Ukraina SOS Vol. 3 - March 20
Donate to Ukrainian artists and zoos, dispatches from Mariupol and Mykolaiv, Kyiv in the Atlantic, Maria Pryyimachenko, and more.
Welcome to Volume 3 of Ukraina SOS, a guide for how to help and what to read/watch/follow in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
How to Help
Buy a book from the excellent Kyiv-based Osnovy Publishing (some good options: Ukrainian railroad ladies, Kyiv guidebook, “the crazy 90s”). Osnovy writes that, due to the war, “our publishing house cannot fully function. But we want to pay salaries to our team. Now it’s needed as never before. … We cannot ship your order right now, but we will do it as soon as the war is over. And it will have a very special significance.”
Donate to the Ukrainian Emergency Art Fund to support Ukrainian artists, curators, and cultural workers.
Donate to the European Associations of Zoos and Aquaria to provide food and care to zoo animals in cities under siege. You can also buy tickets at the Kyiv and Mykolaiv zoos to support them directly.
Donate to help Ukraine’s largest film archive, the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Center in Kyiv, weather the war.
What to Read/Watch/Follow Etc.
Few international journalists remain in Mariupol, Ukraine, the city that has arguably taken the worst of the Russian onslaught. Their account of the hell the city has become is required reading.
Novaya Gazeta journalist Elena Kostyuchenko’s outstanding report from nearby Mykolaiv has a similar thrust (translated by n+1).
Watch a short, important video address by Putin last week with English subtitles: “The Russian people will always be able to distinguish the true patriots from the scum and the traitors.”
Isobel Koshiw of The Guardian reported on the atrocities the Russian army is committing in the rural areas it is occupying.
The NYT produced a stirring short video doc of a Ukrainian soldier’s funeral in western Ukraine; Buzzfeed’s Christopher Miller has this crushing follow-up.
A firsthand account of one family’s perilous escape from Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv that the Russians have ferociously attacked.
Iryna Tsilyk’s documentary, The Earth Is Blue as An Orange, the first Ukrainian film to win a prize at the Sundance Film Festival, is available to stream in the U.S. until 3/27. It follows a family in the Donbas in the aftermath of the 2014 invasion. Highly recommended.
I gathered five Ukrainian urbanists to share the places dearest to them in Kyiv for The Atlantic.
UCL professor Uilleam Blacker wrote a good introduction to Ukrainian literature for The Atlantic.
A Ukrainian folk song starter kit from Bard College professor Maria Sonevytsky.
Quote of the Moment
“Angry and terrified, I stood there watching the smoke. I felt something else that I can’t even describe. What was happening in front of my eyes at that moment was a crime. The fire was so strong that the cloud of smoke continued to expand. I wanted to do something about this crime, though I couldn’t figure out what. But I knew action was necessary, and everything else could wait.” — Yevgenia Belorusets in her wartime diary from Kyiv
Feisty Babushka of the Moment
About this Letter
The header image is a painting called “Flax Blooms, A Bride Goes to her Groom,” by widely-hailed Ukrainian artist Maria Pryyimachenko. Picasso reportedly said, “I bow down before the artistic miracle of this brilliant Ukrainian woman.” A museum devoted to Pryyimachenko’s work was destroyed in the first days of the Russian invasion.