It seems to be like a serene snapshot from Ukraine’s battlefield: A bunch of armor-clad troopers huddled round a makeshift desk scattered with meals and taking part in playing cards. Some giggle or smoke, and one lounges on the bottom, smiling as he scrolls by his telephone.
The {photograph} is in contrast to others of the Ukrainian entrance which have rallied individuals in Ukraine over the course of the warfare — there isn’t a cannon hearth, no troopers climbing out of trenches, no wounded fighters with faces contorted in ache.
Nonetheless, for the previous 12 months, the picture has been broadly shared on-line by Ukrainians and praised by authorities officers, who displayed it lately within the capital’s main exhibition heart as a result of it has struck on the coronary heart of the Ukrainian identification wrestle brought on by Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The {photograph} — staged and brought in late 2023 by Émeric Lhuisset, a French photographer — reimagines a well-known Nineteenth-century portray of Cossacks based mostly in central Ukraine, with present-day Ukrainian troopers standing in for the legendary horse-riding warriors. The troopers’ poses and expressions are the identical, although swords have been changed by machine weapons.
The subject material is on the coronary heart of a tradition warfare between Russia and Ukraine that has intensified since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion nearly three years in the past, with Ukrainians searching for to reclaim and assert an identification that Russia says doesn’t exist.
The portray has been claimed by each Ukraine and Russia as a part of their heritages. It not solely depicts Cossacks, a those who each international locations view as their very own, however it was additionally made by Illia Repin, an artist born in what’s at the moment Ukraine however who did a lot of his work in Moscow and St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire.
It’s a cultural battle lengthy dominated by Russia. Essentially the most well-known model of the portray is displayed in St. Petersburg, whereas one other lesser-known model is in Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine. Repin has been labeled Russian in worldwide exhibitions, irritating Ukrainians who see him as one in all their very own.
However Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed establishments just like the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork to rethink this classification and relabel Repin as Ukrainian.
Together with his photographic reinterpretation, Mr. Lhuisset seeks to additional problem Russia’s narrative by drawing a direct line between the Cossacks, who at occasions resisted the rule of czarist Russia, and the present Ukrainian Military.
“You’ll be able to’t perceive this warfare in the event you don’t perceive the entire difficulty of cultural appropriation,” Mr. Lhuisset, 41, mentioned in a current interview in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. “It is a actual cultural warfare.”
The portray — “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of Turkey” — is acquainted to most Ukrainians, with reproductions adorning many household houses. It exhibits a bunch of Cossacks from an space straddling at the moment’s Zaporizhzhia area in southern Ukraine laughing heartily as they write a mocking reply to an ultimatum to give up from the sultan in 1676.
The Zaporizhzhia area is now partly below Russian occupation. The remainder has come below rising Russian airstrikes in current months.
Though historians say the depicted scene most probably by no means happened, the sense of defiance it conveys has resonated deeply in Ukraine.
“This portray was a component of self-identity formation for me,” mentioned Tetyana Osipova, 49, a Ukrainian servicewoman featured within the {photograph}. She recalled that her grandmother had stored a small replica “in a spot of honor” close to the Christian Orthodox icons of their house, the place it served as a reminder to “get up for your self.”
Mr. Lhuisset mentioned he first grasped the portray’s significance when he was in Kyiv throughout the 2014 rebellion that ousted a pro-Kremlin president. He remembered seeing protesters holding placards with reproductions of the paintings to represent “their willingness to not give up, to not submit.”
Again in France, the portray slipped from his thoughts.
Till Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
Mr. Lhuisset was impressed by a information report a couple of Ukrainian border guard’s defiant and expletive-laden radio message to an oncoming Russian naval assault. The insulting reply instantly reminded him of the portray.
“For me, it was the Cossacks’ reply to the sultan,” he mentioned. “It appeared blindingly apparent.”
He determined to seize this spirit of defiance by recreating Repin’s portray in a contemporary setting. He spent months negotiating with the Ukrainian navy to get armed troops to pose for the {photograph} and to discover a secure place, north of Kyiv, to stage it. Some troopers got here straight from the entrance line, their mustachioed faces evoking the unruly Cossacks.
“They regarded like that they had stepped out of the portray!” mentioned Andrii Malyk, the press officer for Ukraine’s 112th Territorial Protection Brigade, which participated within the undertaking.
Mr. Lhuisset needed the {photograph} to be as near the portray as potential. He meticulously organized the 30 or so troopers, positioning their fingers and asking them to freeze in bursts of hearty laughter to echo the vitality of the unique scene. Objects within the portray had been changed with fashionable equivalents: a slouch hat turned a helmet; a musket reworked right into a rocket launcher; a mandolin was swapped for a conveyable speaker.
A drone hovers within the sky, a nod to the plane with no crew which have turn out to be conspicuous on the battlefield.
Mr. Lhuisset launched the {photograph} a couple of days afterward social media, and it was rapidly embraced by Ukrainian media and authorities officers as an emblem of the nation’s spirit of independence. Ukraine’s Protection Ministry posted the picture on the social media platform X with the caption: “Cossack blood flows in our veins.”
To Ukrainians, the {photograph} served as a way to reclaim a masterpiece that they are saying has lengthy been misattributed to Russia, regardless of its Ukrainian roots.
“Some individuals consider the portray as Russian, not Ukrainian,” mentioned Eduard Lopuliak, a fight medic featured within the {photograph}. “It’s a solution to remind them it’s our cultural heritage, not Russia’s.”
Russia, for its half, says that Repin is a Russian painter and that every one of his work must be thought-about Russian.
The painter was born in present-day Ukraine and studied artwork there earlier than shifting to St. Petersburg to additional his profession. Oleksandra Kovalchuk, a deputy head of the Odesa Wonderful Arts Museum, mentioned that Repin retained sturdy ties to Ukraine by pals there and by supporting Ukrainian artists. To depict the Cossacks with authenticity, he traveled throughout the nation and labored carefully with native historians, she mentioned.
In some ways, the {photograph} was Ukraine’s reply to Russia’s personal reinterpretation of the portray. In 2017, the Russian painter Vassily Nesterenko, a Kremlin favourite, reimagined the Cossacks in fashionable Russian uniforms, in a piece titled, “A Letter to Russia’s Enemies.”
The undertaking additionally carries a extra pressing mission for Ukraine: serving to it rebuild a cultural heritage devastated by practically three years of warfare.
Russian bombings of museums and theaters have destroyed numerous Ukrainian cultural treasures. Moscow’s occupation forces have additionally looted establishments just like the Kherson Regional Artwork Museum in southern Ukraine, which misplaced practically its complete assortment.
To assist handle the loss, Mr. Lhuisset traveled to Kyiv late final 12 months with a big print of his {photograph} and donated it to Alina Dotsenko, the museum’s director. “The Kherson museum at the moment is an empty constructing,” he mentioned. “To turn out to be a museum once more, it wants a brand new assortment.”
The {photograph} was displayed for a day within the Ukrainian Home, a serious cultural heart in Kyiv, alongside empty frames left from the theft in Kherson. Like most of Ukraine’s artworks, it was then saved in a secure and secret location to guard it from Russian assault. Will probably be transferred to Kherson when the museum reopens, which is virtually unattainable at the moment as a result of it’s lower than a mile from the entrance line.
Mr. Malyk, the soldier, mentioned he hoped to go to the museum when the warfare was over to indicate his youngsters the picture. Just like the portray, he mentioned, the {photograph} captures an vital second in Ukraine’s historical past.
“We hope it is going to move down by generations,” he mentioned.
Daria Mitiuk contributed reporting.
