This issue of the London Ukrainian Review takes a look at culture as a matter of national security. Highlighting the voices of cultural figures who defend Ukraine with arms, it also examines culture as a tool of Russia’s imperialist expansion, all the while insisting on a bond between cultural familiarity and political solidarity.
Knowledge of Ukrainian culture is a prerequisite for lasting international support for the country’s fight against invasion by Russia. The pieces in this issue elucidate the relationship between culture, power, and the survival of a political nation at a moment when the stakes for success in this battle could not be higher, not only in Ukraine but around the world. As authoritarianism surges and global security crumbles — driven equally by citizen disengagement and strongmen consolidating power — Ukraine’s battle for sovereignty becomes a fight to preserve a world order of independent states protected by international law.
While the world has much to gain from the insights of Ukrainian art, the lessons of Ukrainian political culture and traditions of civic engagement are likewise vital today. The meanings and implications of active citizenship are at the heart of Olesya Khromeychuk’s conversation with Peter Pomerantsev. The author of This Is Not Propaganda, Nothing is True and Everything Is Possible, and most recently, How to Win a Disinformation War, explains that it is the refusal to take responsibility for the actions of one’s country that paves the way for authoritarianism, in Russia and elsewhere. And by contrast, as Khromeychuk makes clear, ‘Practising active citizenship is […] a skill honed [by Ukrainians] over decades of statelessness, and later through years of safeguarding their statehood by holding elected officials to account’. The case in point is the protests that erupted all over the country in July 2025 in response to the Ukrainian government’s attempt to undermine the independence of the country’s two anti-corruption bodies. These grassroots protests were both massive and successful in reaching their political goals of restoring the autonomy of the anti-corruption agencies. In spite of the limitations that martial law imposes on certain democratic freedoms, Ukrainians have proven that the people remain the only source of power in the country, in accordance with the Ukrainian Constitution’s Article 5.
Ukrainian culture in all its forms, with its history of resourceful resistance to imperialism and erasure in the face of Russian efforts to diminish its global reach, is an essential ally of open democratic societies in the fight against totalitarian threats. An obstacle for this alliance is the lack of awareness of Russian imperialism. Between 2016 and 2020, I taught a course on Critical Foundations at the English Department at one of the University of London’s colleges. It exposed the first-year undergraduates to a toolkit of methods, from psychoanalysis to feminist critique, which the students applied to one of the key texts in the English literary canon, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. During the seminar on postcolonialism, I would ask them to search for indicators of empire in the opening passage of the novel, which is set during the narrator’s journey from Saint Petersburg to Arkhangelsk. The class would fascinate me with ruminations on scientific imperialism, civilising discourse, and knowledge extraction. None of the students would mention the eighteenth-century Russian Empire, where the cities of Saint Petersburg and Arkhangelsk belonged. Russia as an empire did not feature on their mental map.
This contradiction is central to writer and security specialist Edward Lucas’s essay ‘The Other Front’. While Western societies have become increasingly sophisticated at critiquing their own imperial histories, they maintain a conspicuous blind spot regarding Russian imperialism. The failure to recognise and counter Russian imperial culture as such inadvertently perpetuates the very imperial thinking that Western institutions claim to oppose, leaving themselves vulnerable to ongoing Russian influence operations.
While Lucas examines institutional blind spots, Maria Sonevytsky’s ‘Everyday Amulets’ documents how displaced communities themselves maintain cultural continuity through the preservation of memory embedded in the most prosaic objects. The essay traces how house keys become symbols of refusal to consent to elimination across contexts of displacement: Crimean Tatars deported by Stalin in 1944, Palestinians displaced in 1948, and Ukrainians fleeing Russian occupation since 2014. For families deprived of their homes, keys to doors they may never see again are both instruments of ‘storywork’ rectifying epistemic injustices, and material archives of resistance to erasure.
The dynamics of cultural assertion play out differently within elite artistic institutions. Leah Batstone’s essay traces how Russian works dominate classical music repertoires through centuries of resource investment and strategic cultural positioning, forming an impression of the works’ inherent artistic value. Although the outpouring of pro-Ukrainian sentiment at the start of the full-scale invasion stimulated an interest in Ukrainian music, it was usually included in ‘special Ukraine-themed programmes’. Such positioning exoticises the country and reduces its role to that of a victim and a charity project, instead of highlighting the ways Ukrainian composers have addressed timeless themes over the centuries.
Ukraine’s culture has been intentionally eclipsed by its imperial neighbour, and thus it remains poorly understood throughout the world. As Uilleam Blacker argues in ‘Defensive Wall’, cultural knowledge directly influences political support. If international publics were more familiar with Ukrainian culture and its defiance of Russian colonial violence, Ukraine might not have been perceived as an obscure part of Russia’s ‘backyard’ in 2014. Therefore, cultural support for Ukraine should become part of the geopolitical strategy to build and maintain transnational solidarities in the face of authoritarian threats, which Russian impunity has enabled to proliferate around the world.
While pieces by most of the authors based outside of Ukraine — Blacker, Pomerantsev, Batstone, Lucas — reveal the considerable intellectual energy required to counter Russian cultural hegemony, the Ukrainian writers featured in this issue have taken up arms — literally — to defend the cultural space they seek to preserve. There could not be a starker illustration of the imbalance of resources between the two cultures locked in this existential fight. Failing to take responsibility for their state, Russian artists and heritage are still present in the international cultural discourse; at the same time, Ukrainian prose writers like Kateryna Zarembo and poets like Eva Tur, Vasek Dukhnovskyi, and Valeriy Puzik are invested in military resistance rather than cultural production.
In Tur’s poem, the speaker locked in combat — or play — with death envisions herself as a ‘blank page’ upon which she writes ‘the killer’s name’, ‘russia’, for the whole world to see. Dukhnovskyi’s poem insists that the place to look for culture today is Ukraine’s war-battered east, where the line between a beating and a silent heart is crossed so easily, where contemporary Ukrainian identity is being shaped, where the future of global security is being decided. Puzik’s poem imagines the eighteenth-century Ukrainian philosopher, Hryhoriy Skovoroda, postponing his travels and philosophical exploits, volunteering for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and dreaming to rebuild the Skovoroda museum destroyed by a Russian missile strike as his postwar project.
Ringing with moral clarity, Zarembo’s piece also deals with the issue of artists choosing to engage in the military defence of a nation. It explains: ‘If we stop defending ourselves and our people, that will be the end — both physically and intellectually — of Ukrainian culture’.
This issue is illustrated by Crimean Tatar artist Sevilâ Nariman-qızı. Her hokku-style typographic interpretations highlight key words from each piece in Crimean Tatar, the language spoken by the Indigenous people of Crimea and classified as ‘severely endangered’ by UNESCO. While Crimean Tatars have survived numerous attempts at elimination by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, their ancestral homeland remains occupied by the Russian Federation since 2014. The perceived cultural greatness of the occupier has eclipsed the resistance of the people occupied. The world’s indifference to this crime paved the way for further escalation of the war which, by autumn 2025, has engulfed the European continent via violations of NATO countries’ airspace, cyber attacks, and disruption of critical infrastructure.
Coming to know a culture that is too busy fighting for survival might require an additional effort from outsiders. Yet, this Ukrainian culture that does not shy away from political responsibility and fights against tyranny is one that outsiders will doubtless benefit from knowing better. This knowledge is a matter of their own security.
The project is a part of the Lysiak-Rudnytsky Ukrainian Studies Programme held by the Ukrainian Institute and Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation with financial support of the International Renaissance Foundation.
Sasha Dovzhyk is the Editor-in-chief of the London Ukrainian Review.
Image: Sevilâ Nariman-qızı, bizler (medeniyet) (we (culture)) from the series menim – seniñ (mine – yours), 2025
The opinions expressed in the London Ukrainian Review are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board or affiliated institutions.
