Ukraine's publishing industry has lost more than 10 million books to Russian attacks since the start of the war, according to Chytomo, the Kyiv-based publishing news outlet.

The physical damage ranges from book stalls at Kyiv's Petrivka market to warehouses. This year, schools had to ration books, as 1.1 million textbooks were destroyed. As a result of running out of defensive munitions, all mass gatherings, including book festivals, have been postponed or canceled for the first time since the start of the war in February 2022.

Iryna Baturevych, cofounder of Chytomo, also pointed to a pair of independent Kyiv bookshops that closed not from a direct strike but because damaged pipes flooded their stores, a consequence of Russia's attacks on infrastructure. Now, Baturevych says, “We have this saying, ‘The safest place for a book is in your home,’ ” alluding to the fact that books are more likely to get destroyed at a warehouse or bookstore. "It's one more way of encouraging people to buy books," she says.

That philosophy extends to how Ukrainians carry their books, too. Chytomo now distributes tote bags with clear fronts, designed to display the books inside. This way, Baturevych says, “every reader can now double as a walking advertisement.”

The uncertainty of the book trade means publishers, who have managed to continue working through the war, are tilting hard toward sure-thing, international bestsellers. In 2021, Ukrainian authors dominated the country's bestseller lists. By 2024, Colleen Hoover's It Ends With Us, translated by Iryna Hnatkovska outsold every domestic title, selling sold 70,000 copies in the year. Illarion Pavliuk's I See You're Interested in the Dark, one of the last homegrown blockbusters, sold 64,500 copies in 2024. In 2025, the pattern held: Brianna Wiest's self-help title The Mountain Is You sold 58,584 copies against Pavliuk's 38,000.

“We'll all end up fed up with safe, non-risky books—if there are still publishers around to publish them,” Baturevych said. Even prestige houses have started leaning into “low-quality but highly commercial” titles just to stay solvent, she noted. “This summer was worse for the Ukrainian publishing industry than Covid.”

Still, some debuts are breaking through. A third of Chytomo's own year-end critics' picks for 2025 were first novels: Anna Bezpala's Cassandra Smokes Cigarettes, Dmytro Krapyvenko's Everything in Three Letters, Vira Kuryko's Letytsia Kuriata and All Her Imaginary Lovers, Lena Liagushonkova's My Cat Peed on My Flag.

Baturevych also points to publishers like Laboratory for continuing to push new and local voices. Like most Ukrainian men, the publisher, Anton Martyniuk, is now serving in the military. Still, he is finding time to work on the press and publish new, award-worthy work, including Victoria Feshchuk’s recipe-filled Jasmine Pie, a debut novel about leaving the city and returning home to the countryside as the war starts, s, and Kateryna Trompak’s Poor Irving, a gothic, magic-realist novel about an American from New Orleans who lands in Carpathian Ukraine in 1938.

Losing the language

With publishers looking to play it safe, there may be less incentive to put out books written in Ukrainian. The language has already been imperiled by the war, as evidenced by the millions of displaced Ukrainian children who are now in schools abroad, where their principal language is English, French, German, or Spanish.

“Maybe your son or daughter isn't reading in Ukrainian anymore because they are now assimilated into the country where they are living,” Baturevych said. “It's easier for them to read in the other language.”

Among publishers, children’s publishers in Ukraine has been hit hardest—Baturevych could name barely three Ukrainian houses still specializing in children’s books, having been squeezed by shrinking audiences and rising shipping costs, particularly for sending books abroad.

Writers are also increasingly cut off from their own readers and finding it difficult to travel. Baturevych helps run a stand for Ukrainian publishers at the Salon du Livre in Montreal—Canada has the largest Ukrainian population outside Ukraine and Russia—and described visa applications stuck in limbo for weeks, embassy appointments repeatedly interrupted by air raids, and conscription-age men being limited in the amount of leave they can get to travel abroad. Trains, which take writers to Poland, so they can get to an airport, are increasingly targeted, adding more risk, while driving is often not an option, as the price of gasoline is quadruple what it is in North America.

“It makes you more isolated culturally,” she said. “I don't know how we're going to manage—publishers need something, authors need something, the military needs help. Everybody has a need.”

Chytomo is marking its 17th anniversary this month, even while losing staff to burnout and relocation, and is running a fundraiser on Patreon to raise funds for continued reporting. Baturevych admits to a kind of self-censorship these days—“I don't want Westerners to associate Ukraine with suffering only”—in a sign of how careful the industry has had to become about its own image abroad.

“I just want all these writers to continue writing, and the publishers to continue publishing, and the readers to continue reading, and the children to continue learning,” she said. For now, despite everything working against them, they are.