Tetyana Berezhna voted in as new Culture Minister

The Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, confirmed Tetyana Berezhna as the country’s new Culture Minister on Oct. 21, approving her appointment with 266 votes in favor.

Berezhna had been serving as acting minister since August and previously worked as deputy economy minister from June 2022.

Berezhna was named acting minister as part of a reshuffle focused on preserving government stability and advancing reforms during wartime. She succeeded Oleksandr Tkachenko and Mykola Tochytskyi, who held the post from 2022 to 2023 and 2023 to 2025, respectively.

The previous two culture ministers who served since the start of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine were criticized for a number of issues, most notably ineffective budget planning and use of donor funds, lack of public transparency, and failure to take significant action in the preservation of cultural heritage.

Tkachenko, a former television manager, resigned in 2023 following backlash over proposed government funding of nearly $885,000 for a television comedy about two young men fleeing Russia's war in the province.

Ukraine's cultural community petitioned for Tochytskyi's resignation's following his dismissal of Maksym Ostapenko, the director-general of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra National Historical and Cultural Reserve, who Tochytskyi claimed was not sufficiently combatting the actions of the Moscow-oriented Ukrainian Orthodox Church at the Lavra.

Following Berezhna's appointment as acting minister in August, Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said that her role in the Culture Ministry would guarantee better "manageability, financial capacity, and effective dialogue with the cultural community," adding that Berezhna had a "a strong background in public policy, international projects, and working with partners."

Berezhna is an experienced lawyer and policy specialist with advanced legal degrees from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and international training in government and public affairs.

Heading the Culture Ministry is a particularly important roll during wartime as Ukraine's cultural heritage is one of the main targets in Russia's full-scale war. Since 2022, Ukraine has suffered massive losses to its cultural sphere: 1,599 heritage sites and 2,415 cultural facilities had been damaged or destroyed, according to data published by the Culture Ministry at the end of September.

Data monitoring by PEN Ukraine also shows that at least 240 people from across Ukraine's cultural sphere have been killed by Russia since the start of the full-scale war.

This Ukrainian author was executed by the Soviets, but his legendary novel ‘The City’ lives on

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

The Kyiv IndependentKate Tsurkan