V.Z. lives.

• V.V. lives.

• D.K. lives.

• D.A. lives.

• S.Z. lives.

• O.P.-K. lives.

• A.P. lives.

• A.H. lives.

• A.F. lives.

• Y.H. lives.

• Y.S. lives.

• I.S. lives.

• R.B. lives.

• I.O. lives.

• O.S. lives.

• A.D. lives.

• P.L. lives.

• I.T. lives.

• V.O. lives.

• S.P. lives.

• A.S. lives.

• O.O. lives.

• R.R. lives.

• Y.K. lives.

• A.F. lives.

• V.P. lives.

• K.S. lives.

In a parallel universe, Russia is a bad dream from which we all are happy to wake up. In reality, we have to stop daydreaming and get to work instead. It’s genocide o’clock. Ending it and serving justice is the responsibility of those left standing.

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We don’t know how many Ukrainians have survived this genocide so far. Hundreds of thousands have been murdered. Hundreds of thousands, both adults and children, have been kidnapped and deported to Russia. Millions have been forced to flee abroad since the full-scale invasion. The shortage of people, the shrinking of our community is something acutely felt, reported, and mourned.

I feel this lack not only when my friends in the army tell me they spend weeks on the positions because there is nobody to change them. I feel it while recruiting for a new cultural and research institution based in Lviv, the capital of the home front. On employment websites, there are more jobs than applicants.

In our institutions in Ukraine and abroad, we should keep thinking of the ways to support those who can’t leave or choose not to, who keep working inside the country in spite of blackouts, sleepless nights, and murderous missile strikes in the third year of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. If this land is deserted by people, evil moves further unimpeded.

Standing your ground, in a very basic physical sense, is a lesson I learned a decade ago at the Maidan. During the Revolution of Dignity, we defended our square from the riot police by putting our bodies on the line. Kyivans did not always stay in the camp at night but, at the first sign of danger that the government’s forces would attempt to disperse the protesters, they flooded the Maidan. It’s easy to brutally disperse a few hundred people; a hundred thousand, not so much.

There were a few nights when I felt so anxious for the Maidan that I took a taxi to the centre and just walked the perimeter of the square till dawn listening to Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria on an mp3 player. Nothing dramatic happened during those nights: I walked between tents and barricades stopping to drink tea with strangers. But it felt vital to reinforce the Maidan with my inadequate physical presence. And perhaps, it was.

People who keep living and working, publishing books and paying taxes, treating patients and buying soap, repairing houses and teaching children, walking their dogs and making plans in Ukraine are defending their country like some of us defended the Maidan in 2014. Our simple contribution can’t be compared to those who are actually fighting Russian invaders with arms. Yet all of us together present an obstacle to the spread of evil. In the third year of the all-out genocide, this obstacle still proves difficult to overcome.

We may not be 52 million, but we are strong, as long as we keep reinforcing each other.

Three years into Russia’s genocidal war, my former classmates whom, based on our teenage habits, I believed to have perished from addictions a long time ago, volunteered to fight. My hairdresser, whom I considered a sweet summer child, turned out to have escaped on foot from the occupied town of Bucha. My country, which was expected to fall in three days after Russia attacked it on all fronts, turned into the site of full-scale resistance. Crossing Ukraine in press and volunteer cars, I have collected testimonies of everyday defiance which surprised the world and, at times, Ukrainians themselves. 

I have written up these stories stylising them as fairy tales. The nonfiction writing on Russia’s war against Ukraine is inclined towards the dry, the factual, the unadorned. Why would one decorate an open wound? In an attempt to purify the style, to not let it tarnish our rage, suffering, and love even with a hint of artifice, we, Ukrainians, spare literary devices and discipline our imagination. And yet, a suitable language for relaying the atrocities we witness does not exist. I accept it, alongside the need to reach for a universal dimension in the singular horror and brutality of each act of Russian aggression. When reaching for the universal, one often taps into folklore. And once in the realm of folklore, one can read the old stories in a new way and make the reading emancipatory.

Last summer, I read one of these stylised tales, Little Red Riding Hood from Bucha, at the IWM in Vienna. You can watch the recording here. Since then I have been thinking that I must turn these stories into a book or find another home for them. Or an agent who will know what to do with them. If you can think of one, please reach out to me. These untold stories haunt me, and the time I can dedicate to this project while helping to set up a new institution in Ukraine is shrinking. I would really appreciate some help.

On 22 March 2024, Russia hit DniproHES eight times, ruining the hydroelectric power station Dnirpo-2, damaging the 60-metre dam, spilling oil products into the river, and threatening the world with another environmental disaster following the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in June 2023 and 1500 cases of damage to nature from Russia’s war.

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