Photograph Revives Ukraine-Russia Culture War

It looks like a serene snapshot from Ukraine’s battlefield: A group of armor-clad soldiers huddled around a makeshift table scattered with food and playing cards. Some laugh or smoke, and one lounges on the ground, smiling as he scrolls through his phone.

The photograph is unlike others of the Ukrainian front that have rallied people in Ukraine over the course of the war — there is no cannon fire, no soldiers climbing out of trenches, no wounded fighters with faces contorted in pain.

Still, for the past year, the image has been widely shared online by Ukrainians and praised by government officials, who displayed it recently in the capital’s leading exhibition center because it has struck at the heart of the Ukrainian identity struggle caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The photograph — staged and taken in late 2023 by Émeric Lhuisset, a French photographer — reimagines a famous 19th-century painting of Cossacks based in central Ukraine, with present-day Ukrainian soldiers standing in for the legendary horse-riding warriors. The soldiers’ poses and expressions are the same, though swords have been replaced by machine guns.

The subject matter is at the heart of a culture war between Russia and Ukraine that has intensified since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion almost three years ago, with Ukrainians seeking to reclaim and assert an identity that Russia says does not exist.

The painting has been claimed by both Ukraine and Russia as part of their heritages. It not only depicts Cossacks, a people that both countries view as their own, but it was also made by Illia Repin, an artist born in what is today Ukraine but who did much of his work in Moscow and St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire.