While Russian missiles and bombs rain down daily on Ukrainian cities, it might seem trivial to be alarmed by the upcoming reopening of the Russian pavilion , closed since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, for the Venice Biennale, which opens on May 9, 2026. This "detail," however, is anything but. Slowly but surely, Russian networks of influence are regaining lost ground, and the Kremlin's rhetoric is permeating public consciousness. "Art is above politics ," declares Mikhail Shvydkoy, Special Representative of the President of the Russian Federation for International Cultural Cooperation.

In this instance, art serves primarily as a pretext for continuing the war by other means . A clandestine and invisible war, aimed at reintegrating Russia into the community of respectable nations. Does it matter that Russia struck the Bernardine Monastery district in Lviv on March 24, 2026, despite it being a UNESCO World Heritage site? Does it matter that museums in Mariupol, Kherson, and Melitopol, whose works are now listed as Russian in the catalog of museums of the Russian Federation, were looted? Does it matter that systematically plundered archaeological sites in Crimea, where the diversity of peoples and languages that have shaped Ukrainian identity over the centuries could be read on the very ground, matter? Does it matter that the forced "Russification" of the past at the site of Tauric Chersonesus, also a UNESCO World Heritage site, is being carried out? It doesn't matter, in fact, as long as Europeans can persist in their belief in the myth of "Great Russian Culture" and close their eyes to the war of influence that Moscow is patiently waging.

However, if one is willing to look at the facts, one can easily understand the reasons behind the choice of Anastasia Karneeva as curator of the Russian pavilion at the Biennale. The daughter of Nikolai Volobuev, a former FSB general and senior executive at Rostec (the state-owned defense conglomerate), this curator founded the company Smart Art with Ekaterina Vinokourova, herself the daughter of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. It is clear that her membership in the ruling family, which guarantees her loyalty to the Kremlin, determined her appointment far more than her supposed artistic competence.

The program of the Russian pavilion is quite telling. It encapsulates the principles of governance that Putin inherited from his Bolshevik predecessors: the promotion of lies, the perversion of language, and the inversion of reality into its opposite. By inviting artists connected to the indigenous and regional cultures of the entire Federation, the exhibition is thus intended to align itself with the "decolonial" movement of thought . This appropriation of the discourse of the representatives of the peoples of the Federation — whose history, like that of the Ukrainians, was shaped under the Tsarist and then Soviet regime by forced assimilation and the hecatombs caused by executions, “punitive” wars and mass deportations — is all the more perverse as regional activists and cultural figures who defend the linguistic and cultural rights of minorities face increasing repression.

The Biennale is “a space of truce” where art takes precedence over geopolitics, according to its president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, a former journalist and neo-fascist activist with the Italian Social Movement, appointed by the government of Girgia Meloni. Under the rubble of Kharkiv and Kherson, the idea of an apolitical Russian art is obscene. Every artist exhibiting in this pavilion will bear, whether they like it or not , responsibility for the crimes of the regime that commissioned them.

Neither the indignation of the culture ministers of twenty-two European Union member states and their intervention with their Italian counterpart, nor the European Commission's statement threatening to withdraw its two million euro subsidy from the Biennale, have, so far, changed Pietrangelo Buttafuoco's position. We therefore expect the European Commission to immediately suspend the European subsidy to the Biennale, as the reopening of the Russian pavilion in Venice is undeniably part of the Kremlin's efforts to rehabilitate Moscow's image. We also have the right to expect the European authorities to examine the possibility of sanctioning Anastasia Karneeva and her associate Ekaterina Vinokourova.

Signatories

Opinion piece submitted by:

Ada Ackerman , Art Historian, CNRS

Konstantin Akinsha , art historian, curator of the exhibition “In the eye of the storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s”

Emmanuel Daoud , lawyer at the Paris bar

Alain Fleischer , filmmaker, visual artist and writer, founder of Le Fresnoy, national studio of contemporary arts

Sarah Moon , photographer, Grand Prize of the Academy of Fine Arts 2025

Sylvie Rollet , Professor Emeritus, President of For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours!

Gabriel Sebbah , lawyer at the Paris bar

Olga Sagaidak , Chair of the Council of the Coalition of Ukrainian Cultural Actors

Cécile Vaissié , University Professor of Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies