Charlotte Higgins

It's really, really hard to overstate what a huge effect that catastrophe had on Ukraine.

It was one of those events that absolutely contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It's a sort of foundational event in the future independent Ukraine's sense of itself.

It had transformed itself, thinking about all the people who were affected by the disaster, and that was a lot of people, because thousands of people were displaced, for example.

I had not expected being in that destroyed museum to be quite so upsetting.

The museum director was standing in the middle of this collapsing, burnt out building, kind of clutching a brown painted earthenware jug with some patterning on it.

A traditional piece of ceramic from the region where Chernobyl is.

She was actually deeply in shock.

They reckon that they were able to save 40% of the artefacts on display.

Every time a museum artefact is destroyed, it means the loss of a singular object that holds memory and knowledge.

And once it's gone, it's gone.

I went for the first time in October 2022 in order to write what I imagined would be one article about the way artists were reflecting and documenting the war in their work.

Because I had a conviction that artists would be responding to the war in a way that would likely be...

more interesting and more revealing than the work of even our dear colleagues, journalists and government reports, surely not, and politicians.

And this was going to be a super interesting aspect of the war to try to cover.

People are writing extraordinary poetry.

There are amazing plays being written.

People are making tremendous art.

all of which I'm sure is going to shape the way this war is remembered.

And the stakes are extraordinarily high.