Daria Herasymchuk provides a comprehensive and sobering account of what Russia’s invasion is doing to children. Demonstrating resolve and resilience, she describes Ukraine’s efforts to ensure the safety of children at home and worldwide.

Ukrainian children are a frequent target of Russian attacks on civilians. How do children wounded by the aggressor state recover from their trauma? How do Ukrainian parents provide support when Russia has made safety impossible? Diana Deliurman reports on Ukrainian kids who have endured injury, loss, rehabilitation, and made it back to childhood — transformed.

The glare of war forces carefree children to grow up quickly. Poems by Artur Dron’, currently serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and Maksym ‘Dali’ Kryvtsov, killed in the line of duty in 2024, illuminate the tenderness, resolve, and tragedy at the heart of Ukraine’s fight to protect the future of its children.

Adolescence under any conditions is traditionally a time of exploration and self-discovery. Sixteen-year-olds Daryna Rud from Ukraine and Emma Roberts from the UK reveal what they have in common, despite incomparably different experiences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: a sincere interest in their peers and in the world they share.

Iuliia Skubytska outlines the history of the Soviet summer camps Russia is employing in the mass deportation and re-education of Ukrainian children. Her overview shows how the complex legacy that Russia is exploiting encompasses infrastructure, ideology, and personal memory, and raises questions about the role of individuals in implementing state policy.

Highlighting the intimate relationship between cinema and political culture, Olga Birzul surveys the landscape of Ukrainian documentary films with young protagonists. Marked by sensitivity and commitment, this cinematic trend reflects the turbulent conditions in which Ukrainian children are becoming adults.

This issue of the London Ukrainian Review is dedicated to justice. It explores how impunity for Russia’s crimes of the past breeds its genocidal war against Ukraine in the present. Ukrainians’ fight for justice is viewed from the standpoint of the Sixtiers and the Maidan generations, through the eyes of an art historian, lawyer, ex-serviceman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Ukraine is at the forefront of envisioning justice in a changing world. While acknowledging the immense individual toll of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, Oleksandra Matviichuk sees possibilities for bringing war criminals to justice before the war ends, renewing the rule of law, and creating a future where justice can exist — if individuals do their part.

How does a pacifist find himself fighting Russian troops on the front line—together with other Ukrainians who had dedicated their lives to preserving human rights, lives, and culture? Yevhen Shybalov searches his personal history—from the lawless 1990s to the Revolution of Dignity to spring 2022—for the source of Ukrainians’ will to fight against injustice.

In the aftermath of the ground-breaking exhibition of modernism from Ukraine ‘In the Eye of the Storm’, its co-curator Katia Denysova reflects on justice in the realm of art history. Erased by Russian colonialism for centuries, the place of Ukraine’s artists and heritage in global cultural history must be restored.

Vasyl Stus was an extraordinary Ukrainian poet and dissident who died in a labour camp in Russia three years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Bohdan Tokarskyi notes in his introduction to the poetry translations, Stus was ‘uncompromising in his pursuit of justice and the truth’ in his life and art.

Ukrainian state and civil society have responded to Russia’s war-related atrocities in ways that can galvanise transformations in the legal sphere both inside Ukraine and globally. Kateryna Busol uncovers the patterns of unwavering resilience and draws attention to the avenues for change it has opened up for the international community.

For the eightieth anniversary of the Soviet deportation of Crimean Tatars, the London Ukrainian Review dedicates its second issue of 2024 to the Russia-occupied Crimean peninsula and its Indigenous people’s ongoing fight for justice.

The mass deportation of Crimean Tatars in May 1944 is rooted in Russian settler colonialism which Martin-Oleksandr Kisly traces to the subjugation of Crimea by Catherine II. Eighty years after the grievous crime against the Indigenous people of Crimea, Crimean Tatars are under Russia’s occupation and banned from marking this historic date.

The stories of three Crimean Tatar women, Emine Ziyatdinova’s paternal grandmother, mother, and the author herself, revolve around their relationship with Crimea and its history. The essay is based on multiple interviews with her family Ziyatdinova recorded between 2008 and 2022   as well as her personal memories.

Exploring the legacy of Crimean Tatar autonomy in the aftermath of World War I and its progressive governing body, the Qurultay, Rory Finnin releases the history of the Black Sea peninsula from the grip of Kremlin obfuscations, and envisions a future, free Crimea within Ukraine.

The histories of anti-colonial resistance of Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian peoples provide a common ground for them to construct a non-competitive and hopeful story of Crimea’s future. Mariia Shynkarenko argues that a key component of this future is Ukraine’s recognition of Crimean Tatars’ Indigeneity as a political rather than just cultural category.

Alim Aliev surveys topics which have been in the spotlight since Russia occupied Crimea in 2014: the violation of human rights by the occupational regime, the Indigeneity of Crimean Tatars, the militarisation of the peninsula, and various solutions proposed by political leaders for the ‘Crimean issue’ over the decade.

This issue of the London Ukrainian Review looks into Russia’s war on nature in Ukraine and its global repercussions. The editor Sasha Dovzhyk reflects on how Ukrainian and international responses to Russia’s wanton damage to the environment shape our present and future.

Jojo Mehta speaks about the addition of ecocide as the fifth international crime to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on international legal discourse, and the significance of the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam for the debate.

The bird observing the devastation brought by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam, the house of an artist uprooted by the flood, the trees stripped of their leaves by a blast wave: Kateryna Mikhalitsyna’s poems give them a voice so they can testify about Russia’s war crimes.

While imagining the war’s clear end might feel therapeutic, Svitlana Matviyenko seeks to shake our imaginations into envisioning the forms of coexistence and mutual care in the world of radioactive colonialism, where the end of occupation is delayed to the point of never.

The war has changed the relationship of Ukrainians with their landscapes, memory, identity, and belonging. Referring to dozens of works, which manifest an environmental strand in contemporary Ukrainian culture, Kateryna Iakovlenko questions our place in the deadly terrain of the war.

The inclusion of ecocide and the need for immediate protection of the environment in Ukraine’s peace formula advance the rule of law globally. Thammy Evans discusses Ukraine’s recent legislative revisions, which expand our understanding and improve responsible governance of the ecosystem that sustains us.

Roman Adrian Cybriwsky’s Along Ukraine’s River: A Social and Environmental History of the Dnipro (2018) explores the river which has become the frontline of Russia’s invasion today. Marjukka Porvari’s review focuses on the colonial history of the Dnipro from Tsarist to Soviet times.

One of the two winning entries for the Ukrainian Literature in Translation Prize is Daisy Gibbons’ selection of Facebook posts by Artem Chekh, a Ukrainian writer and veteran who went back to serve in the Armed Forces when Russia launched the full-scale invasion. As the translator observes, the dispatches showcase Chekh’s ‘wry appreciation of social relations during wartime’ which combine experiences such as lying in a sniper’s nest and receiving nudes from strangers, conversations with air defence servicemen who have just shot down a missile, and with liberated civilians who have survived months under occupation.

Daisy Gibbons’ translation of an abstract play by Olha Matsiupa (written in 2017) is one of the winning entries for the Ukrainian Literature in Translation Prize. As the translator explains, this experimental piece documents ‘war trauma without showing frontline experience’. Set in Kyiv and framed by a Pilates class, the play involves incongruous characters, including a Pilates instructor who turns into an executioner, Herostratus, who orchestrates an arson thus killing the protagonist’s parents, and the protagonist’s traumatised partner.

Yulia Musakovska’s poem about the death of a soldier was written after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The translator Olena Jennings notes that the poem is addressed to ‘you’, thereby encouraging the reader to contemplate their role in the war and share responsibility for it.

This poetic record of a person’s transformation into a soldier comes from Yulia Musakovska’s collection The God of Freedom (2021). According to the translator Olena Jennings, it contains the idea of ‘poetry transcending the physical’ and exemplifies Musakovska’s unique way of writing about the body.

Oleksandr Kocharyan’s quiet poem of anticipation draws attention to the civilian experience of waiting for the big war.

Taras Shumeyko, a Ukrainian historian, journalist, and war reporter, comes to his hometown of Bucha to cover a tragedy that filled global headlines in April 2022.

Giving voice to a frontline medic and a soldier and bridging their life-and-death experiences, Olha Kryshtopa’s short story also offers a glimpse into the future after Ukraine’s victory.

Thirty-one years since Ukraine regained its independence, and six months to the day since Russia escalated its eight-year long war to engulf the entire country, it is high time to hear and believe ‘Ukrainian Cassandras’.

The winner of the Ukrainian Literature in Translation Prize run by the Ukrainian Institute London in 2021 is Nina Murray’s excerpt from Lesia Ukrainka’s poetic drama Cassandra (written in 1907). In this play, the author chooses to tell one of the keystone myths of western culture, the story of the siege of Troy, from the point of view of a woman, the Trojan princess and prophet Cassandra. For the translator, Lesia Ukrainka’s exploration of the credibility of a woman as a producer of knowledge remains ‘highly relevant and compelling’.

The runner-up of the Ukrainian Literature in Translation Prize (2021) is Daisy Gibbons who submitted excerpts from Lesia Ukrainka’s tale ‘By the Sea’ (written in 1898, published in 1901). The tale is based on the author’s experience of staying in Crimean health resorts where she crossed paths with Russian tourists and patients. The heroine’s subdued frustration with one of them is in contrast with her contemplative connection to nature. ‘By the Sea’ raises the questions of imperialist chauvinism, national identity, and political solidarity.

Lesia Ukrainka’s correspondence with another pioneering feminist writer of the Ukrainian fin de siècle, Olha Kobylianska, reveals a search for a new model of female solidarity. The letters are a testament of an intimate friendship between two women authors who broke with patriarchal limitations on a professional, personal, and textual level. As the translator Daisy Gibbons explains, Ukrainka’s letters depart from linguistic norms by ‘using the genderless, coded voice peculiar to the authors’ correspondence that confuses writer and addressee. […] This is the first publication of the English translation of this letter that we are aware of’.

Lesia Ukrainka’s first prose drama The Blue Rose explores the vital topics of the European fin de siècle: heredity and madness, female hysteria and sexuality. It is an important example of the New Drama situated at the intersection of Symbolism and Naturalism. As the translator Lidia Wolanskyj explains, the chosen scenes relate to ‘the climax of the play, when the hero’s mother tries to dissuade him from his relationship with a young woman’ who has a family history of madness ‘and then the hero and heroine […] try to hang on to their ill-fated love’. The symbolic blue rose of the title stands for ‘attaining the impossible’.

Lesia Ukrainka wrote her Woman Possessed at the very turn of the twentieth century and at the bedside of her dying friend. An emphatically modernist text, it marks a rupture with the nineteenth-century literary traditions not only for Lesia Ukrainka but for Ukrainian literature in general. In this first of her poetic dramas, Lesia Ukrainka shifts the focus of the founding narrative of Christianity from Messiah to his impassioned disciple, the New Testament’s Miriam.

The poem ‘I wish this stream would carry me away’ was first published in 1901 and then reappeared in the collection On the Wings of Songs (Na krylakh pisen, 1904). Lesia Ukrainka employs the image of Ophelia which, according to the translator Iryna Shuvalova, reveals the writer’s ‘Neoromantic fascination with what in her time would be described as the Western canon’.

In 1896, Lesia Ukrainka wrote ‘City of Sorrow’ about the patients of a mental health clinic. It was published in the collection of her works in 1929. This short story is based on the author’s stay in the town Tworki near Warsaw where her uncle worked as the head doctor at the psychiatric hospital Warszawska Lecznica dla Obłąkanych.

This 1897 poem is dedicated to Mykhailo Kryvyniuk, a Social Democrat, Lesia Ukrainka’s friend and would-be brother-in-law, who was imprisoned in 1896 for his political activism. As the translator Bohdan Pechenyak points out, the poem got a second life when it was put to music by the Lviv band Korolivski Zaytsi.

The Neoromantic Forest Song is the most famous of Lesia Ukrainka’s poetic dramas, first published in 1912. The translator Eriel Vitiaz presents a selected passage about dreams drawing attention to the ability of the Forest Song’s heroine ‘to paint mesmerising pictures with words, pictures that show us glimpses of a different world where everything is more vibrant, more pronounced, and (in a way) more real’.

In Soviet Ukraine, Lesia Ukrainka’s poetic drama Forest Song has been presented as a naïve folk tale, while the more radical aspects of the drama, including Ukrainka’s subtle commentary on female agency, creativity, and embodiment, were overlooked. The translators Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps chose to render the work ‘in an English that would sound natural when spoken by young actors of diverse backgrounds and could easily be understood by an English-speaking theatre audience’.

Having chosen, at the age of 13, the pen name ‘Ukrainian woman’, Lesia Ukrainka went on to reinvent what it meant both to be a Ukrainian and a woman, dismantling the patriarchal foundations of Western literature along the way. In this article, published in the Los Angeles Review of Books to celebrate Lesia Ukrainka’s 150th birthday in February 2021, Sasha Dovzhyk shows how the author used revisionist feminist mythmaking to revolutionalise Ukrainian and European literature.

On the anniversary of the momentous referendum on the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine, this special publication of the Ukrainian Institute London takes stock of what makes Ukraine – thirty years young and feisty – a treasure trove of untold stories.

The Ukrainian Studies programme at the University of Cambridge will enable students to study Ukrainian language, culture, and history at the highest level for as long as the University exists. One of the key people responsible for this achievement is Rory Finnin, the Founding Director of Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, whose career became linked to Ukraine in what he describes as a ‘wonderful twist of fate’. Editor of the London Ukrainian Review Sasha Dovzhyk talks with him about the challenges of advancing Ukraine as a field of study on the international level and the lessons that Ukraine can teach the world.

While the thirtieth anniversary of Ukrainian independence invites us to reflect on what has been achieved so far, the issue which is likely to define the next three decades for Ukraine and the rest of the world is climate. For the first time in history, Ukraine has committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions and saying goodbye to coal. With the planet already 1.1°C warmer compared to the pre-industrial era, climate negotiations in Glasgow became an endurance test for global efforts to keep the rise in temperatures at a relatively safe level of 1.5°C. For Ukraine, this means modernising the economy, insulating buildings, and transforming whole regions where life revolves around coal.

Why did Ukrainian poets long to die in Paris at the end of the Soviet era? And how did the yearning for Europe manifest itself in the literature of independent Ukraine? Dr Uilleam Blacker explores three thriving decades in the history of Ukrainian literature, from a symbolically significant poem ‘We Will Not Die in Paris’ by Natalka Bilotserkivets and the experiments of the ‘Bu-Ba-Bu’ group to the powerful new war writing by Olena Stiazhkina, Serhii Zhadan, and Olesya Khromeychuk.

Like the country itself, Ukrainian cinema has gone through periods of stagnation in the 1990s and creative search in the 2000s, as well as a remarkable revitalisation after the Euromaidan revolution of 2014. Throughout the years of independence, Ukrainian filmmakers approached the question of national and cultural identity in diverse and surprising ways. Professor Vitaly Chernetsky surveys the films of the last three decades and draws attention to the linguistic and stylistic choices which have shaped Ukrainian identity on screen.

Olena Stiazhkina’s new novel takes the reader to the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, which has been the primary target of the Russian offensive since 2014 and remains occupied to this day. Debunking stereotypes about local identities, Stiazhkina draws attention to the Soviet roots of this ongoing tragedy. Born in western Ukraine, Mariana Matveichuk examines her changing ideas of Donetsk and reads Stiazhkina’s novel as a hopeful roadmap to a personal deoccupation.

On 7 September 2021, the world’s leading contemporary dance theatre Sadler’s Wells hosted a spectacular evening of Ukrainian ballet, brought to the United Kingdom by Olga Danylyuk and Ivan Putrov. The first of its kind in London, the Ukrainian Ballet Gala proved to be an example of how art can shape new cultural narratives and help Ukraine reclaim its cultural identity.