European Central: Politics, Ethics, and the Human Being in Ukrainian Culture

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With the escalation of war in 2022, patriotic songs once again became a form of collective unity and conscious resistance for Ukrainians. Yet as the war has now lasted longer than World War I, the fate of the Ukrainian people seems heavily staked: both the choice of the future and the interpretation of the past. The question of culture’s role in the vital rituals of wartime recedes into the shadow of an all-consuming conflict. What role does the Ukrainian song occupy today — at the tip of the bayonet, or sustaining life in the rear?

The Risk Of Dehumanization

At the beginning of Russia’s invasion in 2022, songs alluding in their motifs to the era of World War II became popular in Ukraine. The most vivid example is the song “Ukrainska Liut” (“Ukrainian Fury”) by Khrystyna Solovii, which has garnered seven million plays on YouTube Music. The title of the song also notes that it draws upon Italy’s anti-fascist folk song, “Bella Ciao” – the melody is indeed taken from the Italian original, while the lyrics are contemporary. The song addresses the outbreak of the war, the destruction of the enemy, the glorification of the Ukrainian army, and the then-popular weapons systems (Javelin and Bayraktar).

The Italian “Bella Ciao,” a well-known partisan song, symbolizes popular resistance against fascist regimes. Its musical image became canonical and one of the cornerstones of the cultural image of World War II. In the Ukrainian song, the image of a small people fighting against a vast Russia is adopted, akin to partisans, while the instrumental base of the Italian original reinforces the Ukrainian song with the symbolic framework of World War II.

Yet the content of the songs diverges far beyond a shared myth. In the original “Bella Ciao,” there is not a single line about cruelty; the song is devoted to sacred ideals of love and loyalty unto death. The Ukrainian version, by contrast, shifts the emphasis toward the violence of military struggle.

The practical danger, critics argue, is that such Ukrainian songs distort the motivation for struggle. They cultivate death in war, not in the positive sense of “death for the homeland” or “sacrifice for love,” but in a purely negative sense — “against the enemy.” And while any intentional struggle in war implies a readiness to die, this framing formulates the song’s idea as “death against the enemy.” Such an idea is reactionary in nature, placing the primary emphasis on hatred rather than on love that seeks wholeness, and contradicting the ideal of military duty.

The Loss Of Reality In A Fateful Time

The historical context of World War II became firmly embedded in the consciousness of citizens of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, where the war functioned as a central ideological construct of the “Great Victory,” almost akin to a war of independence.

Shortly before Russia’s invasion in 2022, the Ukrainian government passed a law on decommunization, which, at the legal level, aimed to debunk Soviet myths and ban communist symbols. Due to fear of the law and potential negative reactions from audiences, Ukrainian artists who used cultural imagery from World War II to boost morale were forced to rely solely on Western cultural symbols and motifs, such as “Bella Ciao.” Nevertheless, they still reawakened a long-established image of World War II in people’s minds — precisely in the Soviet scenario, in which the war ended with the capture of the enemy’s capital and the total defeat of the Wehrmacht.

It is precisely through this myth that Ukrainians imagine victory. The mere halting of the aggressor, or even the return of territories, appears as a far paler idea of victory. In the emotional world of song, it loses to the image of total annihilation and complete retribution.

The most vivid example here is the song “Moskva Zghorila y Vtonula” (“Moscow Burned and Sank”) by the band Spiv Brativ, which has amassed 10 million plays on YouTube Music. The song is built on an extremely simplified metaphor, the city of Moscow being equated with the cruiser of the same name that Ukraine sank with missiles in spring 2022.

The danger of this pattern lies in the fact that it shapes the narrative of how Ukrainians envision victory or defeat in the war. Increasingly, the word “capitulation” can be heard in the public sphere. Ukrainian military commentators, frightening audiences with the prospect of defeat, have invoked the image of “the Russian flag over Lviv,” echoing the iconic image of “the Soviet flag over the Reichstag.”

The harsh reality on the front lines these past two years has naturally sharpened this narrative. As a result, the myth of World War II has come to be used by propagandists to rally the Ukrainian people not around struggle, but around fear.

At the same time, the possibility of stopping the war along the line of contact is not being seriously considered, though such a pause could provide an opportunity to begin a new project for Ukraine’s development, focused on growth and resilience. A victory plan making Ukraine more attractive to nationals who have fled would constitute true peace, not according to the script of World War II, but according to the script of Ukraine’s future. Yet war-hawk propagandists dismiss this option, betting on a narrative driven by negative motivation and a war fought to the very end.

Songs That Shape Ukraine

In 2025, UNESCO designated Kyiv as a UNESCO City of Music, signaling institutional recognition of music’s role in the city’s cultural life. In cultural publications, Ukraine’s folk song heritage is often described as comprising approximately 15,500 folk verses. By primarily intertwining cultures and historical events, Ukrainian songs form a rich and multifaceted image of the nation. It is of fateful importance, even amid the fog of war, not to forget this principle of diversity.

Ukraine has never been a nation-state throughout its history. Multiculturalism is a feature of its historical formation. And the rejection of Jewish, Russian, Polish, and other heritages does not lead to the freedom of decolonization. On the contrary, it only cultivates the seed of contradiction. For Ukrainians, who are ready at any moment to fight for their traditions, really allow the arbitrary erasure of the memory of their culture from the times of the USSR and the Russian Empire, merely because of the aggression of a neighboring country?

This undermines multiculturalism as the central factor in Ukraine’s formation. The aggressive actions of the dictator in the Kremlin are merely a catalyst.

The Role of Humanism and Ethics in Politics

Aristotle wrote of politics as the highest form of association, encompassing all other forms of human existence, including the sphere of culture. Today, when singers become popular opinion leaders, in times of hardship, their creative work begins to exert decisive influence on people, thereby acquiring the power of the highest political good. With the emergence of power among artists, immense responsibility also arises. Therefore, when culture borrows the myths of total war and replaces ethics with hatred, it loses its humanizing function and begins to operate as a mechanism of fear and propaganda.

The ethical danger for Ukraine today lies not only in the fact that, in choosing between struggle and capitulation, it risks losing its connection with reality, but also in the possible loss of a part of its own political culture. The defeat of ethics by politics will lead to the demise of democracy. Human consciousness will experience its own insignificance before the steel rain of events, powerless to change anything. In such a case, only philosophers can help politicians by deconstructing the terrifying myths of propaganda and initiating dialogue from the standpoint of traditions, societies, and human beings.

Compassion is the chief, perhaps the only, law of the existence of all humanity. — Fyodor Dostoevsky