On 1 August, a Russian attack struck warehouses belonging to the Ukrainian publishing group RNK-Ranok in Kharkiv.
Inside were books.
Millions of them.
The Ukrainian Book Institute now says that attacks during July and August have cost the country around 13 million copies of books. The losses include school textbooks, finished print runs and books belonging to numerous publishers. The Institute estimates that the stock destroyed in the 1 August attack alone represented roughly 30 per cent of the Ukrainian publishing industry’s annual output.
Numbers of that size are difficult to picture.
So it is tempting to turn them immediately into symbolism.
Burned books. War. Culture under attack.
All of that matters.
But I think something even more basic is being destroyed.
A book is an object.
A publishing system is an infrastructure.
And without the second, the first eventually disappears.
We tend to notice culture after it has survived
When we speak about protecting culture, we usually think about things that have already become precious.
A cathedral.
A painting.
A manuscript.
An archaeological site.
A great library.
These deserve protection precisely because they connect the present to something that came before us.
But every classic was once a new book.
Every archive was once today’s paperwork.
Every great writer once depended on someone willing to edit, print, distribute and sell the work.
Culture does not simply exist.
It has to be reproduced.
That requires surprisingly ordinary things.
Paper. Printing machines. Warehouses. Trucks. Bookshops. Teachers. Librarians. Cash flow. People who know which box goes where.
None of these sounds as grand as “civilization”.
Yet civilization depends on them.
Look at the Ukrainian numbers differently
Ukraine published 15,069 book and brochure titles in 2025, with a total print run of more than 33 million copies, according to the country’s Book Chamber.
The Ukrainian Book Institute describes an industry of roughly 400 active publishers. Its research suggests that the market was already economically fragile: nominal publisher revenue rose in 2025, but after inflation the industry’s total real revenue was essentially flat.
Then came this summer’s attacks.
A printing facility was destroyed.
Warehouses were struck.
Finished books disappeared.
Publishers lost stock they had already paid to produce but had not yet sold.
Some of the books were textbooks.
This is where the meaning of the story changes.
If a manuscript is destroyed, the text may survive somewhere else.
If a warehouse burns, a publisher can theoretically print another edition.
But printing another edition requires money.
The printer must still exist.
The publisher must survive the loss.
The distributor must be able to move the books.
The school must receive them.
The reader must be able to buy or borrow them.
A publishing industry is a chain.
Break enough links, and the fact that a text still exists digitally is not enough.
A textbook is not only a book
Consider a school textbook.
Its literary value may be negligible.
Nobody is likely to place it behind museum glass in a hundred years.
But on the first day of school it may matter more than a rare first edition of a famous novel.
A textbook carries language into a classroom.
It helps determine what history a child encounters.
It provides the common text around which a teacher and thirty students can work.
It moves information from one generation to the next.
In that sense, a textbook resembles a bridge or a water pipe more than a work of art.
Its importance lies partly in what passes through it.
That is why the destruction of publishing capacity deserves to be understood not only as damage to culture, but as damage to infrastructure.
The distinction matters beyond war
We often make the same mistake in peaceful societies.
We celebrate authors while ignoring editors.
We celebrate books while letting bookshops disappear.
We praise reading while underfunding libraries.
We worry about whether young people are reading but rarely ask whether the systems that place books in front of them are healthy.
We talk about “culture” as though culture were a collection of excellent objects.
It is also a supply chain.
This may sound brutally commercial.
It is not.
A culture that cannot finance writers, manufacture books, maintain libraries, teach children, preserve records and circulate ideas eventually becomes a culture that can remember but cannot reproduce itself.
Heritage looks backward.
Infrastructure makes continuation possible.
A society needs both.
What war makes visible
War has a terrible ability to reveal what ordinary life allows us to overlook.
Electricity becomes visible when the lights go out.
Logistics becomes visible when food does not arrive.
Government becomes visible when institutions stop functioning.
Publishing becomes visible when millions of books suddenly disappear from the system.
What we normally call “a book” turns out to be the final visible object produced by a much larger invisible network.
Once you see that network, the Ukrainian story becomes harder to describe simply as the destruction of books.
What is threatened is the ability to make the next book.
And the book after that.
And the school textbook after that.
And the possibility that a child, five years from now, will encounter a writer whose manuscript has not yet been written.
That future cannot be photographed in the ruins of a warehouse.
But it is part of what is at stake.
Culture has to keep moving
There is a familiar idea that civilizations survive through the works they leave behind.
That is only partly true.
Civilizations also survive because someone keeps moving those works forward.
Someone teaches the language.
Someone prints another copy.
Someone preserves an old edition.
Someone translates.
Someone buys.
Someone lends.
Someone writes the next book.
Culture is not only inheritance.
It is transmission.
And transmission requires infrastructure.
The 13 million books lost in Ukraine this summer matter because they were books.
But perhaps the deeper warning lies elsewhere.
When the machinery that carries ideas from one person and one generation to another is damaged, a society risks losing something that cannot be counted simply by counting burned copies.
It loses part of its capacity to continue the conversation.
And that may be one of the most consequential things a culture can lose.
Sources:
Ukrainian Book Institute, “Appeal to the International Community to Support Ukrainian Publishers,” 14 August 2026.
Reuters, “Millions of burnt books show how ‘war of endurance’ is hurting Ukraine,” 10 August 2026.
The New Voice of Ukraine, “Russian strike wipes out 8 million books at Kharkiv warehouse,” 2 August 2026.
First published on Substack on Sep 9, 2026. Archived here as part of the Fabio Caipirinha permanent archive. Original: https://fabiocaipirinha.substack.com/p/what-is-lost-when-millions-of-books