The Conversation - Putin's war on Ukrainian culture

Much of the news on the Russia-Ukraine war, now entering its third year, centers on advances, retreats, casualties, funding and politics.

Often missing from the coverage is the subtle, more pernicious damage to Ukrainian culture and history – the libraries, churches and artifacts damaged or lost to shrapnel, bullets and looting.

Notre Dame anthropologist Ian Kuijt and filmmaker Bill Donaruma made two trips to Ukraine in 2023. Working with Ukrainian scholars including National University of Kyiv archaeologist Pavlo Shydlovskyi, they toured parts of the country that had been occupied by Russian troops, documenting what they saw.

In an essay and two short films, they take readers to a bullet-riddled village church and a hill that has served as a lookout point since medieval times, where trenches dug by Ukrainian troops revealed human bones from centuries ago.

“While the destruction of churches, libraries and museums viscerally evokes a sense of loss,” they write, “there’s an entire unseen world below the ground surface – filled with untold numbers of artifacts, bones and buried buildings – that are exposed when trenches are created.”

We've also collected articles on the impact of drone warfare, the role of collaborators now and in the past, and other stories to mark the second anniversary of the war in Ukraine.