Ukrainian Publisher Ranok Loses Eight Million Books
A Russian drone strike destroyed eight million books at publisher Ranok's Kharkiv warehouse, wiping out over 85% of its stock.
A Ukrainian publisher lost eight million books when its warehouse was struck by Shahed drones. The attack on Ranok in Kharkiv destroyed over 85% of the company's stock during a back-to-school shift.
The Ranok warehouse, built fifteen years ago on the site of a former bread factory, occupies a 10,000 square metre premises. Books were stacked twelve metres high on its shelves. On a Saturday morning in August, fifty people were on shift when the jet-powered drones hit. The building was left structurally unstable, its roof on the verge of collapse with metal beams listing alarmingly. Firefighters took a week to bring the flames under control, and smoke still rose from the ruins weeks later. None of the 628,000 new schoolbooks stored there could be salvaged.
The scale of cultural loss
The eight million destroyed books represented a catastrophic loss for a single publisher. In total, an estimated thirteen million Ukrainian books were destroyed by Russian missiles or drones over the summer. The government calculates that figure represents one third of all books printed in the country this year.
The publisher’s perspective
Ranok's co-founder and chief executive, Viktor Kruglov, asserted the attack was a deliberate strike on Ukrainian culture. He is convinced his warehouse, full of Ukrainian-language, Ukraine-produced books, was specifically targeted. Kruglov framed the aggression as part of a larger strategy to eliminate Ukrainian cultural autonomy.
"Russia thinks that books are more dangerous for them than military equipment," Kruglov said. He claimed Vladimir Putin aims to deliberately erase everything connected with Ukrainian culture.
Context: Ukraine’s linguistic and publishing reclamation
The destruction comes as Ukraine undergoes a profound cultural shift. Until 2022, about 70% of the Ukrainian book market consisted of Russian-language titles. This dominance had roots in 19th-century tsarist decrees against publishing in Ukrainian and persisted long after independence in 1991. The idea of a commercially successful modern Ukrainian novel once seemed unthinkable. When author Oksana Zabuzhko was told in 1996 to publish her novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex in Russian translation, she refused. Its subsequent success in Ukrainian proved a landmark.
Bohdana Laiuk, a deputy minister for culture, characterised the old dominance of Russian book imports as a form of colonialism. The full-scale invasion in February 2022, prompted in part by Putin's denial of a separate Ukrainian cultural identity, triggered a rupture. Booksellers stopped selling Russian imports. Swathes of the population switched their daily language from Russian to Ukrainian. Publishers fed the new appetite with classics, poetry, translations, and new writing. Current law allows publishers to issue Russian-language books only if at least half their titles are in Ukrainian.
New cultural initiatives are flourishing despite the war. Oleksiy Erinchak opened the first of his Ukrainian-only Sens bookstores in 2021. In 2024, while Kyiv was under fire, he opened a second branch on the city's grand Khreshchatyk boulevard, recently adding a third-floor events space. He has since opened stores in Ivano-Frankivsk and in a former cinema in Lviv.
Another venture, the imprint Krapky, was started in 2023 by Kateryna and Artem Sova. By then, Artem had been in the army for nearly a year and Kateryna was several months pregnant. Living in her hometown of Kremenchuk, they began by securing the rights to Olivia Laing's nonfiction work Lonely City. They named their imprint Krapky, Ukrainian for 'ellipsis', their favourite punctuation mark.
Viktor Kruglov said he remains short-term optimistic about rebuilding. He is focusing on reprinting books and keeping his team employed as acts of resistance. "Fifty people were on shift that day, and I don't know how to explain how nobody was injured."
