• Ukrainian troops recreated a classic scene from a 19th Century painting.
• The iconic painting and the new artwork based on it portray Ukraine’s refusal to give up.
• Yet the painting that depicts Ukrainian identity is held in a Russian museum.

Ukrainian warriors gathered round a wood table laugh as they one-up each other’s insults in writing a reply to the leader of an invading empire.

This is the classic scene of a 19th Century painting that a Paris-born artist recently recreated with the help of Ukrainian troops now battling the Russian troops who invaded their country. These troops, from the 112th Territorial Defense Brigade, traded the muskets and shashka sabres of Ilya Repin’s painting for the tools of their war: assault rifles, extra magazine clips, slung anti-tank missiles, MOLLE vests and packs. A small drone, one of the war’s marquee weapons, hovers in the smoky sky.

This tableau, entitled “From far away, I hear the Cossacks’ reply” (2023), is the creation of artist Emeric Lhuisset, who was reminded of Repin’s masterpiece after hearing how a Ukrainian guard on Snake Island replied to a Russian ultimatum at the war’s start in February 2022: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.” In fact, the guard who said this, Roman Hrybov, posed in Lhuisset’s image; he’s in the center of the image, a helmet-clad soldier with a beard who smirks while looking to his left as he crouches over the table. He’s in the same place as the Cossack hetman who dictates the letter in Repin’s painting.

Lhuisset told Business Insider that the image includes real weapons and was taken along the Dnipro river.

The Kharkiv-born Repin depicted a scene based on a legend of how Cossack warriors, in what is now southern Ukraine, replied to the surrender ultimatum from a Turkish sultan; there’s some debate over whether the Cossacks really wrote a letter to the sultan around 1676. His painting, “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks” (1880-1891), captures an essential element of Ukraine’s identity: its refusal to submit. It also embodies, to Lhuisset, the cultural appropriation at the heart of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest.

“Yet this painting, so important in the Ukrainian national narrative, is in the collections of the Museum of Russian Art in Saint Petersburg,” Lhuisset wrote in an statement introducing the artwork. “This appropriation of Ukrainian history by Russia is essential, as demonstrated by the text of 50,000 characters written in July 2021 by Vladimir Putin, explaining that Ukraine is merely an artificial Soviet creation.”

In another echo of the Repin painting, the Zaporizhia region is divided between Ukrainian and Russian forces and was one of the fulcrums of Ukraine’s counter-offensive this year to break Russia’s grip on the country’s south.

This war has come at enormous cost to both nations: Russia has suffered an estimated 315,000 troops killed and injured, while a much smaller Ukraine has experienced an estimated 170,000 casualties. And yet Ukrainians refuse to relent.

“Culture,” Lhuisset noted, “is a weapon in a vast battlefield, let’s try not to forget it.”