A Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv on June 17 destroyed a Ukrainian publishing house and damaged several other book-related businesses, the Ukrainian publishing industry news service Chytomo has reported. Ukrainian Priority Publishing was completely destroyed when Russian forces launched 175 drones, more than 14 cruise missiles, and at least two ballistic missiles at the Ukrainian capital and surrounding areas. The attack killed 28 people and damaged 27 sites across various districts.
"The Russian invaders targeted not only residential buildings and hospitals but finally struck a truly strategic site: our publishing house, Ukrainian Priority, was completely destroyed and burned to the ground," Volodymyr Shovkoshytnyi, CEO of Ukrainian Priority Publishing, told Chytomo. "The office and warehouse are gone. Tens of thousands of books—over 130 titles—were turned to ash."
Ukrainian Priority had previously lost an employee to the war when sales manager Valentyn Dobryi was killed at the front in November 2023 while serving as a volunteer with Ukrainian Armed Forces. After the June 17 attack, Shovkoshytnyi said he "sifted through the ashes of 14 years of my life," but expressed determination to rebuild the company.
Їzhakultura Publishing's office and storage space, located on the ground floor of a residential building, was also hit during the attacks. "The building sustained significant damage from the impact of fragments of a Russian cruise missile," Artem Braichenko, cofounder of Їzhakultura Publishing, said. "The force of the explosion was so powerful that it caused structural deformation inside the building, including damage to the doors and walls of our office."
One location of the Book.ua bookstore chain also reported being impacted by the attacks. Its CEO, Ivan Bohdan, struck a defiant note in his own comments to press: "We will recover and get back to work.”
Literary resilience
The attacks came just a week after the 13th International Book Arsenal Festival was held in Kyiv for the third time since the war began. The country’s primary literary events attracted 30,000 attendees for some 200 events over three-and-a-half days, including 111 publishers and six bookstores.
"Book Arsenal is one of the most beloved Ukrainian festivals, and we are happy that, despite everything, we can hold it for the third time during the full-scale Russian war," said Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta, director general of the Mystetskyi Arsenal National Art and Culture Museum Complex in Kyiv. "It is very important for all of us readers, authors, publishers, artists and musicians, for everyone to continue existing, to affirm Ukraine's presence in the world, to strengthen Ukrainian subjectivity."
This year's theme was "Everything Is Translation," and the festival's fellowship program set up 94 business meetings between 22 Ukrainian publishing professionals and eight international publishers, agents, and rights managers from countries including Estonia, Finland, Georgia, and Italy. Yuliia Kozlovets, director of the Book Arsenal, said that during this year’s festival, attendees "talked about mutual understanding, about translation from one language to another and within one language, about interpretation and those situations when full understanding was impossible—when experience, especially tragic or traumatic experience, could not be explained or translated."
