Olga Danyluk
You are in a Red Zone. This signifies a declaration of martial law. It means your civil rights are suspended and no longer in effect. All civilians can be requisitioned for work under federal supervision, and all modes of transportation can be taken over by the government. Any vehicle may be commandeered. Communications and media are to be seized by the federal government. The government can confiscate all food supplies. You will not be permitted to hoard food, as food supplies will be regulated. You are prohibited from moving in and out of the war zone. You may be arrested and imprisoned without charge. Remain calm and do not panic.
Artists Fedir Aleksandrovych and Iryna Ozarynska performing at the Cultural Centre of the Embassy of Ukraine in France, 2023. Photo by Olga Danylyuk.
This excerpt is from my street performance Evacuation 2022, created in collaboration with Ukrainian refugee artists Fedir Aleksandrovych and Iryna Ozarynska and the civil advocacy project Voices of Occupation.1 The dystopian movie scenes we’ve seen countless times: are we now experiencing them for real? This question captures a profound and unsettling truth: what was once confined to fiction has increasingly become lived experience, particularly in contemporary war zones like Ukraine. The extension of martial law and heightened security measures, though justified by authorities as necessary for national defence, also mirrors the structural anxieties depicted in dystopian narratives such as Red Dawn2 or Children of Men3 where ordinary life is disrupted, and every action carries moral and existential weight. Ukrainians are programmed to win, fight, be happy and survive. Our agency and identity are shaped through a dialectical relationship with the culturally available narratives. It doesn’t leave much space for grief in a society that’s all geared up for war. In February 2025, the Chatham House report mentioned that Ukrainian refugees interviewed for the study expressed feelings of self-censorship. This self-censorship hindered them from disclosing the challenges they faced while living abroad, driven by guilt and fear of being shamed or misunderstood by those still in Ukraine.4 Many Ukrainian refugees often feel a recurring sense of guilt and shame for not having fought for their country, alongside accusations from those who remained for fleeing to a better life.
Creating during wartime, especially in Ukraine, puts immense pressure on artists and writers. When violence is normalised and militarisation is promoted, the boundary between art as resistance and art as propaganda becomes blurred. Artmaking in such times is not optional or decorative; it becomes highly political and socially urgent, carrying ethical responsibilities as well as risks and tensions with dominant power structures.
The Maidan uprising in 2013 marked the commencement of a new, violent phase in Ukraine’s nation-building. The state’s willingness to use force against its own citizens shattered illusions of peaceful political transition, while the deaths of the ‘Heavenly Hundred’ became a moral mandate for resistance. The slogan that ‘no one will give you freedom without struggle’ has attained a near-mythic status, drawing strength from its ambivalence: it justified resistance while also subtly normalising violence as an essential part of Ukrainian political change. Within weeks of Ukrainian corrupt president Yanukovych’s flight, Russia annexed Crimea in a swift operation combining military force with the weaponisation of media narratives. Simultaneously, in Donbas, Russian-backed insurgencies exploited local grievances and hybrid warfare tactics to open a new front, casting the post-Maidan state into a grinding conflict. By the time Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, the symbolic language of Maidan and the trauma of Crimea’s annexation had fused into a single narrative of existential defence. Freedom paid in blood crystallised into a nation-building narrative sanctifying sacrifice as the currency of sovereignty. In such a framework, sovereignty is not just a legal status or territorial condition but rooted in physical peril and endurance. The “currency” is the willingness of individuals to offer their lives, which the state then symbolically converts into a basis for national unity. This logic lifts death to a form of political capital: the fallen serve as proof of national resolve, while the living are implicitly indebted to the sacrifice already made. In this continuum, the spectacle of struggle has become both a weapon of war and a cornerstone of Ukraine’s international image.
As the war commenced, the range of topics that could be regarded as ‘social wrongs’ and open to critique in Ukraine significantly narrowed, with the boundaries increasingly shaped by wartime considerations rather than scholarly merit or social urgency. This narrowing is evidenced by increasing incidents of self-censorship: in a 2023 survey, 78% of Ukrainian journalists reported that self-censorship had grown since the full-scale invasion, and 44% said there were topics they now felt ‘could not be written about.’5 Furthermore, academic freedom has come under strain as government mandates and martial law conditions have restricted critical discourse on military and political issues, affecting what can be taught, researched, and published.6
The framing of national identity through sacrifice and martyrdom becomes a tool for cultural defence; meanwhile, there is the invisible pressure of ‘appropriate’ grief, patriotism, and unity. National resilience has become associated with curated stories of sacrifice and blood, which restricts critical reflection while emphasising unity over historical nuance, risking the reduction of complexity into spectacle. In times of war, memory is never neutral. Fighting a powerful aggressor on many fronts, what we choose to remember or forget, and who gets to decide, all play vital roles in shaping a sense of national identity. Ukrainian memory politics often prioritise mythmaking over nuance. The conflicting tendencies between reclaiming and coming to terms with the past create substantial tension. In such a climate, self-censorship by Ukrainian artists does not seem like repression, but rather a duty. However, these same strategies can also intentionally silence other voices and diminish pluralism, especially in marginalised communities and regions with tense relationships to both Ukrainian and Russian identities. At the same time, theatre spaces have tended to favour productions aligned with patriotic urgency, sidelining ambiguous or critical work, leading to a growing form of aesthetic self-censorship. This creates a gap, a space where artists, researchers, and independent journalists are forced to navigate a moral minefield. Critical perspectives, even from Ukraine’s own civic, academic, and artistic communities, are pushed aside in favour of government-approved narratives that evoke emotional responses. These include the rhetoric of total national unity, the framing of the war as a civilizational struggle for European values, the sacralisation of military sacrifice, and the elevation of culture to a “cultural front” tasked with defending national identity. Alongside these, the state’s emphasis on the inevitability of victory and the homogenisation of Ukrainian identity work to consolidate a cohesive public message, but also narrow the discursive space for complexity, dissent, and self-critique.
As Anna Ivanova has noted, (self-)orientalising Ukrainian society and romanticising its wartime struggle, while refusing to acknowledge Ukraine as a society that, like any other, contains conflicts and contradictions, and reducing its diverse and multifaceted interests to an artificially imposed homogeneity, hampers meaningful inquiry and marginalises nuanced research on Ukraine.7 In this context, self-orientalising refers to a process where Ukrainians (or Ukrainian institutions, scholars, or cultural producers) unintentionally adopt externally imposed, stereotypical, or romanticised narratives about themselves, often created by Western or global audiences, because these narratives are politically advantageous, emotionally compelling, or strategically beneficial during wartime. The tension resides in the appropriation of suffering through potent myths that, while vital for morale, often evolve into symbolic structures such as murals, museums, and memorial days that amplify and reinforce narratives of martyrdom. Furthermore, the concept of sacrificial nationhood creates problematic effects by portraying death and martyrdom as the highest moral goods, limiting the range of acceptable critique and obscuring the complex social realities of war. As one analysis observes, the myth that ‘Ukrainians just want to die as martyrs’ suppresses evidence that most civilians simply seek to live in peace and raise families.8
However, you cannot openly state this because the recurring question emerges: how can we challenge national myths without facing accusations of betrayal? In public discussions concerning Ukraine, one often encounters assertions such as, ‘Now is not the appropriate moment to raise these issues while Russian aggression continues,’ or ‘We will address this once we achieve victory.’ Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian state’s efforts to shape its narrative have also intensified. This has created a complex dual reality: on one side, a vital defence of national unity amid existential threats; on the other, growing concerns about the narrowing of media freedom and civic space. These tendencies are not unique to Ukraine but resonate with broader contemporary patterns of wartime propaganda and narrative control. In Russia, the Kremlin’s framing of the invasion as a “special military operation” revolves around myths of ‘denazification’ and existential defence against NATO. Similar dynamics are evident in the Israel–Gaza war, where narratives of absolute threat restrict space for humanitarian critique, and U.S. post-9/11 unity discourses. Those cases illustrate that the pressures shaping Ukraine’s discursive landscape reflect a wider repertoire of wartime storytelling. In such a contested information environment, theatre takes on greater political urgency. Beyond its artistic purpose, it becomes a space where trauma is embodied and where official narratives can be challenged and silenced testimonies brought to light. By presenting personal accounts of survival and reconstructing events that propaganda aims to distort or erase, Ukrainian theatre might act as a counter-archive, preserving memory in living form when digital records are vulnerable to manipulation. In this way, it resists both the erasure of atrocity and the oversimplification of complexity, affirming that truth can still be communicated even as the battlefield extends into the realm of narrative itself. As a Ukrainian artist, I must navigate the constraints and pressures caused by the weaponisation of culture, a pivotal point in our national discourse since 2013. One of the main challenges I face is maintaining humanist principles amid the sacralisation of violence and wartime propaganda. This myth, while powerful, creates a dangerous dichotomy: heroism or betrayal, sacrifice or silence. In the context of Ukraine’s resistance, hatred towards the aggressor (Russia, or russia) is understandable, even unavoidable. Hatred for the invader has become a necessary shield, both psychologically and politically. However, hatred does not come without a cost. It regulates speech patterns, adjusts empathetic responses, and enforces a singular narrative that is clean, proud, and patriotic. When hatred remains unexamined, it risks turning inward, fostering silence, self-censorship, or suspicion of dissent. When wartime hatred becomes sacred, it prevents questioning; it whispers, ‘You cannot say this; not now’. Yet art is the place where contradiction exists. Artists must walk the narrowest of lines: resisting not only occupation but also the complete colonisation of their inner worlds by rage. The tragedy is not that we experience hatred; the tragedy is when it becomes the only thing we are permitted to feel. As James Baldwin, an author of 1963’s The Fire Next Time, stated:’ I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain’.9
Artists Fedir Aleksandrovych and Iryna Ozarynska performing at the Cultural Centre of the Embassy of Ukraine in France, 2023. Photo by Olga Danylyuk. Artists Fedir Aleksandrovych performing Evacuation 2022 at the Cultural Centre of the Embassy of Ukraine in France, 2023. Photo by Olga Danylyuk. Thus, we reach a crucial point, which means Ukraine must defend itself but also stay watchful to avoid becoming what it opposes. While depicting the war as a fight for ‘freedom, democracy, and European values,’ scholars often overlook the contradictions and limits of these principles within the Ukrainian context. In this landscape, the mechanism of the regime mirror-shield comes into play: governing authorities craft a compelling image of moral clarity and national unity, while deflecting or absorbing criticism by projecting it onto external enemies or framing it as betrayal. Generally, authoritarian regimes subvert dissent by promoting the myth of creative freedom and co-opting art, where audiences, actors, and regimes imitate one another. I would suggest using the ‘regime mirror-shield’ as a metaphor to show how governing authorities project and deflect narratives to sustain power. By creating favourable self-representations and redirecting criticism, regimes use this mechanism to protect their legitimacy and suppress dissent. In Russia, the ‘regime mirror-shield’ manifests in the cultivation of a besieged, morally righteous nation image and the systematic use of the “foreign agent” label for internal dissent. By projecting itself as morally embattled and perpetually under attack, the Kremlin deflects responsibility for its actions and recasts critics as externally manipulated threats. During Ukraine’s wartime, this means that stories of heroism, unity, and sacrifice are amplified while complex voices and differing experiences are silenced. Design sketch by Iryna Ozarynska, 2023. In response, we choose to reveal what the shield tries to conceal, a street performance, Evacuation 2022, honouring the innocent victims of the Russian invasion: civilians whose names and lives are absent from triumphant narratives but whose silenced presence resists the mirror. Through movement, objects, and public participation, the performance affirms that memory is not only constructed by the state for display but reclaimed by those who endure. Iryna Ozarynska performing Evacuation 2022 at the Scout Institute, Prague, 2023. Photo by Olga Danylyuk. One can flee a war, though one’s soul and heart still yearn for home. Evacuation becomes death‐like, the soul departing the body, and war leaves traces on our identities forever. On the morning of April 8, 2022, in Краматорськ (Kramatorsk),thousands of people, mainly women and children, had gathered at the railway station in hopes of evacuation from heavy shelling in the Donetsk region.10 At approximately 10:30 a.m., the station was hit by two missiles, resulting in at least 58 civilian deaths and over 100 injuries, including children.11 We want to affirm that behind every statistic lies an individual story of loss, longing and resilience, where theatre functions both as a form of resistance and a challenge to narrative control. The aim is not to lose control of the narrative, but to broaden its scope. Theatre and performance must give multiple truths, painful contradictions, and unresolved histories a room to breathe. A resilient nation is not the one that silences doubt, but one that can contain it. Notes:
Fig.2EvacuationParis
Fig.3EvacuationFrance
Fig.4EvacuationFrance
Dr Olga Danylyuk is a British Academy Researcher at Risk Fellow at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (RCSSD). She is a researcher, curator, and theatre director specialising in performance, conflict, and intermediality. Her fieldwork in Eastern Ukraine included frontline documentation, humanitarian aid, and devising theatre projects with young people affected by war. Her recent documentary performance, A Visit to the Minotaur, was presented at the Voila Europe Festival, London (2022), followed by street performances Evacuation 2022 in Prague, Brussels, and Paris (2023), and EMETA: The Legend of Golem at the International Theatre Festival Golden Lion in Lviv (2023).
