Russian strikes are destroying Ukraine's wartime publishing boom
A warehouse fire at the Kharkiv publisher Ranok shows how a surge in Ukrainian-language book production since 2022 is now being hit directly by Russian attacks, according to the Guardian.
According to the Guardian, the publisher Ranok was holding 628,000 new schoolbooks at its Kharkiv warehouse when Russian strikes hit the city in August. Kharkiv, along with Kyiv, is described as the centre of Ukraine's publishing and printing industry. The warehouse, built 15 years ago on the site of a former bread factory, covers about 10,000 square metres, with books stacked 12 metres high across its shelves.
Viktor Kruglov, Ranok's co-founder and chief executive, was at the site with five senior colleagues on a Saturday morning in August, reviewing distribution plans ahead of the new school year, the Guardian reports. "It was the high season of distribution," he told the paper, "so we were checking all our processes: how to do it more successfully, how to do it in time."
The Guardian frames the episode as part of a wider pattern: a boom in Ukrainian-language publishing that followed the 2022 invasion, as readers and writers turned away from Russian-language books, is now being directly targeted by the force and frequency of Russian attacks on printing and distribution infrastructure.
The source material does not specify further details of the Kharkiv strike's outcome, other losses across the industry, or how publishers are responding beyond the account of Ranok's warehouse.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
