By Bohdana Batsko, project assistant of the Cooperation Program for Spain and Latin America at the Transatlantic Dialogue Center
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“I have no strength left for a message of encouragement. Let’s survive.” With these words, Yuliia Orlova, general director of the Vivat publishing house, closed her post about one of the latest Russian attacks, that of August 28. That day, more than 60,000 books from more than ten Ukrainian publishers and bookstores stored in a single warehouse burned. These are actions directed against the Ukrainian word. And against the conditions that make it possible to be free to be Ukrainian.
At the end of summer, Russia changed its drone attack tactics against cities and towns in Ukraine. The last week of August brought daily bombings aimed at exhausting Ukrainian air defense, damaging critical infrastructure, and pressuring the economy and the psyche of the civilian population. With more than 2,800 drones launched in one month, the likelihood of suffering an explosion or its blast wave increased tangibly. In these circumstances, everyone looks for something to hold on to: staying informed and knowing what to do in case of danger, or maintaining routine, beloved work, study, time with loved ones.
That sense of control is fragile. Life remains relatively predictable until the news arrives that acquaintances of acquaintances were caught in a bombing in their own apartment because that very night they decided not to go down to the shelter after so many sleepless nights. Or until it is known that an attack hit a warehouse in the Kyiv region where thousands of Ukrainian books were stored. That event has long-term effects. The reader will notice higher prices and fewer titles in bookstores. The bookseller or the director of a publishing house will lose their job or have to make difficult decisions to stay in the industry. So far, these are economic problems that many countries know. What makes the Ukrainian case particular are the strategic and worldview levels, where what is under pressure is sovereignty and the very right to exist.
First, the scale. According to Artem Bidenko, president of the Ukrainian Publishers Association, during the summer of 2026 Russian attacks destroyed nearly 13 million books, including hundreds of thousands of school textbooks. Losses exceed 20 million dollars. Here the commercial directly determines the existence of the value: in the midst of a war that is also existential, many publishers fulfill a cultural function for the State, sustain national identity, and publish books that were banned or displaced by the Russians when the territories of present-day Ukraine were part of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union.
And this is the key point: even after independence in 1991, Russia did not give up its strategy of economic, political, and cultural expansion over Ukraine and the rest of the so-called post-Soviet space. The shelves of Ukrainian bookstores were full of Russian authors; radios, of Russian songs; television, of Russian series. Skeptics will say: multiculturalism and pluralism. It would be a fair observation if behind that diversity there were not imperial structures and a long-term planned influence strategy. Ukraine entered the 21st century in that reality. Ukrainian artists painted their mural every night hoping the world would see it, and every morning they discovered that someone had replaced their brushes with branches, their paints with water, and that the wall was made of sand that the rain dissolved: Russian capital, its influence and meanings, where Ukrainian identity was a mistake or a joke.
In 2026, in the fifth year of the large-scale war, the panorama is different. Russian influence in the Ukrainian cultural space is minimal; Ukrainian culture develops, rediscovers itself, and circulates worldwide. For Russian strategists, that status quo is unacceptable. As Russia’s soft power failed, active war allows disguising direct attacks against Ukrainian cultural infrastructure as attempts to hit military targets. The real intention is to destroy the culture that preserves memory and shapes the values, identity, and way of thinking of Ukrainians.
As long as responsibility for these acts remains an ethical concept and not a legal norm with a real punishment mechanism, the attacks will continue and the world will end up perceiving them as normal.
