The Cultural Work of Ukrainian Resistance

Foreign journalism about Ukraine takes for granted the unified spirit of resistance among Ukrainians. It is an assumed response to violent occupation: the people come together to survive. To tell the story this way is partly true but also misleading. Russia’s attack on Ukraine has consistently targeted cultural institutions and cultural figures. Historically, these are the people who give a nation its spirit, heritage, and sense of purpose. Lemkin called it part of the “national pattern.” In the 65 interviews that I’ve conducted with Ukrainians since early 2024, a recurring theme is the effort required to protect and sustain Ukrainian culture in order to unify as a national community. During my residence at INDEX, I focused on this by studying literary production. Ukrainian literature was already growing in readership, reach, and number of titles before Russia’s full-scale invasion. Since the full-scale invasion, that growth has continued. Behind it are translators, editors, authors, and publishers who work in difficult, sometimes dangerous conditions. 

According to Chytomo, an independent, non-profit organization covering Ukrainian literary culture and publishing, the production of Ukrainian books has increased since the full-time invasion, and requests for translation rights from foreign presses are at an all-time high. A grassroots poetry revival sees standing room-only readings in bookstores, coffee shops, and bomb shelters around the country. So many poems were published in Ukrainian on Facebook in 2022, 2023, and 2024 that the definitive digital catalogue of Ukrainian lyric verse reached capacity and stopped collecting them. And yet, Russia’s occupation of and attack on the Ukrainian nation and its people has wrought widespread suffering and irreversible loss. Approximately 50,000 Ukrainian children, women, and men have been injured or killed by Russian forces since the early 2000s. Not a single one of them was a soldier on active duty. (1) 700,000 Ukrainian children were “accepted” by the Russian Federation as new Russian citizens. (2) Many of them were forcibly taken from their families or care facilities in Ukraine (3). Russian military power is indiscriminate in its destruction, even as it targets the practices and people that constitute the Ukrainian nation. One of my tasks is to bring together these different types of violence in a framework capable of explaining the affordances of literary production as a form of resistance to natiocide. Natiocide is a concept created by the Ukrainian legal scholar Volodymyr Pylypenko. It’s an important concept because it accounts for mass killing and destruction that is not limited to a single ethnic group but instead is indiscriminate in its killing and includes attacks on the institutions and agencies that keep the Ukrainian nation-state independent and free. 

Just as national unity is assumed to occur naturally in a time of war, the flourishing literary practices that we see in Ukraine today have been described as a byproduct of the full-scale invasion. But the Ukrainians that I interviewed suggest something else: they understand themselves to be part of a collaborative intellectual revival that has been building momentum over decades. There is nothing inevitable about these practices, so we need to look at the historical choices — by Ukrainians — that made them possible. Ukrainian literary production today is not an outcome of Russia’s war. Its growing success over some thirty years of independence eventually posed a threat to Kremlin political ambitions and therefore had to be destroyed. What all of us, outsiders to but supporters of Ukraine, could consider more carefully is the deep layers of creativity and ingenuity required not only to survive, but to thrive in the face of cynical and totalizing Russian violence.

1 — Civilian casualty statistics come from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which aggregates injury and death reports from regional hospitals, morgues, and UN field offices. Figures are accurate as of February 28, 2025.

2 — Омбудсмен назвала число вывезенных из Донбасса в Россию детей, RBC News July 30, 2023. The report was widely cited in Russian state media in July 2023 but has since been removed from the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights website. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Maria Lvova-Belova and Putin for “the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.” Situation in Ukraine: ICC judges issue arrest warrants against Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova. International Criminal Court, March 17, 2023 press release.

3 — Yale Human Rights Lab (HRL) report for the Conflict Observatory: Intentional, Systematic, and Widespread: Russia’s program of coerced adoption and fostering of Ukraine’s children. Dec. 3, 2024.