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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
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.
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.
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).