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Written by BLAIR A. RUBLE
The Arts of War: Ukrainian Artists Confront Russia
The Ukrainian response to the 2022 Russian full-scale invasion inspired new appreciation for the country both within and beyond Ukraine. The steadfastness of Ukrainians in their own surprised many. The stories presented here highlight the ways in which Ukrainians have long explored the meaning of their country and culture through the arts; and the manner in which the arts and their creators empowered Ukrainians to confront the Russian invaders. These developments also offer intriguing clues about the culture, society, and politics of a post-war Ukraine. One-hundred-and-fifty posts in this series appeared between March 2022 and March 2025 as part of the Kennan Institute’s Focus Ukraine series on the Wilson Center website. Ibidem Verlag and Columbia University Press have published these posts in three volumes: The Arts of War. Ukrainian Artists Confront Russia. Year One (1923), Year Two (2025), and YearThree (forthcoming). This series begins with the war’s fourth year.
CITD's relaunch of The Arts of War: Ukrainian Artists Confront Russia is a homecoming. For more than three decades, CITD founders Philip Arnoult and Carol Baish together with long-time collaborators John Freedman, Yury Urnov, and Howard Shalwitz have encouraged me to explore the arts in post-socialist societies. My interest arose during the mid-1990s when I noticed that my Russian and Ukrainian friends’ conversations about “art” were as much about politics as they were about the arts. Moreover, as they focused on the arts, my friends revealed the deep and growing divide between Ukrainians and Russians. This awareness set me on a path that prepared me to see the 2022 Russian full-scale invasion through the arts. My essays since then follow directly from my engagement with CITD.
-BLAIR A. RUBLE
Blog
Posts
Published Weekly
11 August 2025
Bringing Unexpected Partners Together in Support of Ukraine
By Blair A. Ruble
Gathering together on sacred ground can open up a portal for transformation. Despite the distance in geography and the differences in culture, this past spring an artistic bridge was created between Ukrainian and Ao Naga folk music in the consecrated space of the Lotus Temple in Delhi, India.
28 July 2025
Kyiv's Bright Spring Theater Sea
By Blair A. Ruble
Conducting the business of theater during wartime is hardly business as usual. Kyiv's theater community is fueling a theatrical renaissance, creating time and space for embattled Ukrainians to be renewed, uplifted, and re-energized for the continued fight.
14 July 2025
Reconnecting Ukrainian Opera with Its Baroque Past
By Blair A. Ruble
In the midst of unrelenting loss, a 250-year-old opera is found: believed to be long gone by musicologists, in 2024 the Ukrainian National Opera gave a second premiere to foundational Ukrainian composer Dymtro Bortnyanskyy's epic Creonte, in a breathtaking recovery after its closing performance in Venice in 1777.
30 June 2025
Documenting War with Calmness
By Blair A. Ruble
How many chores get done in the time it takes for the missile to strike? Sometimes, in order to feel the impact of war through film, an artist has to zoom way in, on the most mundane of life's details.
16 June 2025
Toads Singing in the Walls
By Blair A. Ruble
Yes, you read that right. No one gets to choose the circumstances to experience a full-scale invasion. But artists will always be inspired to create connection, even in the most absurd and dire circumstances.
2 June 2025
Italy is Never Far Away In Odesa
By Blair A. Ruble
The Ukrainian city of Odesa has cultural ties with Italy that date back centuries. At the end of 2024, Ukrainian and Italian opera singers and directors leaned into that shared history when they collaborated on two Italian operas never before seen in Odesa's fabled opera house, with the realities of the war never far from their performances.
19 May 2025
Elevating a Musical Tradition Too Long Neglected
By Blair A. Ruble
In February, contralto Vira Slywotzky, cellist Valeriya Sholokhova, and pianists Pavlo Gintov and Margarita Rovenskaya performed the Ukrainian Music Initiative’s (UMI) debut concert at New York’s Shevchenko Scientific Society.
5 May 2025
Kharkiv, Where the Arts Empower Life Over Death
By Blair A. Ruble
Kharkiv lives, despite having lost around a quarter of its buildings and an unknowable number of
its 1.5 million residents since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
4 August 2025
Ukrainian Pop Stars Proclaim "Your Thorny Path is Not in Vain"
By Blair A. Ruble
Pop music is helping Ukrainians reclaim their inner diva--both the musical and religious kind. Two divas of Ukrainian pop music have been raising the tempo, raising awareness, and raising money to aid in Ukraine's fight with their hit song invoking Mother Teresa and the Virgin Mary.
21 July 2025
Saving Ukraine's Future by Saving Its Culture
By Blair A. Ruble
In the ancient city of Chernihiv--one of the hardest hit in the early days of the full-scale invasion--women have taken over the stages. While the men have gone to fight on the front lines of the war, the women of Chernihiv's theater community are fighting to save Ukrainian culture.
7 July 2025
A Ukrainian Japanese Ballet
By Blair A. Ruble
Exile in war brings heartache, and, sometimes, heart-filling connection. On the island of Awaji in Japan, two Ukrainian ballet artists found unexpected community and opportunity to transform their practice and repertoire when they fled into exile in the full-scale invasion.
23 June 2025
Confronting Fate in a Time of War
By Blair A. Ruble
"Fate" is a dangerous topic anytime, especially in a war. But artists, especially in war, are notorious for running towards the danger--even in ballet.
9 June 2025
Sharing Wartime Kharkiv's Horrors Through the Language of Dance
By Blair A. Ruble
The body keeps the score, as the saying goes, and artists can often tell the story of the unspeakable better through the movement than through words.
26 May 2025
Finding Ukraine On London’s Fringe
By Blair A. Ruble
A new generation of Ukrainian theater artists are finding increasingly warm and welcoming audiences in London's theater fringe scene, with people of many cultures bonding over comfort food, parents, and other stories of the universal human condition.
12 May 2025
Unexpected Artists
By Blair A. Ruble
What is the purpose of making art in wartime? Ukrainian artists, inside and outside of professional spaces, have turned to the act of creation as a way to both chronicle the trauma of war, and also to imagine a time beyond war--peacetime.
About the Author
Blair A. Ruble is a Washington-based writer. He is the author of a dozen books and co-editor of two dozen more. For the past three-and-a-half years, he has been writing about how Ukraine’s artistic community has responded to the Russian invasion of 2022. His essays appeared weekly on the Wilson Center’s Ukraine Focus website between March 2022 and March 2025. He continues the series here. These essays have been collected in three volumes: The Arts of War Ukrainian Artists Confront Russia. Year One (2023), Year Two (2025), and Year Three (forthcoming 2025).
These articles continue his focus in recent years on the relationship between the arts and the consolidation of urban communities. His history Washington’s U Street: A Biography (2010) surveyed the tentative mixing of classes in one of the city’s most important neighborhoods. That volume led to the publication of The Muse of Urban
Delirium (2017) examining how new forms of performing arts emerge at moments of uncertain social identity in cities undergoing rapid transformation. He continued this
focus with Proclaiming Presence from the Washington Stage (2021) and Changing Cities, Shifting Stages: How the Performing Arts Reveal Urban Transformation (2024) as well as the co-edited volume with Maurice Jackson, D.C. Jazz Stories of Jazz Music in Washington D.C. (2018).
Ruble held several positions at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars including Distinguished Fellow, Vice President for Programs, and Director of the Center’s Kennan Institute. He completed his undergraduate education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his doctoral training at the University of Toronto.
Major Publications
The Arts of War: Ukrainian Artists Confront Russia. Year Three (Stuttgart: IbidemVerlag, 2025) [forthcoming].
The Arts of War: Ukrainian Artists Confront Russia. Year Two (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2025).
Changing Cities, Shifting Stages: How the Performing Arts Reveal Urban
Transformation (Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, Inc., 2024).
The Arts of War: Ukrainian Artists Confront Russia. Year One (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2023).
Proclaiming Presence from the Washington Stage (Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, Inc., 2021).
The Muse of Urban Delirium: How the Performing Arts Paradoxically Transform Conflict-Ridden Cities into Centers of Cultural Innovation (Washington: New Academia Publishing, 2017).
Washington’s U Street: A Biography (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)
Creating Diversity Capital: Transnational Migrants in Montreal Washington, and Kyiv (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
Second Metropolis. Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Japan. (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Money Sings: The Changing Politics of Urban Space in Post-Soviet Yaroslavl (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Leningrad: Shaping a Soviet City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
Soviet Trade Unions: Their Development in the 1970s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).