We’re recycling Putin’s missiles as art to fund the war effort. Defiant Ukrainians have learned to be creative | Andrey Kurkov

Shell casings painted and auctioned, Russian books pulped to raise money, institutions renamed: the resistance has many guises

The festival of St Tryphon - the patron saint of winemakers - attracted no tourists this year. This saint is very much loved in Bessarabia, the largely ethnic-Bulgarian area of Ukraine's Odesa region, where the February feast is always a much-awaited event. This year, villagers pruned their vines and celebrated quietly by themselves.

Given the tragedy of the war in Ukraine, this tradition could have been abandoned altogether, for a number of local men have died at the front, and in the village cemeteries, their graves are still fresh. But to give up the tradition would be a form of capitulation and no one is prepared to do or even think about that.

Andrey Kurkov is a Ukrainian novelist and the author of Death and the Penguin

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