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Kate Tsurkan
Culture ReporterKate Tsurkan is a reporter at the Kyiv Independent who writes mostly about culture-related topics in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Her newsletter Explaining Ukraine with Kate Tsurkan, which focuses specifically on Ukrainian culture, is published weekly by the Kyiv Independent and is partially supported by a generous grant from the Nadia Sophie Seiler Fund. The U.S. publisher Deep Vellum published her co-translation of Ukrainian author Oleh Sentsov’s Diary of a Hunger Striker in 2024. Some of her other writing and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Harpers, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of Apofenie Magazine.
Articles

The viewer count ticks upward — dozens, then hundreds, sometimes nearly a thousand. Just about everyone has tuned in for the same reason: to hear Tetya (Auntie) Fania’s latest predictions about the threat of Russian attacks against Ukrainian cities.
“(Let’s look at) Kyiv in November,” she says during a recent broadcast, picking cards from a shuffled deck. “There could be problems with resources beyond electricity, gas, and the like. There will be serious water problems in Kyiv…Maybe rolling bla

Russian authorities detain 18 year-old singer additional 13 days for 'petty hooliganism'
by Kate Tsurkan
St. Petersburg police first detained Loginova, who performs under the stage name Naoko,  on Oct. 15 after a video of her and her fellow bandmates performing anti-Kremlin songs by artists designated as "foreign agents" went viral.

'Bring Ukraine more weapons' — author Andriy Lyubka on cultural diplomacy's main wartime role
by Kate Tsurkan
When the full-scale invasion began, Andriy Lyubka struggled to write. A celebrated Ukrainian writer and translator, he turned instead to fundraising, logistics, and delivering used cars to the front for soldiers' needs.
Yet somewhere between non-stop volunteer work and battling with exhaustion that comes from it, he began to see that even literature — words, sentences, imagination — could also serve Ukraine's cause, albeit in a less immediate way.
His volunteer work led him to write a book of 

18 year-old Russian singer fined for 'discrediting' military, still in police custody over new pending charges
by Kate Tsurkan
Instead of being released, Loginova is being kept overnight at the Police Department No. 76 in St. Petersburg after a new case was opened against her for holding an "unauthorized" public event, according to independent Russian outlet Mediazona.

Culture is not neutral: The troubling presence of Russia’s Eksmo in Frankfurt
by Kate Tsurkan
There were two questions lingering over conversations among people at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair: Where was the stand of the Russian publisher Eksmo located, and why were they even allowed to be there nearly four years into Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine?
I will never forget the look of horror and disgust of one exiled Russian author, who is fiercely pro-Ukrainian and quietly attended many of Ukraine's events at the book fair with a visible awe at this year's event program, when h

Tetyana Berezhna voted in as new Culture Minister
by Kate Tsurkan
Tetyana Berezhna had been serving as acting minister since August and previously worked as deputy economy minister from June 2022.

Ukrainian-American author Yurii Tarnawsky dies at 91
by Kate Tsurkan
A co-founder of the New York Group — a collective of Ukrainian emigre writers — Tarnawsky helped to expand and redefine contemporary Ukrainian literature through his embrace of narrative structure experimentation and linguistic innovation.

Chernihiv renames one of its squares after Donald Trump
by Kate Tsurkan
The decision to rename Fairy Tale Square was made “in order to honor prominent political leaders of modern times, as well as to draw international attention to the reconstruction of the hero city of Chernihiv," according to the explanatory note.

18 year-old Russian singer detained by St. Petersburg police for performing anti-Putin song
by Kate Tsurkan
The band Stoptime has previously performed songs by artists labeled as "foreign agents" by the Russian government. 

Ukraine's language ombudsman calls for Russian to be stripped from list of protected 'minority' languages over mistranslation
by Kate Tsurkan
If adopted by parliament, the updated list would include Belarusian, Bulgarian, Gagauz, Crimean Tatar, Modern Greek, German, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Hungarian, Czech, and Hebrew.

Zelensky strips scandalous ballet dancer Sergei Polunin, devoted Putin fan, of Ukrainian citizenship
by Kate Tsurkan
Polunin previously worked with the the Royal Ballet in London and later as the director of the Sevastopol Opera and Ballet Theater in Russian-occupied Crimea from December 2019 until the summer of 2024.

New book exposes Russia’s ecocide as a war against Ukraine’s land – and memory
by Kate Tsurkan
In the book “Ecocide in Ukraine,” Ukrainian scholar Darya Tsymbalyuk places the destruction of the Kakhovka dam at the center of a broader look into Russia’s ongoing environmental destruction of Ukrainian land.
Ukraine’s 'YeKnyha' program reaches more than 200,000 young readers, boosts book sales nationwide
by Kate Tsurkan
In the first nine months of 2025, 18-year-old Ukrainians received Hr 181.9 million ($4.3 million) in government assistance to purchase books through the program, the Culture Ministry reported.

This Ukrainian author was executed by the Soviets, but his legendary novel ‘The City’ lives on
by Kate Tsurkan
Overwhelmed by the buzzing nightlife of Khreshchatyk Street in central Kyiv, Stepan Radchenko, the despondent protagonist of Valerian Pidmohylnyi’s novel “The City,” looks up at the moon for solace and reminds himself: “The city must be conquered, not despised!”
A defining novel of 20th-century Ukrainian literature, "The City" has now been brought to English-language readers by Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute in a fresh translation by Maxim Tarnawsky.
The novel traces Radchenko's uneasy

Art after apocalypse — opera spurred by Russia’s ecocide in Ukraine to return to Kyiv
by Kate Tsurkan
Editor's Note: The Kyiv Independent is a media partner of the "Gaia-24: Opera del Mondo" performance on Nov. 27 in Kyiv.
Even in the midst of Russia’s ecocide against Ukraine — where forests are scorched, rivers are poisoned, and crops are torn apart by shellfire — life refuses to end. Nature sends up green shoots through craters — and in the same spirit, art rises through grief.
"Gaia-24: Opera del Mondo," the opera inspired by Russia’s 2023 destruction of the Kakhovka Reservoir dam in Kherso



