To understand how to reinforce Ukraine’s security, we must examine the strategies being used to undermine it. Uilleam Blacker argues that culture is a crucial element of Russia’s aggression, and that cultural support for Ukraine can be an effective tool in a broader security policy.
In both its actions and its rhetoric, Russia has demonstrated that Ukrainian culture is firmly in its crosshairs. It has attacked Ukraine’s cultural infrastructure, bombing libraries, theatres, printing presses, and more. It has also murdered hundreds of writers, artists, and other people of culture. Beyond physical violence, Russia bans the Ukrainian language in schools in occupied areas and re-educates thousands of kidnapped children to disdain their language, history, and identity. People living under occupation are screened for pro-Ukrainian sentiment, which can lead to arrest, torture, and murder. This erasure of identity and culture is complemented by an extensive programme of resettling Russians to lands stolen from Ukraine. It all adds up to ethnic cleansing.
The Kremlin’s policies are a logical consequence of the vision of Russia that lies at the base of the decision to go to war. Putin’s own words provide all the evidence we need: his speeches and writings are filled with centuries-old staples of Russian chauvinism that deny not only the autonomy, but the very existence of Ukraine. Ukraine, under medieval ruler Volodymyr the Great, was the birthplace of Orthodox Christianity in the east Slavic world, and, as early-modern Russia sought to assert a ‘divinely ordained’ imperial influence beyond its borders, it sought also to appropriate the history of Christianity in Ukraine both discursively and through territorial conquest. At the same time, Ukraine is also strategically important for Russia’s imperial jigsaw. By conquering Ukraine in the eighteenth century, Russia eliminated its main regional rival — Poland — and extended its power to the Black Sea, thus announcing itself on the European stage as an imperial power. An autonomous Ukraine, therefore, is a threat to the foundations of Russia’s historical myths. It is no accident, then, that Putin is so fond of repeating that Ukrainians and Russians are one people; that he built a monument to Volodymyr near the Kremlin walls; and that he has referenced Catherine II, conqueror of Poland, in his speeches.
Ukraine has always been an awkward colonial target, however. In the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, it not only enjoyed periods of relative political autonomy under the Cossacks, but also had a flourishing cultural, intellectual, and religious life. The fact that Ukraine led such a distinct and freedom-loving existence, with strong ties, via Poland, to Europe, always threatened to tear a hole in Russia’s nascent imperial self-image.
To combat this threat, Russia developed a clever trick: it treated Ukraine not as a conquered foreign land, but, via the historical mental gymnastics of its claims on Ukraine’s medieval history, as a rightful and natural part of its cultural, religious, and, thus, territorial patrimony. Ukraine’s distinct history and culture were systematically erased or denigrated by Russian statesmen, historians, and writers, who reduced them to nothing more than folkloric variations of a greater Russian culture. Successive Russian leaders, from tsars to commissars, expended substantial resources on discrediting, imprisoning, or murdering those who suggested otherwise. From Peter I’s bans on Ukrainian religious books, down to Stalin’s mass murder of poets, the policy has been remarkably consistent.
There is, of course, a contradiction at the heart of all this. If Ukrainian culture were a mere folkloric footnote to Great Russian culture and Ukrainian identity just an odd shade of Russianness, why would such strenuous efforts to contain it be necessary? If, as tsarist interior minister Piotr Valuyev wrote in 1863, ‘there is not, never has been, and never can be a separate Little Russian [i.e. Ukrainian] language’, then why would he need to pass a secret decree banning it? But this is Russia’s logic, and it is willing to spill blood to maintain the illusion of Ukrainian non-existence.
Putin is merely the latest practitioner of a long tradition of Ukraine-denial in which culture is central. For Putin, if Ukraine has its own culture, history, and identity, it is better equipped to maintain its statehood and assert its geopolitical agency. If, on the other hand, Ukrainians can be convinced that they are destined by historical logic and cultural affinity to be part of the ‘Russian World’, that they have no right to hold values (like democracy, human rights, freedom) that oppose Russian ones, then they will be more easily ruled. This is the logic at work in the Russian re-education camps for children, and in the killing of Ukrainian writers with bullets and missiles. Every movement of Russia’s de facto border westward feeds Putin’s ambitions for restoring Russian imperial greatness.
The promotion of Ukrainian culture today is, then, no luxury. Every Ukrainian book sold, every movie that makes it to the cinema, every song on the radio is a brick in the defensive wall against Russian expansionism. Ukrainian culture helps Ukrainians maintain a sense of common purpose; it helps them process their past, understand their present, and plan their future; it provides models of resistance and paths to consolation in dark times. It fends off Russian cultural influence, which feeds Ukrainians harmful stereotypes of inferiority and helplessness.
But Ukrainian culture is important not only for Ukrainians. It can also help build solidarity among international publics. For better or worse, when someone we know is suffering, we feel greater sympathy towards them than towards a total stranger. The same is true of countries and societies. On the eve of World War II, western European powers could decide not to protect those under threat of Nazi invasion because, as Chamberlain infamously put it, this was all ‘a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing’. The British prime minister was terribly naïve, but he was correct in assuming that a lack of knowledge could ensure a lack of concern. Knowledge of and familiarity with another culture, by contrast, builds solidarity and sows the seeds for potential action. Had the long history of Russian colonial violence against Ukraine been better understood by a public familiar with the canon of Ukrainian culture, Ukraine and Crimea might not have been perceived by so many in the West as obscure parts of Russia’s ‘backyard’ in 2014. Ukraine, of course, is not alone in this sense: how different might our reactions to events in Gaza or Sudan be if we all read novels by Palestinian and Sudanese writers in our schools and universities?
I have been struck by how many educated Brits feel a sense of disbelief in how Russia, known to them through its great literature, ballet, and music, could be the source of such barbarism. They see mysterious, soulful Russian culture as ‘above politics’ or as suffering in opposition to tyranny. There is little awareness of how the canon of Russian culture — from Pushkin and Dostoevsky to Solzhenitsyn — has supported and constructed Russian imperial discourse. And so it is that, in 2024, Kirill Serebrennikov’s hagiographic film about the writer Eduard Limonov, a fascist who fired a machine gun into besieged Sarajevo for fun and pioneered the idea of violently seizing Crimea, could be fêted at the Cannes festival. It is only recently that one of Russia’s most prominent novelists, Zakhar Prilepin, who gleefully recounted killing Ukrainians while fighting in eastern Ukraine, was finally excluded from European cultural forums.
To throw Russia’s privileged status into relief, it is enough to examine perceptions of its geopolitical allies — China, Iran, North Korea. Western publics have no love affair with the cultures of these countries. It is hard to pinpoint writers from any of them with a status equivalent to that of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, or Chekhov. And there is, consequently, no such determination to ‘see things from the point of view’ of, say, Iran, as there is with the case of Russia. Russian literature, in the shape of Tolstoy and Chekhov, provides the only access points many Western readers have to the history of Crimea. One cannot say the same of Chinese writers in relation to Taiwan. If we are serious about combating and containing Russia, we need to learn to critically approach the historical and cultural narratives that its culture ingrains in those who consume it.
Given all of the above, it is clear that Ukrainian culture is important both for Ukraine and its allies in a very concrete political sense. The more Ukrainians consume their own culture, the more secure they feel their identity and their common purpose; the more European and global publics get to know Ukrainian culture, the more likely it is that political and military assistance will be underpinned by public sympathy. By the same token, challenging Russian cultural and historical myths can guide foreign publics to a more critical approach to Russia’s regional influence. In the UK, we have been keen to challenge our own imperial past and foreground the voices of those who suffered from it. We should give Russia the same treatment.
What are the specific actions needed to facilitate all this? Continued support for Ukrainian culture is crucial. Sadly, the US has recently done precisely the opposite, slashing USAID budgets for Ukrainian cultural and journalistic projects in Ukraine and in the US. European support is also drying up — European book fairs, for example, are no longer offering discounted rates to Ukrainian publishers for participation. If we are serious about a comprehensive plan to help Ukraine survive, we need to embed cultural support into long-term geopolitical strategies and pursue it through bodies like the British Council. At the same time, we also need to think about how to develop a more realistic and critical view of Russia among the UK public. State bodies — for example, academic funding bodies — could contribute by supporting projects that critically approach the cultural underpinnings of Russian imperialism in the way that they have done with British history.
The time to do this is now. The coming years are likely to see Ukraine in a more precarious situation. Russia has, in recent months, become ever more emboldened by a lack of Western pushback, and shows no sign of reeling in its ambitions. Serious economic sanctions and vastly ramped-up military support are, of course, paramount. But this fight needs a cultural underpinning. It needs compelling stories in which positive action in support of Ukraine can take root. It needs historical facts to appeal to our sense of justice and cultural images to appeal to our imaginations. In the end, it is ordinary Ukrainians and ordinary citizens of the countries that support it that matter in all this — without them, no government action will be successful. It is their hearts and minds that need to be opened to Ukraine, and only culture can do this.
Uilleam Blacker is a scholar and translator of Ukrainian literature. He teaches Ukrainian and east European culture at University College London. In autumn 2025, he is a visiting professor at the Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. He is the author of Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe (2019). He has written about Ukraine for The Atlantic, The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Financial Times, and other publications. His translations have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, PN Review, White Review, The Guardian, Words Without Borders, and more.
Image: Sevilâ Nariman-qızı, medeniyetniñ tolaçıqlarnen olacağımız qurula (tomorrow is built from the bricks of culture) from the series menim – seniñ (mine – yours), 2025
