Almost five years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a new book by the Guardian's chief culture writer Charlotte Higgins argues that the art and literature produced during the war will determine how it is remembered. Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War, published by Jonathan Cape, draws on three years of reporting trips to Ukraine beginning in the autumn of 2022.

Higgins travels through Kyiv, Kharkiv and Lviv, gathering the work of artists, writers, poets and film-makers, some of whom have since lost their lives. Among the figures she follows is Marharyta Polovinko, whose drawings of roaming monsters she sets beside the war imagery of Francisco Goya and Otto Dix. Polovinko was killed in action in 2025, aged 31.

The book also discusses a film by the Kharkiv artists Daniil Revkovskyi and Andrii Rachynskyi that was shown in the Ukrainian pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, and closes with a documentary account of the destruction of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, where an elderly resident surveys streets wrecked by shell holes that were once entirely ordinary.

Higgins's central claim is that the creative work made by Ukrainians under bombardment and occupation will outlast the news cycle and shape the war's memory. The book, 272 pages and priced at £22, was published on 20 August.