El-Enany toured the cathedral with Ukraine’s minister of culture, Tetyana Berezhna, who told me the cultural and military impacts of Russia’s war should not be separated.
“This is an existential war, so Russia wants to destroy us as a nation, to erase us as a nation, like Ukrainians do not exist and have never existed. That’s why Russia targets our cultural heritage, the symbols of our presence here for a long time.
“They understand that it’s very important for us because we protect our identity, we protect our culture, and Russia wants to ruin everything that it cannot appropriate.”
Berezhna says Russia has attacked over 1,900 pieces of Ukrainian heritage and more than 2,000 cultural institutions. Digitisation is part of the strategy to protect art and literature and ensure children can still learn, despite the attacks on physical books.
There are warnings Ukraine’s entire publishing sector is under threat and needs international support to remain viable.
At the bombed Kyiv printing press Viktoria Haidai told me protecting the industry was vital to preserving Ukrainian literature. “The word is everything. It is our development, our culture, and our historical heritage that is passed down from generation to generation.”
In a 2021 essay, titled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that Ukrainians and Russians were one people, and questioned the legitimacy of an independent Ukrainian state and culture.
In a statement to the BBC, the Russian embassy to the UK blamed Ukraine’s own government for damage to its cultural heritage, saying monuments had been dismantled and streets renamed. It also claimed cultural sites had been used to conceal military facilities.
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied deliberately hitting civilian targets throughout the five years of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, despite repeated and widespread missile and drone attacks on residential buildings and other civilian infrastructure.
Additional reporting by Mariana Matveichuk, Volodymyr Lozhko and Anastasiia Levchenko
