Viktoria Haidai surveys the mangled remains of the printing press, which should have been busy churning out textbooks ready for the new school year.
The plant, on the edge of Kyiv, was hit during the night by a Russian missile, just as production was ramping up to deliver 1.3 million books – 10% of Ukraine’s schoolbooks.
In the ashes there is a charred page from an English language textbook: “My name is William, I’m from the UK. My grandmother lives in Nottingham. It’s a beautiful city.”
Russia has hit printing presses and publishing houses across Ukraine in a series of recent attacks, destroying 12 million books and damaging other icons of Ukrainian history and culture. Local media report that Russia has destroyed one third of all the books printed in Ukraine this year.
Nothing is salvageable at this Kyiv printing press. Even the pages that survived the flames have succumbed to water damage, from firefighting or exposure to the elements from the collapsed roof.
“I believe it is deliberate on the part of the Russian Federation,” says Haidai, commercial director of the Konvi publishing firm. “Over the past two months, some of the largest publishing houses have lost their logistics warehouses, where very large quantities of books were stored.
“The Russians are also destroying printing houses in an attempt to erase Ukraine as a nation. But frankly they will not succeed.”
More than 35 publishing facilities have been hit over recent weeks.
But it’s not just fresh pages coming under attack. Kyiv’s Pochaina second-hand book market was also struck, wiping out hundreds of individual stalls and countless treasured tomes.
Before firefighters had finished extinguishing the blaze, I found Liliya Velyka, a 28-year-old book blogger, raking through the smouldering ruins, seeing if anything could be saved. She clutched a soaking copy of a sci-fi novel.
“Books are saving us and losing this is like losing our hearts,” she says.
Museums, art galleries, film studios, libraries, and opera houses have also been damaged. At Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the capital’s large medieval monastery and cultural heritage site, the golden domes of the Dormition Cathedral were hit.
Religious artefacts were moved to safety but a large section of the roof was set ablaze after a drone attack. Repairs are predicted to cost $11.2 million (£8.2m) and will take two years.
The site is also home to Ukraine’s museum of books and printing. Unesco listed the complex in 1990, and added it to its register of world heritage sites in danger in September 2023.
At recent celebrations marking 975 years since the monastery’s founding, Unesco’s Director-General Khaled El-Enany said he was “deeply saddened” to see “the significant damage”.
“Unesco firmly condemns all attacks against cultural property protected under international law,” he told gathered dignitaries, including President Volodymyr Zelensky.
