LVIV, Ukraine – When one of Ukraine’s most famous visual artists left her home in Kyiv in the early days of the Russian invasion, she went to the Lviv Municipal Art Center. Vlada Ralko settled among the hundreds of displaced people who had taken refuge in the facility last month. Now it is again an art gallery, featuring works by artists from all over Ukraine during the war, including Ralko, who spent several weeks here in silence, creating more than 100 drawings depicting the invasion. At the same time, Stepan Burban, a rapper from Lviv, added to his soon-to-be-released album a song that equates to a call to arms for Ukrainians. He exchanged the planned cover for one of Ralko’s recent drawings, showing a bomb landing on a shattered matrix. “I felt very angry for the first week,” Burban said. “Now it ‘s just a constant hatred.” The war pushes the Ukrainians to abandon the Russian language and culture Ukraine’s daily life away from the front lines over the past two months has seen a general rejection of all Russian things combined with the need to tell the world, especially the Russians, what has happened here. Ukrainian contemporary artists, who for years have been waging a difficult battle against the Soviet legacy of rigidity that governs freedom of expression, are now at the forefront of this narrative mission. Street posters in Lviv, which has become a gathering place for displaced artists from across the country, depict Ukrainians as white knights, noble defenders of the siege in medieval armor, or men on horseback holding trident. The Russians are represented as bloodthirsty bears, whistling snakes, dead-eyed zombies and red-skinned assholes. Local musicians in Lviv, Ukraine, are organizing music lessons for children fleeing the violence of the Russian invasion of their homelands. (Video: Erin Patrick O’Connor, Zoeann Murphy / The Washington Post) While the artistic response to metropolitan centers across Ukraine was rapid, arrivals from the east lamented the lack of a similar response to Russian aggression eight years ago, when the federation invaded the Crimean peninsula and started the Donbas war. Vitaly Matukhno was a teenager in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine during the annexation of Crimea. He spent his formative years watching the separatists and the Russian elements submit to Ukrainian rule and suppress any allusion to Western culture. “They destroyed our city from the inside so that people would remember that things were better in the Soviet Union,” said Matuhno, now 23. Prior to the invasion, Matuhno was an activist, artist, and publisher. He organized rave parties, designed art festivals and posted a zine on the work of his peers. Months ago, on an abandoned television station in Lysychansk, he discovered a number of recordings from 2002. He intends to create a collection of life scenes in the pre-war area of ​​Donbas. “You have these European liberals saying, ‘We want peace,’” Matouno said. “They are trying to establish a dialogue between Russians and Ukrainians. Every Russian is to blame for what is happening right now. We have the right to hate them. “They are destroying my country.” Ukraine scans faces of dead Russians and communicates with mothers At the Lviv National Academy of Arts, students turned a campus bomb shelter into an art gallery, in part to boost morale and in part to entice apathetic and fatalistic students to actually use the shelter when the city sirens fluttered in the air. Upon entering, guests are greeted with a red bell and a sign saying “Ring for Putin’s death.” The scenery of the gallery changes as one travels in the narrow corridors that testify to what has been lost. An exhibit asks visitors to paint something they are missing from homes that many can not return to a tiny piece of paper and drag it into a matchbox painted with the Ukrainian flag. A student in Kharkov when the bombing began recorded what he heard from his balcony for 24 hours during the invasion. Throughout the recording, the birds chirping are interrupted by explosions. In time, moments of peace only cause stress, knowing that the other shoe will fall again soon. The rector of the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts Oleksandr Soboliev now lives in Lviv and works in an office at the academy. He said at least 30 of his more than 1,030 students are missing and are missing, while one has been confirmed dead. Students have put up posters about the war on an initiative launched by the school and are working to get the Russians seeing them on social media. “Today we give students much more freedom in terms of black humor,” he said. “In peacetime this was not allowed. Now it is the opposite, in fact. ” A popular topic includes the words of the defenders of the Ukrainian Snake Island, who said the famous saying on a Russian warship. The crucial ship has since sunk and Ukraine has taken responsibility. Ukraine this week issued a stamp with a design depicting a soldier making an obscene gesture towards the ship. At the Municipal Art Center, where Ralko stayed before leaving for Germany, and Berban now works on his laptop as a music producer, walls that once housed pottery and Lithuanian art exhibits are covered in violent depictions. Kyiv comes back to life with an emotional mixture of sadness and triumph Among the first works to welcome visitors is a drawing of children ferrying across a river of demonic boatmen. Opposite the aisle, a drawing of a woman crouching on the ground with four soldiers, one without trousers, standing in a semicircle around her. Berban played music that once openly mocked the Ukrainian political leadership. This political environment now seems distant, he said. “The words from my last songs for people are no longer relevant. “Something is changing because people are united now,” Berban said. “I do not know what awaits us after the war. “When we need to live peacefully and commit to certain ideas and values, it becomes difficult to be this united organization.” Violetta Pedorych in Lyiv contributed to this exhibition.