Bohdana Batsko, Project Assistant of the Spain and Latin America Cooperation Program at the Transatlantic Dialogue Center, published an op-ed in the Mundo section of Chilean outlet La Tercera on Russia’s attacks against Ukrainian culture and publishing.
Please note that the article is published in Spanish.
En el artículo, Batsko argues that Russia’s war targets not only Ukrainian infrastructure, but also Ukrainian culture itself. She refers to the Russian strike of August 28, which burned more than 60,000 books from over ten Ukrainian publishers and bookstores stored in a single warehouse — an attack on the Ukrainian word and on the conditions that make it possible to live freely as Ukrainians.
Batsko highlights the unprecedented scale of cultural destruction. According to figures cited from the Ukrainian Publishers Association, Russian attacks destroyed around 13 million books during the summer of 2026 alone, including hundreds of thousands of school textbooks, with losses exceeding $20 million.
The op-ed also explains why attacks on publishing are attacks on identity and sovereignty. In an existential war, Ukrainian publishers perform a cultural function for the state: they sustain national identity and publish books that were banned or displaced during Russian imperial and Soviet rule.
Batsko traces how, even after Ukraine’s independence in 1991, Russian cultural and economic influence continued to dominate Ukrainian media, music, television, and bookshelves. Now that Ukrainian culture is developing independently and gaining visibility around the world, Russia uses physical destruction to target what it can no longer control through soft power.
Por último, Batsko stresses that accountability for the destruction of culture must become a legal norm, not only an ethical principle. As long as such attacks are not met with real enforcement mechanisms, they will continue — and the world risks treating them as normal.
Lea el artículo completo a través del enlace.