Russians are destroying Ukrainian literature in the occupied territory

In the Russian-occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the occupation authorities destroyed almost all Ukrainian literature. Instead, the Russians brought there 2.5 million of their books, the Ukrainian Center of National Resistance reported. Ukrainian books are called “extremist” by the occupation authorities, and they have created a special list of banned books, which also includes publications by foreign authors, including writers from the United States and New Zealand. In the occupied territories, not only books are taken from the shelves, but some Ukrainian publications are thrown away as garbage or burned.

The director of the central library of Mariupol, Victoria Lisohor, says that all Ukrainian-language books in the city were destroyed by the occupiers. Her acquaintances, who remained in the city, told her, in particular, about how the occupiers deliberately burnt the books.

“When the hostilities subsided, the occupiers in the courtyard of one of the libraries, as my acquaintance who was passing by, told me, threw Kobzar into the fire, Kobzar was burning. And she tells them: what did “Kobzar” do to you? There is a monument to Shevchenko in some of your cities. And they answered: “Well, we didn’t know he’d been an extremist,” Lisohor notes.

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