As Ukraine enters the fifth year of its conflict with Russia, culture, language, and art have emerged as central elements in the nation’s resistance against what many Ukrainians describe as an assault on their identity. The ongoing war, which began with Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 and escalated with full-scale military operations in 2022, has deeply intertwined cultural preservation and expression with national survival.
Charlotte Higgins, a culture writer who has traveled to Ukraine multiple times since autumn 2022, documents these dynamics in her account of the country’s cultural frontlines. Her work portrays how Ukrainian artists, writers, and cultural figures have navigated the pressures of war, often transforming their creative outputs in response to violence and occupation.
One notable example is Victoria Amelina, a novelist who became a war crimes investigator. Amelina was killed in 2023 during a Russian missile attack on a pizza restaurant in the frontline town of Kramatorsk. Higgins also highlights artists such as Serhiy Zhadan and Iryna Tsilyk, whose works—ranging from terse short stories to poetry—reflect the harsh realities of life amid conflict.
Ukrainians widely point to culture and language as key targets in Russia’s campaign, which Moscow partly justified by claiming to protect the rights of Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Since 2022, Russian occupying forces have sought to impose a Russian school curriculum on roughly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory under their control, while also reportedly confiscating artworks from occupied regions like Kherson. Ukrainian art experts have tracked some of these stolen pieces to museums in Crimea or the Russian art market.
Resistance to Russian cultural influence has manifested in a deliberate shift by many Ukrainians toward using the Ukrainian language publicly and in removing symbols of Russian heritage. Dozens of statues and monuments honoring Russian cultural figures, such as Alexander Pushkin, have been dismantled since the invasion. Writers like Sasha Dovzhyk, who grew up speaking Russian, describe this transition in personal terms; Dovzhyk stated in 2023 that “my mother tongue tastes like ashes.”
The war has forced many artists to reconsider the role and purpose of their work. Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk reflected on the difficulty of creating art in wartime, saying, “No metaphors work against a man with a machine gun. No poetry can save you from a tank that hits your car as you are trying to evacuate your kids.”
Higgins’s account includes stories of cultural preservation under fire. Leonid Marushchak, for example, risked life and limb to protect thousands of cultural artifacts along Ukraine’s front lines by packing, cataloging, and relocating museum collections to safer locations.
One of the more poignant figures profiled is Marharyta Polovinko, a young artist from Kryvyi Rih, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s hometown. Before the war, Polovinko’s work depicted industrial landscapes, but as the conflict intensified, she took on roles as a combat medic and drone operator. Her art evolved to include depictions of monstrous, fantastical creatures, even using her own blood in her paintings. She ultimately ceased these works after coming to believe, as Higgins writes, “there are no monsters, no ugly creatures. They are just people and they choose to act this way.” Polovinko was killed in combat in April 2025 at the age of 31.
The cultural shifts, struggles, and stories that have unfolded amid the conflict underscore the complex interplay between art, identity, and survival in Ukraine today. They offer a testament to the ways in which language and cultural expression have become as contested and vital as the physical battlegrounds themselves.