Russia’s attacks go beyond the front and also target Ukrainian culture. There are already 172 libraries and around 200 million books have been destroyed. Airstrikes against the cultural industry are focused primarily on Kharkiv, because 90% of the country’s printing presses are located there.

Just a month ago, a Russian missile destroyed Ukraine’s main printing press, Dru Factork, where seven people died. At the time, Tetiana Hryniuk, general director of Factor Druk, was inside the building. She says that, “the journalists who were here saw that books were being made here, that we were making nothing but books, but in the Russian media they said there were drones, although there is no evidence.”

The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, was one of the first to visit the iconic company already reduced to ashes where thousands of books are destroyed by Russian missiles. In fact, the most affected are children and there are campaigns on networks that, with nostalgia, try to rrecover the culture of the smallest ones.

And after the Russian invasion, Ukraine stopped publishing books in Russian. Now, Ukrainians collect some old Russian copies to sell as disposable paper and with that money finance their army as a particular revenge against the Kremlin’s attacks.