Tetiana Babina: When the Muses Refuse to Be Silent

By Matthew Parish

Tuesday 29 September 2026

There are people in Kharkiv whose biographies have been divided by war, and there are others for whom the war seems instead to have gathered together the different strands of a lifetime. Tetiana Babina belongs to the second category. Journalist, television presenter, filmmaker, cultural organiser and volunteer, she has spent much of her professional life recording the artists, personalities and institutions of Kharkiv. Since Russia’s war against Ukraine began in 2014, and particularly since the full-scale invasion of February 2022, the subjects before her camera have increasingly become soldiers, volunteers, wounded veterans and artists attempting to preserve civilisation amid destruction.

Babina is a member of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine. Her television career has included programmes with such titles as Facets of Time, Nostalgia, The Female Face of Ukraine and, more recently, The Muses Are Not Silent. She has made films about prominent Ukrainians, presented cultural reporting on Kharkiv television and established the Sirin cultural organisation. Her more recent work, much of it available through her Sirin YouTube channel, has become an audiovisual chronicle of Ukrainian resistance.

Our conversation took place in Kharkiv and was conducted principally in Ukrainian. What follows has therefore been translated into English and lightly edited for clarity and length. Babina is not naturally an interviewee who confines herself to the boundaries of a question. She speaks in narratives, associations and memories, moving rapidly from Ukrainian television in the 1990s to the Maidan, from wounded soldiers to children’s paintings, from the cultural life of Kharkiv to European politics. The result is less a conventional question-and-answer interview than an extended account of the way one Kharkiv journalist understands the transformation of her country.

From electronics to television

Babina did not begin her professional life as a journalist. Her first degree was in electronics and she subsequently studied at what she describes as a patent and legal institute. Yet art, cinema and literature had always fascinated her. She knew artists in Kharkiv and began writing articles for a local newspaper.

Then she saw Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.

“When I saw Parajanov’s film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, I understood that my dream was cinema and television.”

She subsequently attended directing courses in Kyiv. The decisive professional opportunity came in 1992, when, as Babina recalls it, Kharkiv acquired one of Ukraine’s first private television studios. Ukrainian television was emerging from the Soviet period and she remembers the established channels as weighed down by what she calls the “mothballs” of Soviet culture. The new studio wanted to do something different.

Babina worked on Vitrages, producing short features about artists. She remembers the programmes of this period as consciously European in aspiration. She travelled to the Cannes Film Festival, filmed a feature about haute couture in Paris and interviewed Naomi Campbell. The budgets were hardly those of a Western television network.

“We travelled in our own car, with our own money. Here in Ukraine nobody had seen European programmes like these.”

The experiment did not last. The studio’s director died in a car accident and, Babina says, the team lost access to broadcasting. Many of the journalists with whom she had worked subsequently left Ukraine, building careers in New York, Berlin and Rome. Babina stayed in Kharkiv.

Her subsequent television career included programmes for Kharkiv regional television and the Simon television channel. One strand of her work became particularly important to her: documenting the lives and achievements of Ukrainian women.

She entered a television competition concerned with gender and was struck by the conventional way in which female life was being portrayed. Other contributions, she recalls, tended to show women cooking or sewing. Babina wanted to show something else: the generation of women for whom Ukrainian independence had created opportunities to establish businesses, galleries, legal practices and other independent professional lives.

The project won first prize and led to work connected with a United Nations programme. Babina subsequently made a series entitled The Female Face of Ukraine, portraying the abilities and ambitions of Ukrainian women. She recalls the films being distributed through UN offices internationally.

Politics then intervened. Babina is emphatic in her hostility to former President Viktor Yanukovych, whose government she associates with the closure of programmes supporting women’s advancement. Her description of Yanukovych is considerably less diplomatic than anything appropriate to paraphrase as an editorial conclusion. Her underlying point is that the cultural and social freedoms associated with Ukrainian independence were, in her view, never secure.

Sirin and the women of Kharkiv

Babina subsequently created a Kharkiv programme called New Kharkiv Women, again concentrating upon active and professionally accomplished women. She also founded the Sirin creative centre.

For Babina, Sirin was more than the name of a cultural club. She understood the mythical winged female creature as an image of women’s ability to elevate society towards “morality, dignity and freedom”. The organisation brought together artists, musicians, businesswomen, teachers and doctors. It organised exhibitions and festivals and participated in cultural events abroad.

The network later acquired a purpose its members could hardly have anticipated.

When Ukrainians protested against Yanukovych during the Revolution of Dignity, Babina participated in the Kharkiv Maidan while friends travelled to Kyiv. Three of her friends, she says, were among those killed during the revolution. Members of her circle subsequently helped their families.

Then came the war in the Donbas.

Babina and her colleagues began assisting mothers whose sons had been killed at Ilovaisk. She remembers thirteen mothers in particular whose children had died and around whom the women of Sirin rallied. The transition from cultural organisation to volunteer network was therefore already well advanced years before February 2022.

This history is important in understanding Babina. In her account, art, journalism and volunteering are not separate professions. They are different expressions of the same idea: civil society assumes responsibility when institutions fail.

February 2022

When Russia began her full-scale invasion, Babina could have left Ukraine. Her daughter had lived in Munich for many years and her family there urged her to come. She refused.

“I understood that these women whom I was helping were very ill and very unhappy. I had to stay beside them.”

Her cameraman left Kharkiv temporarily because he had a child. Without him, Babina could not initially continue making films. So she went to the railway station and became a volunteer.

She helped evacuate refugees. She brought food to people sheltering in the Metro. She carried medicines to hospitals. Public transport had largely ceased functioning, so she walked through the city.

“Everything was burning. Everything was being destroyed. Everything was being shelled.”

When her cameraman returned, Babina went back to what she regarded as her principal task. She opened the Sirin YouTube channel and began making films about wartime Ukraine.

Her work divided itself broadly into several strands. One was The Muses Are Not Silent, documenting anti-war exhibitions and the persistence of Ukrainian artistic life. Another recorded people Babina describes as leaders of the volunteer front. Still another documented universities and cultural institutions continuing their work despite bombardment.

For her, these are not peripheral activities taking place behind the “real” war. They are part of the war itself.

“I believe that art now is a weapon of Ukraine. Art addresses the human heart. It does not need translation and it can change people’s opinions about Ukraine.”

That proposition explains much of Babina’s activity since 2022.

Paradise turned into hell

One exhibition was entitled Stop the Ecocide of Ukraine: Paradise Turned into Hell. Babina describes presenting images of Ukraine’s natural beauty alongside information about damaged nature reserves and dead animals and birds. Children’s drawings depicted burning trees and dead dolphins.

The exhibitions travelled not only around Ukraine but abroad, including to Poland, Italy and Bulgaria.

Babina remembers visitors crying.

Another exhibition, War Through the Eyes of Children, used children’s pictures to communicate experiences for which adult political vocabulary can be inadequate. Babina regards this work as simultaneously testimony and cultural diplomacy.

Yet her conception of Ukrainian cultural diplomacy reaches much further back than the present war. She speaks enthusiastically about the history of the Cossacks and about what she regards as Ukraine’s deep traditions of political freedom. Her exhibitions have explored Cossack imagery through painting, ceramics, dolls and decorative art.

Some of her historical assertions are expressed with the enthusiasm of a cultural advocate rather than the qualifications of an academic historian. But the larger point is clear enough. Babina sees Russia’s war against Ukraine not simply as a dispute over territory but as an attempt to erase historical memory. Art, in her conception, restores what imperial narratives attempted to suppress.

The Guardians of Kharkiv

In June 2022 Babina helped establish a volunteer community called Guardians of Kharkiv. She then adopted the same name for an exhibition.

An artist friend painted portraits of people whom Babina believed had saved the city: soldiers, volunteers and paramedics. The portraits were placed around a large map of Kharkiv.

The exhibition was first shown in Kharkiv and subsequently travelled to Lviv. Babina recalls with particular affection its reception there, where large numbers of displaced Kharkiv residents could stand before portraits of people who had defended their home city.

The exhibition then travelled to Poland.

Babina remembers the atmosphere of 2022 vividly: Polish audiences embraced Ukrainians and expressed gratitude for the fact that Ukrainian soldiers were fighting a war that many Poles feared might otherwise reach them.

She is considerably more troubled by subsequent changes in Polish politics. In our conversation she sharply criticised President Karol Nawrocki and claimed that later attempts to exhibit Guardians of Kharkiv in Poland had been refused. These are Babina’s political assessments and claims, rather than conclusions independently established by this interview. What matters for understanding her is the sense of disappointment.

“When we arrived, they embraced us and said, ‘Ukraine is paying with blood for us. Poland is not fighting because your soldiers are dying.’”

For Babina, the apparent erosion of that solidarity is painful precisely because she remembers its intensity.

The city that continues to live

Yet Babina does not want her films to portray Ukraine solely through death.

“I love making films that prove that despite the war, despite the tragedy, life in Ukraine continues.”

She talks about actors, musicians, concerts, exhibitions and festivals. Children continue studying music, sometimes in shelters. Foreign visitors are astonished, she says, to hear air-raid sirens and then discover that audiences still attend performances by opera singers and musicians.

Kharkiv’s universities form another part of her wartime chronicle. She has filmed at the city’s aerospace university and its arts institutions. Her argument is that education continuing under bombardment is itself an expression of resistance.

This is one of the more compelling ideas to emerge from our conversation. Kharkiv is often described abroad principally through military geography: its distance from Russia, missile flight times, damaged energy infrastructure and the movements of armies. Yet a city is not defended only by preventing an enemy from occupying its streets. A city survives because people continue doing the things for which cities exist.

They teach. They perform music. They paint. They fall in love. They argue about art. Students enrol at universities. Children practise musical instruments. Journalists continue pointing cameras at all of them.

That is the Kharkiv Babina wants to record.

At the front and in the hospital

Her admiration for Ukrainian soldiers is emotional and largely unqualified.

Babina travels with friends towards the Donbas carrying drones and other supplies. She admits that she is afraid. Then she compares her fear with the lives of the soldiers she visits and concludes that her own difficulties seem insignificant.

What impresses her is not only their courage but their humanity. She remembers entering dugouts and seeing children’s drawings attached to the walls. She talks about soldiers adopting cats and dogs and preparing food for visiting volunteers.

“I want simply to kneel before them. I never imagined that our soldiers could be so noble and so grateful.”

She has made only limited films about some of these people because operational security prevents their identities and faces from being shown.

Every week, she says, she also visits wounded soldiers in hospital. Volunteers bring food, vitamins and small presents, but Babina thinks these things secondary.

“The most important thing is to tell the wounded how much we love them and how grateful we are.”

They sit beside beds and listen to stories. Afterwards they telephone the soldiers and remain in contact.

Some have lost arms or legs. Babina tells the story of an artist she knew who volunteered for military service, lost a leg, received a prosthesis and subsequently returned to service operating drones. His portrait appears in one of her Cossack-themed exhibitions.

The connection is characteristic of Babina’s imagination: the contemporary soldier, the artist and the historical Cossack become parts of the same story.

Who should govern Ukraine after the war?

Towards the end of our conversation, I asked Babina to imagine the final scene of the film she hopes eventually to make about Ukrainian victory.

Her answer moved from cinema into politics.

She wants the generation that fought the war to have a much greater role in governing post-war Ukraine. She is deeply dissatisfied with what she regards as the survival of corrupt officials and political habits inherited from the Yanukovych era. Her encounters with soldiers have persuaded her that many are intellectually and morally capable of public leadership.

Babina told me that she had previously declined invitations to become involved in political parties because she regarded the intelligentsia as naturally belonging in opposition. Yet she would consider joining a new political movement emerging from the military generation.

That is her political aspiration, not necessarily a simple prescription for Ukraine’s constitutional future. The transition from military distinction to democratic political leadership raises difficult questions of its own, and Ukrainian voters will ultimately determine who governs them. But Babina’s sentiment is revealing. After years spent visiting trenches and hospitals, she has developed profound confidence in the generation bearing the immediate burden of the war and profound impatience with parts of the established political class.

Her imagined final film would therefore not conclude merely with flags or a military parade.

“I would want my film dedicated to victory to contain the people who achieved that victory for Ukraine: my beloved soldiers, my wonderful commanders, intelligence officers, drone operators and paramedics.”

She paused on the thought that she had lived long enough to see what she considers a new generation of Ukrainians emerge.

“I am happy that I lived to see a period when such a generation of people was born in Ukraine.”

The camera as memory

Tetiana Babina is not a detached observer of the war. She does not pretend to be. She is a journalist who became a volunteer, a cultural organiser who regards art as a weapon and a filmmaker whose subjects are frequently also her friends. The distinction between recording events and participating in them has become deliberately porous in her work.

That presents familiar questions about journalism. Journalism traditionally aspires towards distance, verification and scepticism. War places those principles under exceptional pressure, particularly when the journalist’s own city is being bombarded and people she knows are being killed or wounded. Babina’s answer is essentially that neutrality between destruction and resistance is neither possible nor desirable for her.

Yet there is another journalistic function that war makes especially important: memory.

Wars generate enormous quantities of official documentation. There will be military histories of the defence of Kharkiv, maps of troop movements, casualty statistics, diplomatic archives and eventually thousands of pages of scholarship. Those records may tell future generations how the city survived.

They will not necessarily explain what survival felt like.

For that, somebody must preserve the picture of the volunteer walking through empty streets carrying medicine because there is no public transport; the wounded artist returning to war with a prosthetic leg; children’s drawings hanging inside a dugout; musicians performing while air-raid sirens sound; refugees in Lviv looking into painted faces of the people defending the city they had been forced to leave.

Babina has chosen to make those things her archive.

Her phrase The Muses Are Not Silent initially sounds like the title of a cultural programme. After listening to her for the better part of half an hour, it acquires a broader meaning. Russia’s assault upon Ukraine has involved an enormous exercise in destruction: of buildings, landscapes, lives and memories. Babina’s response is to keep recording.

The camera remains switched on.