The devastation of cultural sites was certainly not the goal when the long-damaged dam was blown up. But it conforms to the Kremlin’s war aims. Selensky doesn’t have much time left.
The first picture made by the Ukrainian artist Polina Raiko painted showed a dove perched on a branch. She was 69 years old and already had a whole bitter life behind her, as a deportee to Nazi Germany, as the mother of an alcoholic delinquent son – and never attended an art school. In the few years before her death in 2004, she painted her entire house on the banks of the Dnieper near Cherson with meadows of flowers, black cats and angels looking skeptically. Ukraine honors Raiko as one of the country’s most important naive artists. Her house is protected as a national heritage – and just sunk in the floods of the Dnieper. It is a particularly painful loss due to the destruction of the dam at Nowa Kachowka.