Russian strikes destroy 12 million books ahead of Ukraine’s first week back at school

BBC:

Viktoria Haidai surveys the mangled remains of the printing press, which should have been busy churning out textbooks ready for the new school year.

The plant, on the edge of Kyiv, was hit during the night by a Russian missile, just as production was ramping up to deliver 1.3 million books – 10% of Ukraine’s schoolbooks.

In the ashes there is a charred page from an English language textbook: “My name is William, I’m from the UK. My grandmother lives in Nottingham. It’s a beautiful city.”

Russia has hit printing presses and publishing houses across Ukraine in a series of recent attacks, destroying 12 million books and damaging other icons of Ukrainian history and culture. Local media report that Russia has destroyed one third of all the books printed in Ukraine this year.

Nothing is salvageable at this Kyiv printing press. Even the pages that survived the flames have succumbed to water damage, from firefighting or exposure to the elements from the collapsed roof.

“I believe it is deliberate on the part of the Russian Federation,” says Haidai, commercial director of the Konvi publishing firm. “Over the past two months, some of the largest publishing houses have lost their logistics warehouses, where very large quantities of books were stored.

“The Russians are also destroying printing houses in an attempt to erase Ukraine as a nation. But frankly they will not succeed.”

More than 35 publishing facilities have been hit over recent weeks.

But it’s not just fresh pages coming under attack. Kyiv’s Pochaina second-hand book market was also struck, wiping out hundreds of individual stalls and countless treasured tomes.

Before firefighters had finished extinguishing the blaze, I found Liliya Velyka, a 28-year-old book blogger, raking through the smouldering ruins, seeing if anything could be saved. She clutched a soaking copy of a sci-fi novel.

“Books are saving us and losing this is like losing our hearts,” she says.

Museums, art galleries, film studios, libraries, and opera houses have also been damaged. At Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the capital’s large medieval monastery and cultural heritage site, the golden domes of the Dormition Cathedral were hit.

Religious artefacts were moved to safety but a large section of the roof was set ablaze after a drone attack. Repairs are predicted to cost $11.2 million (£8.2m) and will take two years.

The site is also home to Ukraine’s museum of books and printing. Unesco listed the complex in 1990, and added it to its register of world heritage sites in danger in September 2023.

At recent celebrations marking 975 years since the monastery’s founding, Unesco’s Director-General Khaled El-Enany said he was “deeply saddened” to see “the significant damage”.

“Unesco firmly condemns all attacks against cultural property protected under international law,” he told gathered dignitaries, including President Volodymyr Zelensky.

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.