Every war is not only a struggle over areas, territories, over resources, against humans, or against the equipment, the infrastructure of the enemy. It is essentially, and sometimes overwhelmingly, a struggle against the culture of the opposing country. And this point is essential in the current war in Ukraine. The Russians want to push back, to destroy Ukrainian culture, especially when they say that Ukrainian culture itself doesn’t exist. They claim it is all part of Russian culture and that there is no distinct Ukrainian one. And so you can imagine that everything connected with maintaining the culture, everything that creates new aspects of the culture, has to be suppressed and not only suppressed, but completely destroyed. That’s what the Russians do.
And I think the similar behavior of the Ukrainians—to suppress, to push back all Russian influence on Ukrainian culture—is not only reactive; it is a kind of self-protection of their own culture. And so, on the one hand, we can complain about suppressing Russian culture in Ukraine, but on the other hand, it is quite understandable and part of the whole war, part of the whole struggle to overcome Russian influence.