https://news.artnet.com/opinion/russian-cultural-elites-putins-war-2079885

"On March 1, Russia shot ballistic missiles at a TV tower in Kyiv, located next to Babyn Yar, a site of one of the largest mass shootings of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. The acclaimed Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan posted an archival photo of the massacre site with the caption “Russia bombed Babyn Yar today.”
A famous Russian art historian and curator, Ekaterina Degot, commented on the post: “Not Russia. Putin did.”
Degot’s comment drew fierce reactions from Ukrainian cultural workers, many of whom felt insulted that she had the temerity to challenge her colleague given the circumstances. But the seemingly trivial disagreement struck a nerve because it is also emblematic of a deeper rift between Russian and Ukrainian perspectives on culture, politics, and war."

"Since the war started on February 24, the responses from Russian intellectuals revealed their inability to understand how the ongoing war is in large part a result of their political passivity. For years, modern Russia has cultivated complex narratives that separated culture from politics while using that same culture to distract the West from Russia’s wars, human rights violations, censorship, and persecution of political dissidents.

At the same time, Russian culture received wide representation in Europe and the U.S., supported both by Russian oligarchs’ oil and gas money and international nonprofits aimed at giving a platform to voices of dissent. Paradoxically, all these vastly varying currents have established the same axiom: culture cannot change real politics."

"The present attempts of Russian intellectuals to portray themselves as innocent victims of the new wave of isolationism are fundamentally hypocritical. For many years now, Russian art professionals have been getting a lot of attention from the international community. Russian institutions have been working on projects of all scales imaginable with European and American partners: “Red: Art and Utopia in the Land of Soviets” at the Grand Palais in 2019; Filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s “DAU” in Paris and Berlin; “Diversity United,” a show planned in collaboration between Germany, France, and Russia last year; and the programs at Moscow’s Strelka Institute, to name just a few—all of which helped reinforce and modernize a perennial trope of “the Great Russian culture.”
Hundreds of projects such as these did nothing to prevent the wars Russia has led in the meantime. Quite the contrary, they have been successfully distracting the world’s attention from these crimes."