They were killed by Russia: Ukraine creates project about its fallen cultural figures – photos
Pravda Ukraine
Ukraine has created a project called They Were Killed by Russia: Figures of Ukrainian Culture, dedicated to the memory of fallen cultural figures. PEN Ukraine started working on the project at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Source: Ukrainska Pravda.Zhyttia
Details: In 2024, the project was joined by state institutions and NGOs, among them INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Interaction, Memorial Memory Platform, Raphael Lemkin Society, Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, ZMINA Human Rights Centre, and NeMo: Ukrainian Heritage Monitoring Lab.
The online project is coordinated by Diana Deliurman, journalist and communications manager of PEN Ukraine.
The project’s goal is monitoring the losses among Ukrainian cultural figures, not only to record the names of the deceased but also to demand accountability for the perpetrators through advocacy for the victims’ cases at the international level.
“We have joined the efforts of public and state institutions so that the materials we have collected can be disseminated by Ukrainian and foreign human rights activists, journalists, diplomats, and politicians for advocacy purposes, spreading the word about the talented Ukrainians whose lives were taken by Russia, about their legacy and about the genocidal war that Russians are waging against us, our culture and identity,” the initiators said.
Currently, the project’s online platform contains the names of 181 Ukrainian cultural figures killed by Russia. The website groups the deceased cultural figures by their fields of work, years and circumstances of death.
It is noted that the list is not exhaustive, as there is no access to information from the temporarily occupied territories. If you have information about other crimes of the Russian army, you can send it to [email protected].
Last year, PEN Ukraine and The Ukrainians Media released a joint project, Cultural Figures Taken by War – a series of portraits of deceased cultural figures and artists that emerged in the process of studying their work, conversations with relatives and colleagues, and trips to Ukraine.
PEN said that the series was inspired by the writer Viktoriia Amelina, killed by a Russian missile, who wrote “as long as a writer is read, he is alive” in the preface to the occupation diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, who was tortured to death by the Russians.
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