The CNN star’s wise advice to ‘be truthful, not neutral’ should be tattooed on our souls

After decades as a renowned international journalist, the CNN star Christiane Amanpour is calling it a career, saying she’ll soon leave the cable network which she joined in 1983.

She will be missed for the courage in war zones and forthright presentation that have made her one of the most famous names in media.

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture

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Timothy Kelly, a district court judge, had on 24 September granted a 14-day reprieve for the news organizations, which six days earlier had been banned by the president in an extraordinary move from entering the White House grounds “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS”.

A Russian missile attack on Kyiv overnight on 7 October destroyed warehouse premises in the Podil district and badly damaged a book warehouse of Ukrainian publishing house Knyholav, the publisher said. Tens of thousands of books were lost, but no staff were hurt. It was the second time this year that Russia has destroyed Knyholav's stock.

Russia has destroyed Ukrainian books since the start of its invasion, seizing them from libraries in occupied areas and burning them in boiler houses. Since spring, it has also been aiming missiles and drones at the industry that makes them—printing houses, publishers' warehouses, and bookshops—destroying books by the millions. Each strike takes out not only stock but the reprints, new titles, and textbooks Ukrainian readers were waiting for, at a time when publishing in Ukrainian is part of how the country holds onto its identity.

Tens of thousands of books lost

The publisher can't yet say how many books were destroyed or can no longer be saved, it said, but tens of thousands were lost. The final count will be possible only once staff get full access to the warehouse and check the state of every book.

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The losses include new titles Knyholav received over the past two months. They also include reprints of books Russia had destroyed in July at its previous warehouse. Knyholav had moved its rebuilt stock to this new warehouse after a Russian strike on 19 July destroyed its previous one outside Kyiv, along with about 250,000 books.

"This is a tangible blow for us. These are books we created, printed, and prepared for you," the publisher wrote. "But despite everything, we are holding on!"

The strike hit Kyiv's Podilskyi district, where a Russian attack caused a fire and the partial collapse of the floors of an office and warehouse building, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. The same overnight attack killed people in Pryluky, Kyiv, Kremenchuk, and Oleksandriia.

Millions of books burned

Russia's attacks destroyed more than 1.5 million books in July alone, Culture Minister Tetiana Berezhna said. On 1 August, a strike on the logistics center of publisher Ranok and the distribution center of the KnyhoLand bookshop chain in Kharkiv destroyed 8 million books, including 628,000 new school textbooks. Over three months, Russia burned about 13 million Ukrainian books, nearly a third of everything the country printed in 2025. In August, Russian missiles also hit Kyiv's largest book market.

Russian missiles and drones destroyed 13 million Ukrainian books this summer, The Guardian reported. That is about a third of all books printed in Ukraine this year, the government estimates.

Russia is striking civilian warehouses, including those where publishers store their books. The uncertainty is pushing publishers toward safe international bestsellers, Publishers Weekly reported. "We'll all end up fed up with safe, non-risky books—if there are still publishers around to publish them," said Iryna Baturevych, co-founder of the publishing news outlet Chytomo.

Millions of Ukrainian books on fire

Ranok is one of Ukraine's largest publishing houses and a leader in children's literature and school textbooks. On one day in August, Russia destroyed more than 85% of its stock, The Guardian reported.

Viktor Kruhlov, the publisher's co-founder and chief executive, was on the warehouse floor at its headquarters in Kharkiv. The facility, built on the site of a former bread factory, covered about 10,000 m².

Together with five senior colleagues, he was discussing plans for the upcoming school year, the peak of the distribution season. Moments after the meeting began, a strike hit about 30 meters from where the staff had gathered. Kruhlov heard an explosion and almost at once saw a huge fire. As colleagues tried to put out the flames, a second strike came, and he realized there could be a third and a fourth, so the staff evacuated. Fifty people were on shift that day, and no one was injured, Kruhlov told The Guardian.

Eight million books, including 628,000 new school textbooks, were in the warehouse at the time. None could be saved. Firefighters battled the blaze for a week.

Several editorial staff members who saw the remains of the warehouse for the first time looked shaken as they recognized fragments of books they had helped create.

"When you see what was produced with your brain, with your hands, with your imagination, spoiled by Russia, it's an awful feeling," Kruhlov said.

He predicted shortages at Ranok's stores this fall, when the books in stock run out and there is nothing to replace them.

Literature is part of Ukrainian identity

Kruhlov is convinced that Russia deliberately targeted the book warehouse, but Bohdana Laiuk, Ukraine's deputy culture minister, sees the strikes as part of Russia's broader campaign against warehouses, The Guardian wrote.

"They cannot occupy Kyiv. So they target warehouses around Kyiv to take the possibility of everyday life from us—and books are part of everyday life," she said.

Books also matter to Russia's occupiers, Laiuk said.

"When the Russians occupy, the first thing they do—and we know this from the areas that were occupied and then liberated in 2022 in the Kherson and Kharkiv regions—is to go to the libraries, take the Ukrainian language books out, and destroy them," Laiuk said.

Before 2022, about 70% of the Ukrainian book market consisted of Russian-language titles, most of them imported from Russia.

Russian dominance in Ukrainian publishing developed over centuries, from tsarist bans on publishing in Ukrainian in the 19th century to Soviet Russification. Ukrainian writers were purged, and Ukrainian literature stayed in the shadow of Russian literature, the article notes.

Laiuk calls the dominance of Russian books a form of colonialism. Russia deliberately built its own information space in Ukraine through books, media, and television, she argues, so that everything would be ready for it once its tanks arrived.

Even after independence, a commercially successful Ukrainian-language novel was long seen as unlikely. But at the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainian bookstores stopped selling Russian imports, and interest in Ukrainian literature grew, from 1920s classics and poetry to contemporary authors and translations.

"So people are asking: what does it actually mean to be Ukrainian? Literary culture gives us the place to understand who we are," Laiuk told The Guardian in 2023.

The future of Ukrainian literature is uncertain

Ranok is now rushing to reprint textbooks and bestsellers: schools need the former, while sales of popular titles will help the publisher make up for lost revenue.

For debut authors and writers of less commercial or experimental books, the situation is particularly difficult. Even before the strike on Ranok's warehouse, some publications had been delayed by attacks on printing infrastructure.

Ksenia Shpak's debut novel, an urban fantasy about a girl displaced from eastern Ukraine to the Carpathians, was due out in February 2025 but was published only that November, the article says. Half of the print run was in Ranok's Kharkiv warehouse when it was attacked.

It was her first published book, and Shpak fears the publisher will now focus on bestsellers and reprint her novel only if money allows. The Ukrainian book market is also feeling demand level off and the cost of living rise, she said.

Despite the loss of 8 million books, Kruhlov remained optimistic. Looking over the ruined warehouse in Kharkiv, he said he planned to rebuild everything—and to do it better.