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ATG Special Report — Inside Ukraine’s Defense of Scholarly and Literary Identity

By Dr. Frances Pinter (Director, Academic Relations, Central European University Press and Amsterdam University Press; Founder, SUPRR, Supporting Ukrainian Publishing Resilience and Recovery)

Ukraine is battling for its very survival on all fronts. So, it was heartening to see the response to a small victory in the otherwise obscure world of persistent identifiers (PIDs).

Recently, SUPRR (Supporting Ukrainian Publishing Resilience and Recovery), an initiative I launched in 2023, got involved with the Russian ‘theft’ of Ukrainian ISSNs. In short, publications in territories occupied by Russia are using the ISSNs of Ukrainian journals originally founded by the now-displaced Ukrainian institutions of higher education. Russians are also obtaining entirely new ISSNs while falsely claiming to be the legal successors of Ukrainian publications. We brokered discussions with the ISSN International Agency who then found a technical fix that allows readers to identify whether they are reading the original version or the Russian hijacked version of the journal. More about this curious battlefield here.

This tech fix was all made possible by the forensic work of legal scholars from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and academics at the displaced institutions who are now scattered all around Ukraine. The provenance of what people are reading becomes even more vital here to maintain publishing integrity.

The deadline for this article was the 1st of May 2025, just before my third trip to Ukraine in the past eighteen months. If you are reading this in June, I will have returned again from Book Arsenal where this year’s theme is “Everything is Translation.” In the publishing world, translations are always a challenge. How can we finance them, promote them and get people to read them? Yet, there is an unshakable belief that it does the soul good to understand others through translation. I believe passionately that we are all enriched by translations, especially of stories that tell about lives we can hardly envisage.

Last year, I went primarily to speak on a panel at this literary event that attracted over 35,000 people — including President Zelensky. All these people, like me, had their sleep disturbed by air raid alerts, something that happens almost every night. Russia sends one plane to the border. It hovers, then goes back to base. Millions are alerted — just in case. And recently, more bombs have been showered on Ukraine than ever. Many, if not most, people now ignore the sirens and choose not to go to the bomb shelters. But they are still woken up. The whole country is exhausted by what seems like warfare by deliberate sleep deprivation. Yet, the latest polls show that 80% are willing to keep on fighting.

You can’t get to Ukraine by commercial flights. Airspace is closed, a security risk. So, most people enter by train, bus, or car from somewhere along the border with Poland. I’d flown to Warsaw, and after a few delightful days attending the Warsaw Book Fair, set off on a three-hour train ride to Chelm, and then two hours later climbed aboard a tired-looking train for the 12-hour ride to Kyiv. No one told me the train wouldn’t have food or drink. Luckily, I had a bottle of water, an apple and an emergency Mars bar.

I arrived in the early morning and was collected by a man sent from my hotel. That was my first night in Ukraine, on a train. After freshening up, I went down for breakfast in my virtually empty Radisson Hotel. I was then collected by a beautiful young student who’d been tasked to look after me over the next few days. I’d protested against this excessive care, but she was charming and, after getting over her shyness, provided me with much insight into the life of an eighteen-year old university student in a war zone.

On my second day, I continued with more meetings and the odd air raid during the day — leading to interesting shelters. By this time in 2024, many basements had been converted into surprisingly smart-looking shelters. The creativity with artwork and design in the basement of one university library made it easy to forget why one was there. Coffee and tea were plentiful. Clean toilets and even shower facilities were to be found.

I went to bed on my second night prepared for air raid alerts. I’d downloaded the app that goes off on your phone and even tells you what kind of an alert it is so you can judge its seriousness. Whether to go to the shelter or not is the question. At about 2 am it went off — first on my watch, then on my phone. A few seconds later, the hotel alarm tore through the room. The instructions were to go to the lowest level of the underground car park. Taking the elevator could be risky as electricity might be cut at any time. As I set off, I remembered that rooms at the higher levels of the hotel were cheaper than the lower ones, contrary to usual pricing policies. Now I understood why. The lower ones were closer to the basement, closer to safety.

The highlight of the following day was meeting the Rector of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, the largest university in Ukraine with 30,000 students. He is a philosopher. We talked about Karl Popper and Open Society interspersed with details of what it was like running a university without electricity. Before I left, he showed me his military vest.

I also went to the Ukrainian Book Institute (UBI), a state body that promotes reading and Ukrainian books. They’d arranged for me to meet a group of Ukrainian publishers. UBI is located in the wonderful Lavrska complex — an estate full of historical churches. There is now a petition to rename Lavrska Street after Ivan Mazepa. I’m not sure why, but no doubt I will hear about it when in Kyiv.

Although by now tired from the air raid alerts in the night, the next day was exhilarating. Book Arsenal was humming, full of people buying books, looking at art installations, and attending presentations at both indoor and outdoor stages. The sun was shining — and you could have been at any of the numerous such events around the world — except it was not.

A few days earlier, the Russians had bombed Faktor Druk, one of Europe’s largest printing factories, located in Kharkiv. It was a callous and desperate attack on Ukrainian culture. Some 50,000 books were destroyed, many of which had been destined for the book fair. At Book Arsenal, set against a plain white wall, was a long white table on which about a dozen burned books from the wreckage were placed. It was certainly a design triumph where “less is more.” One could not help but feel a chill when looking at the display. I was reminded of the quote by the 19th century writer Heinrich Heine who said in 1823, “Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings.” Of course, in this war it is happening simultaneously — on both sides — Ukrainians dispose of Russian books meant to spread propaganda. Thankfully, the Buffett Foundation has paid for the rebuilding of the printing factory.

At Book Arsenal, I met many people who spoke fondly of the translation programme I’d started while working for George Soros’s foundation in the ’90s. We enabled the translation of over 1,000 classics of the social sciences and humanities of the West into Ukrainian. Many said these books had transformed their lives, and I understand they continue to be used in education today. I ran a similar programme in all the other post-communist countries. Although some of the printed books of the translations into Russian have been burned because of the connection with Soros, the translations themselves cannot be destroyed. I must believe these books will live on to see another day.

Another cruel blow for Ukrainians was the recent and very sudden withdrawal of USAID funds. When a country like Ukraine is at war, there are limited funds to pay for textbooks. USAID had been paying for primary schoolbooks. Now this has stopped. An appeal is out to private foundations to help fill the gap until the state can take on the cost.

This year, SUPRR will have a stand at Book Arsenal. We’ll display the genuine journals that Russia is attempting to appropriate alongside books from Ukrainian university presses and run an OER prototype on Ukrainian migration. I’ll be speaking about the ISSN saga, widely considered as a Ukrainian win, along with stolen artifacts from museums where the physical objects are tragically still not located. In the case of knowledge in digital form, we must celebrate that we have ways and means of protecting them from attack and ensuring they are available for now and posterity. I’m sure we can all think of other countries where this threat is real.

The Ukrainians I met in Kyiv will be there after the war ends. I hope the resilience I saw in them will see them through. I can hardly wait to go back. I’ve tasted the essence of Ukraine: its people, their love of freedom and of being true to yourself, and to be all and everything that makes us human. Their war is truly our war. Their deep held belief in freedom is something our community shares and is fighting to uphold on all fronts.

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