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 The soldiers’ poses and expressions are the same, though swords have been replaced by machine guns.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.

It is a cultural battle long dominated by Russia. The most famous version of the painting is displayed in St. Petersburg, while another lesser-known version is in Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine. Repin has been labeled Russian in international exhibitions, frustrating Ukrainians who see him as one of their own.

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art to reconsider this classification and relabel Repin as Ukrainian.

With his photographic reinterpretation, Mr. Lhuisset seeks to further challenge Russia’s narrative by drawing a direct line between the Cossacks, who at times resisted the rule of czarist Russia, and the current Ukrainian Army.

“You can’t understand this war if you don’t understand the whole issue of cultural appropriation,” Mr. Lhuisset, 41, said in a recent interview in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. “This is a real cultural war.”

The painting — “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of Turkey” — is familiar to most Ukrainians, with reproductions adorning many family homes. It shows a group of Cossacks from an area straddling today’s Zaporizhzhia region in southern Ukraine laughing heartily as they write a mocking reply to an ultimatum to surrender from the sultan in 1676.

The Zaporizhzhia region is now partly under Russian occupation. The rest has come under increasing Russian airstrikes in recent months.

Although historians say the depicted scene most likely never took place, the sense of defiance it conveys has resonated deeply in Ukraine.

“This painting was an element of self-identity formation for me,” said Tetyana Osipova, 49, a Ukrainian servicewoman featured in the photograph. She recalled that her grandmother had kept a small reproduction “in a place of honor” near the Christian Orthodox icons in their home, where it served as a reminder to “stand up for yourself.”

Mr. Lhuisset said he first grasped the painting’s significance when he was in Kyiv during the 2014 uprising that ousted a pro-Kremlin president. He remembered seeing protesters holding placards with reproductions of the artwork to symbolize “their willingness not to surrender, not to submit.”

Back in France, the painting slipped from his mind.

Until Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

Mr. Lhuisset was inspired by a news report about a Ukrainian border guard’s defiant and expletive-laden radio message to an oncoming Russian naval assault. The insulting reply immediately reminded him of the painting.

“For me, it was the Cossacks’ answer to the sultan,” he said. “It seemed blindingly obvious.”

He decided to capture this spirit of defiance by recreating Repin’s painting in a modern setting. He spent months negotiating with the Ukrainian military to get armed troops to pose for the photograph and to find a safe place, north of Kyiv, to stage it. Some soldiers came straight from the front line, their mustachioed faces evoking the unruly Cossacks.

“They looked like they had stepped out of the painting!” said Andrii Malyk, the press officer for Ukraine’s 112th Territorial Defense Brigade, which participated in the project.

Mr. Lhuisset wanted the photograph to be as close to the painting as possible. He meticulously arranged the 30 or so soldiers, positioning their hands and asking them to freeze in bursts of hearty laughter to echo the energy of the original scene. Objects in the painting were replaced with modern equivalents: a slouch hat became a helmet; a musket transformed into a rocket launcher; a mandolin was swapped for a portable speaker.

A drone hovers in the sky, a nod to the aircraft with no crew that have become conspicuous on the battlefield.

Mr. Lhuisset released the photograph a few days later on social media, and it was quickly embraced by Ukrainian media and government officials as an emblem of the country’s spirit of independence. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted the image on the social media platform X with the caption: “Cossack blood flows in our veins.”

To Ukrainians, the photograph served as a means to reclaim a masterpiece that they say has long been misattributed to Russia, despite its Ukrainian roots.

“Some people think of the painting as Russian, not Ukrainian,” said Eduard Lopuliak, a combat medic featured in the photograph. “It’s a way to remind them it’s our cultural heritage, not Russia’s.”

Russia, for its part, says that Repin is a Russian painter and that all of his work should be considered Russian.

The painter was born in present-day Ukraine and studied art there before moving to St. Petersburg to further his career. Oleksandra Kovalchuk, a deputy head of the Odesa Fine Arts Museum, said that Repin retained strong ties to Ukraine through friends there and by supporting Ukrainian artists. To depict the Cossacks with authenticity, he traveled across the country and worked closely with local historians, she said.

In many ways, the photograph was Ukraine’s answer to Russia’s own reinterpretation of the painting. In 2017, the Russian painter Vassily Nesterenko, a Kremlin favorite, reimagined the Cossacks in modern Russian uniforms, in a work titled, “A Letter to Russia’s Enemies.”

The project also carries a more urgent mission for Ukraine: helping it rebuild a cultural heritage devastated by nearly three years of war.

Russian bombings of museums and theaters have destroyed countless Ukrainian cultural treasures. Moscow’s occupation forces have also looted institutions like the Kherson Regional Art Museum in southern Ukraine, which lost nearly its entire collection.

To help address the loss, Mr. Lhuisset traveled to Kyiv late last year with a large print of his photograph and donated it to Alina Dotsenko, the museum’s director. “The Kherson museum today is an empty building,” he said. “To become a museum again, it needs a new collection.”

The photograph was displayed for a day in the Ukrainian House, a major cultural center in Kyiv, alongside empty frames left from the theft in Kherson. Like most of Ukraine’s artworks, it was then stored in a safe and secret location to protect it from Russian attack. It will be transferred to Kherson when the museum reopens, which is practically impossible today because it is less than a mile from the front line.

Mr. Malyk, the soldier, said he hoped to visit the museum when the war was over to show his children the image. Like the painting, he said, the photograph captures an important moment in Ukraine’s history.

“We hope it will pass down through generations,” he said.

Daria Mitiuk contributed reporting.