Webinar Series: Ukraine’s Archival Landscape – Remote Access and Research Opportunities

Free Public Webinar Series | Every other Friday, August 28 – November 20, 2026 | Online

Time: 16:00 Kyiv / 15:00 Berlin / 09:00 Bloomington

Format: online via Zoom; free and open to all

Registration: required separately for each session; the link for each webinar appears about a week in advance on the project website and in the Facebook group. Registration closes at 23:59 Kyiv the day before each webinar.

Recordings and presentations: published open-access after each webinar

Ukraine’s archives hold an extraordinary wealth of material documenting the country’s diverse and complex past — much of it still barely examined. Russia’s war has made travelling to these archives difficult or impossible for many researchers abroad. The archives themselves, however, have not stood still: digitisation has been a priority of the State Archival Service of Ukraine for over a decade, and a substantial share of inventories and documents can now be consulted online, or identified and ordered for remote copying.

Ukraine’s Archival Landscape is a new series of seven public webinars about how to do exactly that. It opens with a keynote by Prof. Dr. Maryna Paliienko on the country’s archival sector in wartime, situating the central state archives within its broader network. The six sessions that follow each spotlight one of Ukraine’s central state archives: their directors introduce their institutions to an international audience, opening up what each archive holds, how those holdings are organised, and — crucially for those working from abroad — how much can be consulted without travelling to Ukraine. Archivists explain how to use finding aids to search the archive, how to write a copy request that gets answered, and how to pay for it from a foreign account. They also speak about the war — the threats their institutions face, the measures taken to protect the records, and how the archives operate today.

Every session is moderated by scholars based at universities across Europe and North America, closes with an open Q&A and runs with simultaneous Ukrainian–English interpretation throughout.

The series will be of particular interest to students, doctoral candidates and scholars in Ukrainian and East European studies, as well as to archivists, librarians and museum professionals working with Ukrainian collections remotely.

Full programme, schedule and registration: https://sites.google.com/view/ukraines-archival-landscape

Project Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2113052672971785

The series is organised by the Ukraine Art Aid Center (Berlin), in partnership with Freie Universität Berlin, the KIU – Competence Network Interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies Frankfurt (Oder) – Berlin and the State Archival Service of Ukraine. It forms part of the Lysiak-Rudnytsky Ukrainian Studies Programme run by the Ukrainian Institute in cooperation with the Cultural Diplomacy Foundation, with financial support from the International Renaissance Foundation and the Mnozhyna Foundation.

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