Provisioning Pages

In Mr. Nobody Against Putin, a Russian schoolteacher covertly records the Kremlin’s brutally effective “patriotic education” program of state curriculum and military training, which makes soldiers out of students. I had just watched the 2025 documentary when a timely email arrived from the Vancouver writer Cindy Heinrichs. She was seeking donations of children’s books to be shipped to Ukraine. Here was a hopeful image, like a flower placed in the barrel of a gun: a container filled with stories bobbing down the Pacific coast, through the Panama Canal, across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea, to the Port of Odesa, and on to readers.

Since the 2022 invasion, thousands of Ukrainian children have been killed or injured, and more than a third remain displaced. Russia’s attacks have destroyed hundreds of schools, so that students now attend classes in bunkers designed to withstand nuclear blasts. Ukraine’s publishing infrastructure has also been...