by Marcel Kreuger
Lviv, in western Ukraine, is not despondent or defeated. Quite the opposite. A pair of decommissioned MANPADS (portable surface-to-air missiles) sits next to the doggy water bowl in Svit Kavy café as an incentive to donate, via a QR code, to the air defence unit that fired them.
More stickers with QR codes are plastered across checkout tills, shopfronts and bars all over town, inviting donations to other units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Stencils on the walls of the old town demand “Free Azov”, the regiment of defenders of the city Mariupol and the Azovstal Steel works during the 2022 siege, many of whose members are still POWs in Russia.
The war is subtle in Lviv, but as deadly as elsewhere in Ukraine. Air raids here in the west of the country are rare. The city has so far been spared much of the mass-destruction the Russians have inflicted on cities in the east of the country.
On a sunny autumn evening, hundreds of people are strolling along Svobody Boulevard in front of the glorious Renaissance revival Theatre of Opera and Ballet built in 1900 as the Lemberger Stadttheater, when the city was part of the Habsburg Empire.
Young women use the opera and the reflections in its fountain as a backdrop for selfies, reels and TikToks. Teenagers lounge on the benches lining the pedestrian boulevard. Old men are playing chess and checkers. A group of veterans plays football in front of the monument of Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko, displaying the dexterity of their artificial limps and collecting donations.
I travelled to the City of Lions, as it is called after Lev, the son of its 13th century founder King Daniel of Galicia, as a member of the German-Ukrainian Society and to attend a panel historians, essayists, philosophers and translators. The evening is presented in collaboration with Ukrainian NGO INDEX, a new cultural and research institution, documenting the Ukrainian experiences of Russia’s war. It facilitates international exchange through fellowships and grants.
“We bring artists from the east of the country here to work and research in relative peace,” INDEX director Sasha Dovzhyk tells me. Lviv has become, after a fashion, an Rest & Recreation area for the whole country, as though all Ukrainians are also Ukraine’s armed forces.
Promoting Ukrainian art and culture also means promoting the work of those murdered by Russia. The walls of the INDEX office are covered with an exhibition of the works of soldier, illustrator, and poet Mykola Leonovych, missing in action since 2023.
In the week before I arrive Index hosted “Victoria Day”, the closing event of the Victoria Amelina Fellowship 2025, celebrating the life and work of the writer Victoria Amelina, who received the Orwell Prize for Political Writing this year for Looking at Women, Looking at War. The prize was presented posthumously. Amelina died in a Russian missile attack on a café popular with journalists and writers on July 1st 2023.
Lviv’s emergence as a place for rest and recuperation for many Ukrainians becomes clear as I walk the beautiful cobbled streets of the old town. Guides lead groups of visitors around the Renaissance buildings of medieval Rynok Square and the site of the former Golden Rose Synagogue from 1582, destroyed by invading German troops after 1941. The Nazis replaced Soviet troops who had occupied it when it was the Polish city of Lwow as part of the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
As they retreated before the advancing Wehrmacht, the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, murdered between 3,500 and 7,000 political prisoners in the prisons of the city.
Writing, literature and history’s horrors are thick strands in the story Lviv, a UNESCO City of Literature since 2015. As the work of INDEX documents, since hobby historian and war criminal Vladimir Putin sent his battalions of murderers across the border in 2014 and 2022, pain and sorrow has been heaped on Ukraine, daily.
The Uppsala Conflict Data Program estimated that 95% of casualties in the siege of Mariupol were civilians, a casualty ratio higher than in Gaza (83%) and the Srebrenica massacre (92%). These civilians did not die in a tragedy, they were murdered by criminals who belong behind bars, and the men and women of Azov belong home.
I am in awe of the resilience and solidarity of Ukrainians. The whole city knows that the relative normality here is possible only because people in uniform are willing to risk and lose their lives to protect it. On the panel I join, Franziska Davies thanks the defenders of Ukraine who make it possible to hold an academic panel in a country under attack.
During the panel, Yurko Prokhasko states that he sometimes thinks that the people of countries who have lost empires, like in the UK and Germany, have a soft spot for Russia, as Putin is aiming to (re)create an empire for himself. Countries without empire, like Ireland, perhaps, or Ukraine, we might subconsciously not take as seriously, he says.
As we watch news from Ukraine in the UK, we see a numbing daily repetition of images of rocket and drone attacks, death and damage. But this is not a quarrel in ‘a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing,’ as Neville Chamberlain justified the carving up of Czechoslovakia to appease hobby historian and war criminal Adolf Hitler in 1938.
This is a European neighbour fighting the most important fight for democracy in Europe since the War, and if we do not support our neighbour with all we have, the forces of despotism will come for us. The current probing of European air space by Russian drones is a clear preparation for an attack on Europe. Putin testing Europe’s strength and will, while racing to build up his arms, troops and armour.
If we wish to stop them, Vladimir Putin and his murderers need to be smacked in the mouth again and again, not welcomed with red carpets.
If we are serious about European democratic values and human rights, we must defend the democratic future of Ukraine. When Russia rolls over villages, towns and cities, it murders the parents and uses the children as human shields, as the Ukrainians are painfully aware. They will keep fighting.
The price Ukraine is paying for all of us is most obvious at Lychakiv cemetery, one of the most beautiful necropolises of Europe, comparable with London’s Highgate and Père-Lachaise in Paris. I visit the cemetery in search of the grave of Polish poet Maria Konopnicka, but as I find it I spot the so-called “Field of Mars” behind it.
This is a burial plot of those who died fighting the Russian invaders. Hundreds and hundreds lie here, each grave decorated with toys, pictures, printed poems or quotes of the fallen, and things they hold dear.
Each plot is decorated with a flag of Ukraine, or the red-and-black of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of the 1920s and 1940s. Seeing the mass of graves and fluttering flags laid out before me is utterly heartbreaking. Here they lie, mothers, singles, queer activists, train drivers, farmers, ecologists, lovers, conservatives, anarchists, sisters and brothers, dreamers and realists. If we do not want to lie with them, alongside our own families, we must commit to their fight with Putin’s forces, and we must win it.
