Kiev s ministry of education announced on Tuesday that Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and other works glorifying the Russian military will no longer be taught in Ukrainian schools.
Tolstoy's internationally recognized masterpiece joins the list of 20th century Russian books banned in Ukraine long before the current conflict.
In an interview with the Ukrainian TV channel, All these will be completely excluded from foreign literature, first deputy minister of education Andrey Vitrenko said. War and Peace, for example, will not be studied in Ukraine anymore. Vitrenko said that the ministry is still working on the final list of works by Russian writers that will be excluded from the curriculum.
Following the announcement by Kiev's Ministry of Culture and Information Policy last month, he said that works of literature promoting Russian propaganda would be removed from Ukrainian libraries and replaced by Ukrainian books.
Propaganda is a dangerous weapon. Russian lies are poisons all over the world, deputy minister Larisa Petasyuk said on Facebook at the time.
Tolstoy's sprawling account of the Russian Empire during the Napoleonic wars was published in serialized form between 1865 and 1867. It has been translated into many world languages and adapted for TV and silver screen on more than one occasion in 2016.
Kiev has banned Russian works of art and language instruction long before the current conflict. In March 2019, the Ukrainian government banned some 40 works of art due to the mention of Russian companies, artists, social networks, internet portals, the USSR or Soviet political figures. Among the banned works was Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, which had also been censored in the USSR.