Charlotte Higgins

I mean, this is literally life or death.

And the other reason that I wanted to go originally was that it was just extremely clear that culture was implicated in the war in an incredibly clear way.

That is to say that Putin has repeatedly talked about

The idea that Ukraine doesn't really have a separate culture, that Ukrainians and Russians are, quote, sort of brothers, that they belong together.

And he even wrote an essay about this at the summer before the full-scale invasion.

And it's a really a kind of, it's a denial of Ukraine as a separate identity.

And you look at it through my eyes, through the doubtless prejudiced eyes of a culture writer, it just feels like a war about culture because history, language, identity are so implicated in it.

I am learning Ukrainian because I started learning Ukrainian almost as soon as I got back from my first trip.

Because language is a part of culture, so it felt really churlish not to know any of the language.

I will tell you that it's a massive struggle learning this language, but I am currently on an intensive Ukrainian course because I intend to conquer this language, even if it takes me until the next life to do so.

Yeah, it's huge.

And it's very hard if you look at either government or, as it were, UNESCO statistics, it's kind of an ungraspable picture.

But there are kind of several categories.

One is those places that have come under occupation, right?

So,

In Mariupol, for instance, at the beginning of the war, at least one museum was completely destroyed and burnt in aerial bombing as a result of fires from bombs.

In Kherson, for example, the museum there was destroyed.

emptied out as far as the Russians could manage at the end of their occupation.

So truckloads of artefacts were taken into Russia and some experts have tracked some of these artefacts from the Museum in Kherson onto the Russian art market.

And being in Kiev the last...