MARCH 6, 2025 | NEWS | By Isabelle Rosewater
To observe the three-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine– which fell on Feb. 24– several Ukrainian students worked to raise awareness of the war and promote Ukrainian arts and culture. They worked with the Tutt Library to create a display of Ukrainian literature and organized a screening of the 2024 Ukrainian documentary film: “Porcelain War.”
The documentary details the lives of Slava Leontyev, Anya Stasenko and Andrey Stefanov, three Ukrainian artists who stayed in the eastern city of Kharkiv during the war to “defend their culture and their country,” according to the official synopsis of the film.
The film tells a story of sacrifice and resilience, and civilians turned soldiers and activists, fighting to protect their freedom and way of life.
Combining bodycam combat footage, drone video of shelling attacks and tank strikes and clips of cities in rubble with idyllic countryside scenes, tender happy moments and delicately painted porcelain creatures, the film illustrates the stark contrast of life in war– a reality some Ukrainian students at CC have experienced firsthand.
“Ukraine is like porcelain, easy to break, but impossible to destroy,” said Leontyev. “The stories we tell through art are also our resistance. This is how we avoid erasure. We don’t only fight back with weapons, we use art to fight back.”
War in Ukraine Through the Lens of “Porcelain War”
The war, beginning in 2014 with the Russian occupation of the Ukrainian peninsula Crimea, has devastated countless regions across the country and particularly along the eastern border, including the cities of Bakhmut, Mariupol, Marinka, Kharkiv and the nation’s capital, Kyiv, according to the New York Times.
When Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, they laid claim to the “third largest nuclear arsenal in the world,” according to the Arms Control Association. By 1996, however, they had returned all of their nuclear warheads to Russia “in exchange for economic aid and security assurances.”
“For hundreds of years they fed us fairy tales about how we were brothers,” said Johnny, a dairy farmer turned front-line infantry who was not given a last name in the film. “And for centuries we shoveled crap they piled on us– and we believed them.”
Leontyev joined the Ukrainian Special Forces after the war broke out in 2022, teaching former civilians “to be soldiers which they never should have become,” who comprise the army of 980,000 troops currently, according to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine– which has held the front lines of combat for over three years.
“We get people who have come right out of their civilian lives. Doctors, professors, farmers, artists,” said Leontyev. “They pilot drones, they shoot all sorts of firearms, they use heavy weaponry, mortars, anti-tank missile systems.”
Ukraine has been under consistent bombardment since the war began in 2022, including 80,871 shelling attacks, 27,250 air/drone strikes, and 1,054 instances of violence targeting civilians, according to a report from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, an independent nonprofit that collects data on violent conflict and protest.
“They don’t give us a chance to breathe,” said Stasenko.
In December, Zelenskyy said that roughly 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers were killed and 370,000 were injured in the conflict since 2022. However, according to DW News, numbers are estimated to be higher than admitted on both sides.
As of February 2025, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees recorded 6,906,500 Ukrainian refugees globally, many displaced, with their homes destroyed.
“Countless families have buried children, fathers, mothers, and we will bury many more,” said Leontyev. “People have died for their families, their homes, to ensure that their way of life continues when they are gone.”
The conflict is still rapidly developing, with the recent unprecedented meeting between Zelenskyy and Donald Trump in the White House and the Trump Administration’s cut of all U.S. military aid to Ukraine on March 5.
Ukrainian Student Accounts of the War: Polina Panasenko, Sonia Guliak, and Yurii Hrytsak
One Colorado College student, Polina Panasenko ‘28 experienced the war firsthand, in her small town of Vyshgorod, just outside of Kyiv.
“I was at home. I was getting ready to go to school, and my hometown got bombed slightly before my alarm went off. So I just wake up, because it’s explosions all over,” said Panasenko.
Her mother came into her room and told her “The war has begun.”
Shortly after the initial bombings subsided, Panasenko and her family fled to her grandma’s half-built countryside house, where they, as well as several other families– totaling 16 people– lived in the cold concrete garage for two weeks.
“We were all on the news 24/7,” said Panasenko. She and her friends volunteered to translate news from Ukrainian to English for the Telegram channel of Verkhovna Rada, the main governmental body of Ukraine.
There was a lot of uncertainty, “no one knew how this was going on… what was happening,” said Panasenko. “The older men in that bundle of three families took turns to stay on the top floor and listen if something was flying towards us or not.”
After two weeks, Panasenko and her family drove to the border of Poland, where she, her brother and her mother went to live with a Polish family acquaintance– and later with complete strangers who became family– for more than three months, forced to live in a country with a language they did not speak.
Her father stayed behind, as all men aged 18-60 are required to stay in the country during martial law, as they are eligible for the draft, according to the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine.
“We have been fighting for just better life forever,” said Panasenko. “We bounce back every single time… it’s a very strong willed nation”
Sonia Guliak ‘27, from the capital city of Kyiv, was at Colorado College when the war began, having visited home just two months before.
Her family was forced to leave their home and country behind, and with nowhere to go, lived in shelters in Montenegro for six months before eventually moving to Berlin, Germany, where they now live.
“A lot of my family friends died,” said Guliak. “And a lot of relatives of mine as well, because they’ve been fighting in the war.”
Guliak’s family and friends– like countless other Ukrainian families– have been experiencing emotional hardships, forced to live away from their cultures, in languages unfamiliar to them, all while carrying the weight of the war.
“Some of my family friends who are older now experience severe traumas and depression, because their children died fighting for the country,” said Guliak. “It completely changed my life, and the life of the entire nation.”
Yurii Hrytsak ‘27 grew up in Lviv, a city in western Ukraine, close to the Polish border. Although he was not in Ukraine when the war broke out, his family continues to be impacted.
Hrytsak’s parents live with power outages–sometimes lasting for days– and frequent air raid sirens. His uncle, who formerly worked in IT, is fighting in an artillery squad on the front line.
“I haven’t been able to see my dad for three years, because men cannot leave the country and I cannot enter,” said Hrytsak.
Hrytsak considers himself lucky, having been attending high school in another country when the war began.
“Our lives at CC are super comfortable,” said Hrytsak. “We have our meal plan, we are super safe, while people our age, you know, people that aren’t that different from us at all, have to endure this insane suffering and insane stress from the act of war.”
Uplifting Arts and Culture as Resistance
“During this genocidal war, the aggressors, at the first opportunity, try to destroy people who contribute to culture,” said Leontyev. “Among them writers, musicians, teachers, artists. When they erase these people, they erase Ukraine.”
Since February 2022, over 2,000 “objects of cultural infrastructure,” including libraries, museums, historical archives, universities, theaters, places of worship, and cemeteries were destroyed in Russian attacks, according to a 2024 United States House of Representatives hearing from the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission.
This has been identified by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner to be part of a “widespread narrative of demonisation and denigration of Ukrainian culture and identity promoted by Russian officials,” according to a 2023 press release.
The destruction of Ukrainian culture did not begin with this war.
According to an article in Chytomo, one of the largest media covering publishing and literary processes in Ukraine, oppression of the Ukrainian language began in 1627, and includes a long history spanning into the present of banning publishing and selling of Ukrainian books, destruction of literature and forced translations, censorship, banning and dismantling Ukrainian press, school closures, banning Ukrainian language from schools and churches, and persecution of activists.
“I counted all the books I have at home… six shelves just filled up with books. And I think I counted 11 books in Ukrainian and five of them written by Ukrainians,” said Panasenko. “That’s not because my family didn’t want to buy Ukrainian books, that’s because that was the situation on the bookshelves.”
Panasenko, Guliak and Hrytsak worked with Tutt Library to order 10 books written by Ukrainian authors, which are on display in the library in observation of the third anniversary of the Russian full-scale invasion.
The books include the history of Ukraine, “The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine” by Serhii Plokhy, journalistic reporting from the front lines, “Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence” by Yaroslav Trofimov, a fiction novel of life in war, “Grey Bees” by Andrey Kurkov and a book of poetry “How Fire Descends” by Serhiy Zhadan.
“I’d love for the CC community to remember that the war is still happening in a very active phase,” said Hrytsak. “There [are] still, unfortunately, civilians dying almost every day on the front lines, there [are] soldiers dying on both sides. And even though it might have disappeared from the American news, it doesn’t mean that the conflict does not deserve any attention.”
“Porcelain War” is screening at film festivals around the world, and has received awards including the Sundance U.S. Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Film, and been nominated for many awards, most notably Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, according to the film’s website.
“The thing that Ukrainians value the most is freedom. It’s in our literature, it’s in our music, it’s in our folklore, it’s in everything,” said Panasenko. “In the end, Slava Ukraini! (Glory to Ukraine!)”