Vitaliy Bolgar is a regular at the military evacuation hospital, the first stop for Ukrainian soldiers when retreating from the warzone. This sanctuary stands 20 miles out from Donestk Oblast in eastern Ukraine, where armed forces soldiers stand—a line of bodies—defending against Russian troops. “These guys come off the front lines and they’re watching their friends get destroyed. Their eyes are empty like glass, nothing behind them,” says Bolgar.

 

To the soldiers, Bolgar is a healer. He has become a popular visitor, with many men specifically requesting his treatment. “You could see a kind of life being breathed back into the soldiers,” says Bolgar describing the effects of his care. What Bolgar possesses is not a secret medical antidote: he arrives with a guitar, his voice, and traditional Ukrainian folk songs.

 

Three years out from the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Bolgar’s musicmaking has been a form of lifesaving therapy to process the trauma and grief of the war, not only for the soldiers and victims of military attacks, but also for himself. Bolgar’s musical choices reflect a broader trend of the Ukrainian folk tradition’s postwar revival. Ukrainian folk music has become a uniting cultural marker for Ukrainian identity. Refugees as well as those who stayed unanimously returned to an old and largely forgotten culture, embracing the same songs across national lines.

 

Since Russia’s attack of Kyiv in February 2022, Bolgar has remained in western Ukraine. Bolgar worked tirelessly with relatives to find a way to transport his wife, Ludmila and son, Julien out of Ukraine to safety, eventually linking up with a Christian Romanian group in May. “In the back of your mind, you think about the huge amounts of human trafficking that takes place of women from Ukraine and from Russia,” Bolgar said. While his family reached refugee settlement camps in Germany, Bolgar was unable to flee and spent over a year alone in Kyiv.

 

In his solitude, the persistent accompaniment to Bolgar’s life was blaring air raid sirens. His body settled into a state of physical unrest, unable to sleep and constantly on edge for an impending attack. “I used to love putting music on to get moving and to lift myself up. Now, the music that I want to listen to is quiet, it brings peace to your soul,” said Bolgar.

 

This newfound need for meditative music shaped what he chose to sing to the front-line soldiers at the military hospital. Bolgar was singing traditional Ukrainian folk tunes: patriotic yet spiritual songs that have been rising from the ashes of a shared cultural fabric.

 

“Since the beginning of the war, people have returned to patriotic music, to traditional Ukrainian folk songs that haven’t been sung for many, many years,” said Stephen Benham, president of Music in World Culture (MIWC) who frequently visits Ukraine for music development projects. “You’re seeing the return to the idea: what does it mean to be a Ukrainian?”

 

In the folk song tradition, Ukrainians and the diaspora are recognizing the duty to preserve a culture that is threatened by extinction says Simon Morrison, a professor of music at Princeton University who studies the Soviet Union and Russia.

 

“Now that there’s this monstrous force that’s seeking to erase them as a people, Ukrainians are finding within songs of lament,” Morrison said. “These songs are communal expressions of grief, a wealth of material that people associated with these traumatic events that have occurred over and over again.”

 

Today, this notion of the Ukrainian identity is also being revived linguistically. Bolgar was raised in the small Russian-speaking village of Bograd, but switched to speaking Ukrainian since the start of the war. His choice reflects trends amongst Ukrainians towards reclaiming the Ukrainian identity and its modern expression, but still being rooted in the traditions of old Ukraine according to Benham.

 

Now, the Ukrainian language and music are the two main cultural identifiers for Ukrainians who have left. “All of a sudden, they want to sing Ukrainian folk songs, even if they never spoke a word of Ukrainian in their life. That is a big deal for people to say, ‘We’re not Russia,’” Benham said.

 

However, there has been an increasingly bitter discourse around Ukrainians who fled since the start of the war. A negative sentiment has risen around Ukrainians leaving, labeling them as abandoning those who chose to remain, says ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky.

 

“For musicians, it’s an ambiguous question: what do you do in the moment of a crisis like this one? Some of course joined the military. Many, especially pop musicians who use commodified platforms, understood that they would have better luck in Western Europe,” said Sonevytsky.

 

As Ukrainian musicians search for a new audience of listeners outside their country, the sudden burst of international attention towards Ukrainian artists since the start of the war has also brought a sense of global solidarity for these musicians.

 

“It feels very powerful that Ukrainian music is even in the U.S., that everybody knows about Ukraine now,” said Sonya Zhukova, a Ukrainian singer-songwriter who is a refugee in Poland, about a performance at her music camp in Los Angeles. “In that moment, I just closed my eyes and I thought about the war. I felt this support from my team: that they loved Ukraine, they support us, and everything is okay.”

 

Bolgar’s current musical project is creating a Ukrainian psalm book with guitar backing tracks, specifically for soldiers based on his performances at the military hospital. The book contains a mix of traditional Ukrainian folk songs as well as spiritual songs aiming to spread peace, calm, and hope during the war.

 

“Sometimes one of the guys will be a musician and have a guitar in the in the trench with them. Other times, they just don’t have anything,” Bolgar said.

 

He hopes to meet his fundraising goal of $3,500 to make recording backing tracks a reality, so that soldiers can have the music to listen and sing to while they are in battle.

 

“Ukraine is not just our territory, but it’s our culture as well. We want Ukrainians to remember who they are when they leave the country. We want there to be a Ukrainian culture that remains, and music is a really important part of it all,” said Bolgar.

 

“In the midst of this horrible war, music is not only our therapy, but it also lifts us up to go into battle together, so that we know we are fighting for our freedom.”