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In May 2025, a two-day workshop “Ukrainian Scholars and Artists at War” was held in Berlin. The event was organized in partnership with several organizations: the Forum for Transregionale Studien, the Interdisciplinary Research Network “Prisma Ukraїna – Eastern Europe Research Network”, the academic website “Ukraine Moderna”, the NGO “The Center for Applied Anthropology”, and the European University Institute. The organizers of the event, Lidia Kuzemska, Oksana Ovsiiuk, and Iulia Lashchuk, created a platform for Ukrainian scholars and artists to engage with the ways war has impacted their professional, ethical, and existential horizons.
One of the highlights of the first day of the workshop was the co-presentation of the project “In the Thunderstorm of War” (an online collection of interviews with professional historians, anthropologists, and ethnologists about war time), co-curated by Oksana Ovsiiuk and Olena Sobolieva. Our goal was not only to capture the experience of wartime among Ukrainian scholars, but also to explore new modes of scholarly responsibility opened up in conditions of rupture. As the project’s author and editor-in-chief of Ukraina Moderna, Oksana Ovsiiuk herself emphasized, this work is both academic and public — an act of resistance aimed at preserving truth, scholarly continuity, and the cohesion of an academic community affected by war and still working through its consequences.
Julia Buyskykh, an anthropologist and translator who translated the lion’s share of the interviews, shared her experience working on the project. Julia is also the author of a diary published within the project. She kept these notes during the first month of the full-scale invasion.
During the presentation, Julia provided personal perspectives on writing as a means of holding on to the self during uncertainty. She defined translation as an ethical practice of listening, a practice requiring empathy, precision, and watchfulness over the limits of language itself.
One of the recurring themes throughout the workshop was the dual positionality of researchers in times of war, as both witnesses and participants. This hybridity resonated with many of the stories shared on the first day, particularly in the reflections of historians Volodymyr Mylko and Ihor Zhaloba, who left their academic positions to join the Armed Forces, yet continued to reflect critically on their experiences. For Mylko, “The primary task is to win” but “historians, at the very least, should record contemporary events, using, in particular, the method of oral history. Eyewitness testimonies are very important for creating a future archive of the Russian-Ukrainian war .” This urgency to preserve knowledge against destruction echoed throughout numerous testimonies. By writing encyclopedias, recording testimonies, or continuing to teach under siege, contributors emphasized that scholarship and research are today acts of existential care and resistance.
In his report, Igor Zhaloba paid special attention to the stages of the formation of civil society in Ukraine and the role it plays in resisting the Russian invasion.
The workshop also brought sharply into focus the decolonization imperative — at both knowledge production and institutional arrangements underpinning Ukrainian and East European studies. The problem was not only framed in formal presentation but also canvassed and debated through the trajectory of conversations and roundtables where scholars spoke about the lingering influence of Russian and Soviet epistemic hegemonies and breaking through these hierarchies from within.
These discussions continued during the first day’s roundtable (moderated by Viktoriya Sereda), where issues of feminization in Ukrainian studies, the precariousness of exile academic careers, and the need for long-term support to forced migrant scholars, and a discussion of strategies for returning to the profession as rehabilitation and a way to return to peaceful life for demobilized scholars took central stage. Our discussions confirmed firmly that even though the war has created unfixable ruptures, it also enabled new solidarities, infrastructures, and ethical requirements for scholarly practice.
Roundtable discussion “The Impact of War on Science and Researchers”
Besides the panel on academic witnessing and decolonization, the workshop consisted of a series of presentations emphasizing the diversity of wartime scholarly and artistic reactions. There was a presentation by sociologist Tetiana Kostiuchenko of the book “Russia’s War in Ukraine 2022: Personal Experiences of Ukrainian Scholars” (co-edited with Tamara Martsenyuk), which presented empirical evidence on how scholars have coped with displacement, career disruption, and limitations of instant mobility. She emphasized how war-induced exile is not merely a personal but also a disciplinary disruption which demands new methodology for documenting the fractured lives of researchers.
With a very emotional speech, Khrystyna Semeryn introduced the memorial project “Ukrainian Scientists at War”, devoted to scientists who were killed during the Russian-Ukrainian war. The project aims to preserve each name, every human story, as part of a growing picture of collective memory. By documenting the lives and deaths of Ukrainian researchers, the project honors their work but also defies forgetfulness by asserting that scientific labor is not separate from war, but grotesquely entwined in its wake.
The second day is dedicated to the artistic and cultural consequences of war. Day two of the workshops started with valuable experience sharing by Kateryna Rietz-Rakul, Head of Representative Office of the Ukrainian Institute in Germany. Drawing upon her vast experience in cultural diplomacy, Kateryna emphasized it is extremely important not to lose Ukraine’s presence in the world during the war. She touched upon the question of representing a country under attack and introduced participants to the programs of the Ukrainian Institute.
Iuliia Lashchuk and Anna Dolinska explored the visibility and working conditions of Ukrainian women artists in exile, focusing on how artistic work gains meaning in the context of forced displacement and how cultural producers navigate foreign art markets and institutional gatekeeping. These sessions highlighted how artistic exile often parallels academic exile — both marked by precarity, the need for reinvention, and the dual burden and opportunity of representing a nation at war.
Other presenters, such as Alina Potemska and Oksana Drachkovska, presented projects that blended creative expression with collective memory. Potemska’s live-action role-playing project “In Our Shoes” invites participants to inhabit the emotional spaces of coerced displacement, while Drachkovska’s Visual Diaries of War present the everyday resistance to drawing. These presentations illustrated the pedagogical and affective potential of art in representing wartime conditions across linguistic and cultural divisions.
The day concluded with Anastasiia Shevchenko’s report on “Restore#UACULTURE” and documenting the destruction of cultural heritage in southern Ukraine. In her presentation, she revealed that cultural erasure is not an aftereffect of war, but a purposeful component of Russian aggression — not only to devastate infrastructure, but cultural heritage.
These two panels collectively gave us a many-sided view of how artists and scholars are still creating, documenting, and resisting — using their areas of study as tools of resilience, testimony, and transformation.
It was also part of the program to screen the short film “Marushka”, introduced by its author, artist and writer Yuliia Marushko. Writing under the pseudonym Marushka, she is working on themes of personal and collective memory, and specifically the Maidan and war in Ukraine. Drawing on a diary-inspired visual language that blends the visual narrative with private reflection, her work opens up a space of affective and historical engagement.
This Workshop on memory and representation logically segued into the final roundtable of the day, “Strategies of Cultural Diplomacy During Wartime and Afterwards” (moderated by Iuliia Lashchuk). The dialogue brought together curators, academics artists, and cultural activists to discuss how Ukraine’s cultural sphere engages with diplomacy during war, displacement, and visibility. Panelists grappled not only with short-term strategies of presence and advocasy but also visions for long-term cultural sovereignty and institutional partnerships.
