Understanding the conflict two years on.
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When Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, annexing the Crimean Peninsula and bringing turmoil and destruction to Ukraine’s eastern regions, many people—both outside Ukraine and inside it—found it easier to ignore the violence unfolding in the country’s east than admit that war had returned to Europe. This included creative artists, who rarely mentioned the war in their works, not least because they feared scaring off the Russian fans who constituted much of their audience.
Seri/Graph studio illustrations for Foreign Policy
When Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, annexing the Crimean Peninsula and bringing turmoil and destruction to Ukraine’s eastern regions, many people—both outside Ukraine and inside it—found it easier to ignore the violence unfolding in the country’s east than admit that war had returned to Europe. This included creative artists, who rarely mentioned the war in their works, not least because they feared scaring off the Russian fans who constituted much of their audience.
As Ukrainians all over the country woke up to explosions on Feb. 24, 2022, the truth could no longer be ignored: The “big war” had truly begun. Today, the country’s art is catching up to the truth of war.
Before 2022, few Ukrainian artists and entertainers openly mentioned the ongoing war in their works. In fact, many pop stars like Ivan Dorn or Luna continued to perform in Russia and created works aimed, first and foremost, at the Russian market and in the Russian language. When criticized for this by their Ukrainian fans, many dodged the subject, claimed to be “apolitical,” or explained their actions as “trying to build a bridge” between Russia and Ukraine.
“My music isn’t about politics, it’s about healing souls,” Luna said in a lengthy interview with Russian opposition journalist Xenia Sobchak in 2021. “That’s why I don’t pay attention to the critics back home trying to make me feel guilty for giving concerts in Russia.” Similarly, Dorn claimed that by interacting with Russian listeners he was “trying to capture as many people as possible with my music so that they would never attack my own country.”
But the main reasons were pragmatic ones: The large and relatively rich Russian market has long been attractive to Ukrainian performers, much like the American market for the English-speaking world. Making films or music built around a Ukrainian context could scare off Russian fans, so the overwhelming majority of content made in the 2000s and 2010s was tailored to sound and look as neutral as possible, devoid of any references to local events or personalities. There were, of course, notable exceptions.
Musicians, such as singer and veteran military paramedic Anastasiia Shevchenko, better known by her pseudonym СТАСІK, wrote songs openly referencing the war in their lyrics and music videos. Indie rapper Stas Koroliov released an entire album in 2021 of tracks inspired by the war and society’s apathy toward it. It contained lyrics like “I now understand that to become a messiah you just need to state the obvious: My homeland is at war with Russia.”
While mainstream comedies that wanted both Ukrainian and Russian box office sales steered clear of any references to recent domestic events, independent movies were more willing to process the violence taking place in Ukraine’s eastern regions and the loss of Crimea. Wartime dramas such as Tymur Yashchenko’s U311 Cherkasy (named after the naval mine sweeper blocked by Russian forces during the capture of Crimea) and Maryna Er Gorbach’s Klondike addressed specific events of the Russo-Ukrainian war, while Nariman Aliev’s 2019 drama Homeward was a meditation on what the loss of Crimea meant for its indigenous Tatar population. Other films, such as Volodymyr Tykhyi’s dramedy Our Kitties, tried to find humor amid the heartbreak and horrors faced by the Ukrainian soldiers stationed on the frontlines.
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Everything changed in early 2022, when war—previously treated as a niche subject that was likely to scare off people looking for light entertainment—quickly became the only topic most Ukrainians were interested in. As missiles rained down, entertainers suddenly realized that they could not remain apolitical bystanders any longer.
Almost every popular musician spoke out against the invasion, with several (such as Dasha Astafieva and Vitaly Kozlovskiy) apologizing for performing in Russia and platforming their Russian colleagues in recent years. “I felt like a zombie while performing in Russia. I’d arrive, smile mechanically at everyone, do the set and return home. Russia has a lot of money but it’s a soulless place,” Astafieva wrote in a social media post shortly after the start of the full-scale invasion. Many artists—such as Antytila leader Taras Tolopya, singer Yarmak, and most of the lineup of cult Kharkiv-based hip-hop group TNMK—took up arms and joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine, while others took to volunteering by raising funds and sourcing equipment for Ukrainian soldiers, performing on the frontlines, or training as medics.
Some of their personal stories exemplified Ukraine’s modern civic identity, which has little to do with ethnicity or where you were born. Instead, for many, it’s a choice. Take Yulia Yurina: The Russian-born musician first came to Ukraine as a 18-year-old student in 2012 and soon joined forces with Ukrainian-born Stas Koroliov to form critically acclaimed pop-folk duo Yuko. Today, Yurina—still formally a Russian citizen despite publicly renouncing her citizenship and applying for a Ukrainian passport—is not only a beloved performer, whose recent album encapsulates much of the anger and grief felt by the average Ukrainian, but also a volunteer working tirelessly to provide the Ukrainian Armed Forces with weapons and equipment. “I dance through the bullets as air raid sirens sing to me,” Yurina sings on one of the album’s tracks. “I am disgusted by what you’ve done here, you’re killing souls but you won’t be able to kill our dreams. We are not your friends, your family, or your lovers.”
During the first months of the war, a new subgenre of locally produced music arose. “Bayraktar-core” (the semi-ironic name came from how often these songs mentioned the Turkish drones used to great effect by Ukrainian forces in the early stages of the war) songs were simple, composed over a mere few weeks, catchy, and characterized by their aggressive optimism, constant references to recent events, local politicians, wartime memes, and foreign allies (Boris Johnson, then British prime minister, was mentioned often).
What these songs lacked in lyrical nuance and musical innovation they more than made up for by giving millions of Ukrainians a sense of unity and community amid the chaos and horror. “Occupiers came to Ukraine, wearing new uniforms and driving military vehicles,” go the lyrics of one of the most popular “Bayraktar-core” songs. “But their equipment was soon ruined by the Bayraktar!” Some, such as a viral mashup sampling a folk tune and a phrase spoken by Johnson, made the leap over to English-language social media.
While simple war-themed entertainment (or even anything vaguely patriotic and uplifting) might have been enough for listeners and viewers in the early months of the war, the artistic questions got sharper as the fight went on.
Was it ethically acceptable to use trauma you hadn’t personally experienced as a source of inspiration for art? Did performers who left the country soon after the full-scale invasion have a right to make money off of songs mentioning the horrors others faced while staying in Ukraine? Could writers who hadn’t personally experienced life under Russian occupation use the devastation in say, Bucha or Mariupol, in their stories? And what if they conducted interviews with the people who had? Many of these questions lack definite answers, but the public response to various works inspired by the war have been noticeably different.
When writer Daria Gnatko announced in late 2022 that she would be publishing a novel set in Russian-occupied Bucha, many pointed out that not enough time had passed to properly process the events that had transpired in the town, and wondered whether writing a story like this without conducting in-depth interviews with the survivors of the occupation was a form of exploitation. The book, along with another upcoming work by Gnatko, a novel inspired by the destruction and occupation of Mariupol, was postponed indefinitely by the publisher after a wave of public criticism.
Likewise, popular writer Kateryna Babkina’s latest novel Mom, Do You Remember? was met with controversy after the author, who had spent much of the war abroad, announced that the plot would be inspired by the occupation of Bucha. Some reviewers were concerned that not enough time had passed since the liberation of Kyiv Oblast and that the subject was still too triggering for most readers, while others darkly suspected Babkina had only mentioned the tragically famous town when announcing the book to draw more attention to her work.
However, most of this criticism was limited to social media, while the reviews in local publications were much more enthusiastic about the novel—which is told from the perspective of a teenage girl narrowly escaping from Russian occupation with her infant half-sister and trying to build a life for them both abroad—and described it as a touching and delicate work full of compassion.
“If for some Ukrainians the book is therapeutic, for foreigners, in particular for Poles, who can already read Babkina’s story, it gives a more internal context about what war victims experience—who walk the same streets and visit the same shops as they do—actually go through. What challenges and problems they face, what they feel, why some do not learn the language and choose to return home despite the missile attacks, and what is happening in the hearts of millions of children who were forced to grow up one day when their world was destroyed by Russia,” wrote a reviewer for the Polish-Ukrainian outlet Sestry.
The truth is that when it comes to describing experiences as traumatic as an ongoing war, there isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all perspective or approach. Some readers find works written about or vaguely inspired by something they or their loved ones went through therapeutic, while others find them triggering or even offensive.
When it comes to film, meanwhile, the pre-2022 offerings were earnest but often unwatched. Reviewers treated these movies as important pieces of cinema, but ones that described horrors most Ukrainians preferred not to dwell on for too long. After the full-scale invasion, however, a dark realization dawned: The wartime dramas were now reflections of our own collective experience, and no romantic comedy or workplace drama was going to stop you from thinking about shrapnel and blood.
That was supplemented by the belief that Ukrainians had to bear witness. At a time when many civilians felt abandoned by human rights organizations’ failure to document Russian war crimes (Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy personally called out the International Red Cross over its inaction after the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam, while Amnesty International found itself in hot water after publishing a much-criticized report accusing Ukraine of endangering its own civilians), filmmakers took this challenge upon themselves. Documentaries shot during the siege of Mariupol, after the liberation of Bucha, and during the near-constant shelling of Kharkiv became a powerful tool for cultural diplomacy, encouraging non-Ukrainians to support Ukraine, and an instrument to counter Russian propaganda and war fatigue in the West. Perhaps the best-known example is the Oscar-nominated documentary film 20 Days in Mariupol, which garnered universally positive reviews at home and abroad and offered viewers a unique glimpse into the horrors faced by the residents and defenders of the besieged city.
One unexpected wartime challenge is creating entertainment aimed at children. How do you keep kids of vastly different ages entertained while sitting in cold, poorly-lit bomb shelters for hours on end? How do you teach them the rules of wartime safety in an accessible and easy-to-remember format? How do you help them process the heartbreak of losing loved ones, having parents on the frontlines, or living in constant fear of missiles and drones? And perhaps most importantly, how do you begin to broach the topic that there are people who want these kids and their entire families dead? This is when Patron—a real-life sapper dog who became an unexpected celebrity among both kids and adults alike—came in handy.
The wildly popular Jack Russell Terrier, who works as a detection dog and mascot for the State Emergency Service of Ukraine first caught the public’s eye in early 2022, when the dog was awarded a medal for locating and helping defuse unexploded mines left behind by Russian forces after they were driven out of Chernihiv. A video of the bulletproof vest-wearing puppy went viral, and the newly famous dog was soon making charity appearances, visiting kids harmed by the war in hospitals across the country, and even got his own animated web show and book series. Content starring Patron is produced in partnership with UNICEF and aims to teach Ukrainian kids the importance of staying away from abandoned landmines, avoiding suspicious objects left behind by the invading army, and staying brave under difficult circumstances.
Undoubtedly, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has led to a heightened interest toward local art both among Ukrainians and foreigners, as well as provided an entire generation of artists with stories of sacrifice, courage, and defiance—stories that, despite their complexity, simply must be told, and that may well become modern classics at an international scale. When Penguin Press bought the rights to Ukrainian writer and soldier Oleksandr Mykhed’s autobiographical novel The Language of War, publishing director Casiana Ionita described the book as “a war book that will be read 10, 20, 50 years from now.” But it’s unclear if enough foreign publishers are ready to break their long-standing tradition of viewing events in Ukraine solely through the eyes of their Moscow-educated authors and allow Ukrainians on the frontlines to speak for themselves, like Mykhed, before the war claims them too.
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