Built around testimonies of people who lived through Russian occupation in different regions of Ukraine, the book is based on interviews collected in 2022–2024 as part of The Reckoning Project. Bringing together reportage, monologues, and documentary essays, it reflects on memory, violence, survival, and the challenge of speaking about war through personal experience.

The conversation will focus on the process of documenting war crimes and occupation, the role of testimony, and the ethical questions that emerge when working with trauma and memory. Through stories from Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv regions, and territories that remain under occupation, the event offers a way to engage with Russia’s war against Ukraine beyond headlines and abstraction.

Svitlana Oslavska is an independent Ukrainian journalist, writer, and cultural researcher. Since 2022, she has documented Russian war crimes as part of The Reckoning Project and writes for Ukrainian and international publications.

The event will be held in English. The book will be available for purchase on site in Ukrainian.

📅 Tuesday, May 26
🕕 18:00
📍 Ukraine House in Denmark, Strandgade 27B, Copenhagen

We look forward to welcoming you for this conversation.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, embroidery and other forms of traditional craft have taken on new meaning as part of Ukraine’s cultural resistance. During this event, you will have the opportunity to try Ukrainian embroidery yourself, learn about its historical role, and hear how art and culture are used in different contexts to resist occupation and cultural erasure.

We will hear a personal story from our Chairperson Nataliia Popovych, while Yastemska Oksana, Head of the Fund Work Sector of the National Museum of Folk Architecture and Everyday Life of Ukraine and ethnographer, will talk about the embroidery tradition from different regions of Ukraine.

The theoretical part will be followed by a hands-on workshop led by one of our Ukrainian craftspeople. Participants will work with authentic patterns from the Ivan Honchar Museum archive and each person will receive their own kit and embroider a small ornament to take with them.

The event is free of charge but requires registration, as places are limited.

📅 Wednesday, May 20
🕔 16:30-18:30
📍 Ukraine House in Denmark, Strandgade 27B, Copenhagen

Spend some time with us to learn about this tradition and try practicing it yourself!

VARTA follows Ukrainian soldiers from different branches of the armed forces – army aviation, attack aircraft, tank crews, army medics, state emergency service responders, infantry, and drone operators – whose ordinary lives were abruptly transformed by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

War changes the body before it changes the world, and the series follows that change in faces, voices, routines, and silences. Each protagonist carries the weight of the war in their own way: a young pilot flying at dangerously low altitudes, a former farmer fighting from a Soviet-era tank, a sapper clearing land poisoned by mines, a woman medic saving lives under fire, and rescuers who continue to search for life beneath the rubble.

After the screening, the audience will have a chance to meet Evgen Matvienko, Ukrainian filmmaker and director of VARTA and Mariana Shafro, Ukrainian photographer, filmmaker, and lead producer of VARTA. Together, they will speak about the project's making and the responsibility of documenting war and representing the voices of those defending Ukraine’s sovereignty to the world.

The screening is held with English subtitles.

📍 Ukraine House in Denmark, Strandgade 27B, Copenhagen
📅 10 May at 19:00

We hope you’ll join us!

As part of the 2026 edition of Voices of Dignity, we invite you to the opening of the exhibition “Voices of Dignity: Literature of Resistance”  — a tribute to Ukrainian literary voices of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The exhibition reveals how Ukrainian literature has functioned not only as art, but as an act of resistance across generations. It honors writers who were persecuted or silenced under imperial and totalitarian regimes, those killed as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion, and those who continue to write under the conditions of war today. 

From Lesia Ukrainka and the Executed Renaissance to the Sixtiers, post-independence authors, and contemporary writers, the exhibition unfolds chronologically through key literary generations. These authors stand at the center of Ukraine’s cultural survival as they preserved the memory, challenged imperial narratives and articulated issues of human dignity in the face of repression. 

Through installations, archival materials, historical documents, videos, and contemporary publications, visitors have the chance to encounter literature as a living force — not peripheral to history, but central to it.

📅 Monday, February 23
⏰ 17:30 (doors open)
📍 Ukraine House in Denmark, Strandgade 27B, Copenhagen

The exhibition will be on view from February 23 to May 31.

We look forward to welcoming you to the opening!

In early 2025, Melnychenko distributed 25 disposable film cameras to Ukrainian soldiers across the front line, inviting them to document their everyday lives. Each camera was sent back with a handwritten letter and a personal artifact from the war: a piece of shrapnel, a flight jacket patch, a part of a drone, or a MacCoffee pouch. These objects create an emotional, first-person archive of wartime, identity, humor, and hope.

The resulting exhibition offers a rare historical snapshot from within the war, told directly through the eyes of those who fight it through photographs from across the front lines, handwritten letters from soldiers and physical artifacts: uniform patches, handmade tokens. Each part of the exhibition offers a snapshot from within the war, rather than about the war.

What does “liberation” really mean?

For many, the end of the Second World War did not bring freedom. In Ukraine and specifically Crimea, the defeat of Nazi Germany was followed by renewed Soviet control, repression, deportations, and the silencing of national histories.

In connection to Europe Day, together with the European Commission Representation in Denmark, we are organizing an event that looks at liberation as an uneven and often contested experience.

Together, we will reflect on how liberation was lived differently across Europe, and what that history can tell us today. From the Ukrainian perspective, we turn to a past shaped by occupation and continued resistance – and to the difficult questions that still surround it. From the Crimean Tatar perspective, we confront the 1944 deportation, where “liberation” became the beginning of exile and survival.

We will also place these experiences in a broader European context, where the meaning of liberation ranged from relief to reckoning, and where its consequences continue to shape political and historical narratives.

Among the speakers:

• Spartacus Olsson – historian and documentary producer, known for large-scale projects on the World Wars and public history

• Gulnara Abdulayeva (online) – historian, writer, and expert on the history of Crimea and the Crimean Tatar people

One more speaker TBC.

📅 Saturday, May 9

🕔 15:00

📍 Ukraine House in Denmark, Strandgade 27B, Copenhagen

This conversation looks beyond victory and into what follows – join us to be aware.