This is the Guardian.

Today, the Ukrainian artist defying Putin's war on culture.

Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian's chief culture writer, was at the opera in Kiev.

The national opera of Ukraine is a really, really beautiful building.

And I'd spent the afternoon watching dancers rehearse, despite the fact that these cruise missile attacks had been very recent.

There was actually an air raid alert in the middle of that rehearsal, which everybody could not wear.

So it felt like this kind of window of relative calm, despite the fact that there had been strikes on the city.

From the beginning, this was a war not just overland, but values much greater.

A country's history, its language and its culture.

Since Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February, they've destroyed more than 300 of the country's libraries, its state archives.

They've looted museums and stolen tens of thousands of artworks that cannot be replaced.

Ukraine's culture minister has called it a cultural genocide.

We see this on repeat through history that in times of pressure and crisis and violence, artists are both, in a sense, the most important testifies to the truth.

And they're also often targets of oppression.

But Ukrainian artists are refusing to be erased. Across the country, its poets are writing in their own language to preserve it.

Its visual artists have turned into documentarians, keeping accounts of the brutality of this war. And the opera plays on.

There was something about watching this gorgeous opera, Natalka, Poltavka, set in this beautiful bucolleck, 19th century Ukrainian landscape.

This was almost like a defiant, we're going to go on as if there isn't a war happening, even though a month previously, one of their principal dancers had been killed at the front line.

From the Guardian, I'm Hannah Moore. Today in focus, how art, music and dance have become weapons of resistance in the war on Ukraine.

Charlotte, you'd normally be writing about subjects like the buco prize or the history of the BBC. But this is something different for you. You've recently returned from a trip to Ukraine.

And that was the first time that you'd been in an active war zone. What made you decide to go?

Well really, there were two things. The first was that back in April, I went to the Venice Biennale and reported from that, you know, it's the biggest international art event really.

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