The War Against Ukrainian Culture

Russia set the Dormition Cathedral on fire last night. It was not an accident.

Last night, between 1 a.m. and dawn, russia launched 611 drones and 70 missiles at Ukraine. Most were aimed at Kyiv. They killed at least five people in the capital and injured dozens more, including a pregnant woman and two children, ages five and six. They killed five Ukrainian rescuers in Kharkiv – men who had run toward an earlier fire and were caught by a second strike timed to kill the people trying to save lives.

They also set fire to one of the holiest sites in all of Eastern Christianity.

The Kyiv Pechersk Lavra – the Monastery of the Caves – was founded in the eleventh century, almost a thousand years ago. Its caves were a place of prayer before Kyiv officially adopted Christianity. Its surface churches and underground catacombs hold the relics of saints buried over centuries. UNESCO calls it a masterpiece of Ukrainian art and a World Heritage Site. To Eastern Christians, it is something more than a building. It is a place where God has been worshiped continuously for ten centuries.

Russian missiles hit the complex. The roof of the Dormition Cathedral at its center caught fire. Firefighters battled the flames beneath the towers as smoke rose over Kyiv at dawn. This is only the third time the Lavra has been damaged since the Second World War. The first time was earlier in this war, in January 2024. The attacker was russia then. The attacker is russia now.

This is what russia is actually fighting.

When people think about war, they think about soldiers, tanks, missiles, and territory. But some wars are fought over something deeper – over memory, identity, and the right of a people to exist as themselves. Russia’s war against Ukraine is one of those wars.

The pattern of attacks on Ukrainian cultural institutions is too consistent to be accidental.

In recent weeks, russian strikes have damaged or destroyed the Kharkiv Art Museum, where five people were injured including a one-month-old girl. The Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kyiv, hit twice last night, lost its costume department – approximately 100,000 costumes and three million individual garments, the largest such collection in Ukraine. The Chornobyl Museum, devoted to humanity’s worst nuclear disaster, was destroyed in last month’s attack on Kyiv. The National Art Museum of Ukraine, the Church of the Nativity of Christ, the Kyiv Municipal Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, the Kyiv Small Opera, and the Ukrainian House have all been damaged.

Each individual strike can be dismissed as collateral damage. The pattern cannot.

For two thousand years, conquerors have understood that you cannot fully subdue a people by killing only their soldiers. Armies can be rebuilt and territory can be retaken. What is harder to recover is the cultural memory that tells a people who they are. So invaders have burned libraries, banned languages, and destroyed monuments wherever they could not assimilate the people they conquered. The goal was never only military victory. It was to make a people forget themselves.

Russia has been explicit about this objective. Russian state media has openly called for the “de-Ukrainization” of Ukraine. Thousands of Ukrainian children have been deported to russia and subjected to programs designed to strip them of their Ukrainian identity. In occupied territories, Ukrainian history is rewritten in schools, Ukrainian books are removed from libraries, and Ukrainian symbols are replaced. The Lavra strike fits into this campaign exactly. It is the same war fought with different weapons.

When a museum burns, more than a building is lost. When a church is struck, more than stone is damaged. When a costume archive is destroyed, more than fabric is gone. A nation lives not only through its people but through the institutions that preserve its collective memory. A people can rebuild a bridge in months. They can rebuild a power plant in years. Some cultural losses can never be recovered.

The Dormition Cathedral has been rebuilt before. It was destroyed in 1941, during the Second World War, in circumstances Soviet and Nazi authorities each blamed on the other. It took fifty years to bring it back. The version that burned last night was completed in 2000. It is sacred now not only for what it is but for what it has survived.

This is why the defense of Ukraine is more than a military struggle. It is the defense of a culture, a history, and a national identity that russia has spent generations trying to erase – first by force, then by Soviet repression, now by missile.

Metropolitan Epiphanius, the head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, called last night’s strike “another Russian crime against humanity, against history, against Christianity.” He is right.

The men who launched those missiles are not defending the faith they claim to represent. The russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill has blessed this war from his pulpit and disgraced himself before history. The regime he serves is doing what russian empires have done to Ukraine for centuries – trying to convince the world, and convince Ukrainians themselves, that Ukraine is not a real country with a real history and a real culture worth defending.

The Lavra answered them last night with a thousand years of evidence to the contrary.

Ukraine fights not only for its land. It fights for its right to remain Ukraine. It fights for its language, which russia has tried to extinguish in every generation since the seventeenth century. It fights for its history, which russia has tried to steal and overwrite. It fights for its churches, its theaters, its museums, its archives, its songs, and its names.

It fights for memory itself.

The Lavra will be rebuilt again. So will every museum, every theater, and every church russia destroys. Ukraine has been doing this for a thousand years, and the answer to the question russia keeps asking – does Ukraine really exist? – was visible last night in the smoke rising from a cathedral that has stood, in one form or another, for nearly a millennium.

It exists.

Slava Ukraini.