It looks like a serene snapshot from a Ukrainian battlefield: a group of armored soldiers huddled around a makeshift table strewn with food and playing cards. Some are laughing or smoking, and one is lying on the ground, smiling as he scrolls through his phone.

The photo is different from the others Ukrainian front that brought people together in Ukraine during the war — no cannon fire, no soldiers coming out of trenches, no wounded fighters with faces contorted in pain.

Yet for the past year, the image has been widely shared online by Ukrainians and praised by government officials, who recently put it on display at a leading exhibition center in the capital, for striking at the heart of Ukraine’s identity struggle sparked by Russia’s all-out invasion.

The photo — posted and shot by French photographer Émeric Lhuisset in late 2023 — reimagines the famous 19th-century painting Cossacks based in central Ukraineand today’s Ukrainian soldiers replace the legendary warrior riders. The poses and facial expressions of the soldiers are the same, although the swords have been replaced with machine guns.

The topic is in the center culture war between Russia and Ukraine that has intensified since Moscow initiated his complete invasion almost three years ago, with the Ukrainians asking for a refund and assert an identity that Russia says does not exist.

Ukraine and Russia have declared the painting part of their heritage. Not only does it depict the Cossacks, a people both countries claim as their own, but it was created by Illia Repin, an artist born in what is now Ukraine, but who did much of his work in Moscow and St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire.

It is a cultural battle long dominated by Russia. The most famous version of the painting is exhibited in St. Petersburg, while the other less well-known version is in Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine. Repin was marked as a Russian in international exhibitionsfrustrating Ukrainians who see him as one of their own.

But the Russian invasion of Ukraine did forced institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art to reconsider this classification and relabel Repin as Ukrainian.

With his photographic reinterpretation, Mr. Lhuisset seeks to further challenge the Russian narrative by drawing a direct line between the Cossacks, who occasionally resisted the rule of Tsarist Russia, and the current Ukrainian military.

“You can’t understand this war if you don’t understand the whole issue of cultural appropriation,” Mr. Lhuisset, 41, said in a recent interview in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. “This is a real culture war.”

Picture — “Zaporozhian Cossacks’ response to the Turkish Sultan Mehmed IV” — is known to most Ukrainians, and reproductions adorn many family homes. It shows a group of Cossacks from what is now the Zaporizhzhia region in southern Ukraine laughing heartily as they write a mocking response to the sultan’s ultimatum to surrender in 1676.

The Zaporizhzhia region is now partly under Russian occupation. The rest fell out increase in Russian airstrikes in recent months.

Although historians say the scene depicted most likely never happened, the sense of defiance it conveys resonated deeply in Ukraine.

“This picture was an element of forming my own identity for me,” said Tetyana Osipova, 49, the Ukrainian soldier depicted in the photo. She recalled that her grandmother kept a small reproduction “in a place of honor” near the Orthodox icons in their home, where it served as a reminder to “stand up for yourself.”

Mr Lhuisset said he first realized the significance of the painting when he was in Kiev during the 2014 uprising. overthrew the pro-Kremlin president. He recalled seeing protesters holding placards with reproductions of the art to symbolize “their willingness not to surrender, not to submit.”

When he returned to France, the image slipped from his mind.

Until Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Mr. Lhuisset was inspired by a newspaper report about a defiant attack by a Ukrainian border guard radio message full of swear words to the upcoming Russian naval attack. The insulting answer immediately reminded him of the picture.

“For me it was the Cossack’s answer to the Sultan,” he said. “It seemed blindingly obvious.”

He decided to capture that spirit of defiance by recreating Repin’s painting in a modern setting. He spent months negotiating with the Ukrainian military to get armed troops to pose for the photo and to find a safe place, north of Kiev, to stage it. Some soldiers came straight from the front line, and their mustachioed faces conjured up wild Cossacks.

“They looked like they stepped out of a picture!” said Andrii Malyk, media officer of Ukraine’s 112th Territorial Defense Brigade, which participated in the project.

Mr. Lhuisset wanted the photograph to be as similar as possible to the painting. He meticulously lined up about 30 soldiers, placed their hands and asked them to freeze in bursts of hearty laughter to echo the energy of the original scene. The objects in the picture have been replaced by modern equivalents: the lowered hat has become a helmet; a musket converted into a rocket launcher; the mandolin was replaced by a portable speaker.

A drone hovers in the sky, a nod to the unmanned aircraft it has become noticeable on the battlefield.

Mr. Lhuisset posted the photo a few days later social mediaand was quickly embraced by Ukrainian media and government officials as an emblem of the country’s spirit of independence. The picture was released by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense on social media platform X with the inscription: “Cossack blood flows through our veins”.

For Ukrainians, the photo served as a means to reclaim a masterpiece they say has long been wrongly attributed to Russia, despite its Ukrainian roots.

“Some people think the picture is Russian, not Ukrainian,” said Eduard Lopuliak, the military medic shown in the photo. “It’s a way to remind them that it’s our cultural heritage, not Russia’s.”

Russia, for its part, says that Repin is a Russian painter and that all his work should be considered Russian.

The painter was born in what is now Ukraine and studied art there before moving to St. Petersburg to continue his career. Oleksandra Kovalchuk, deputy head of the Odessa Museum of Fine Arts, said Repin maintained strong ties to Ukraine through friends there and by supporting Ukrainian artists. In order to portray the Cossacks authentically, he traveled across the country and worked closely with local historians, she said.

In many ways, the photograph was Ukraine’s response to Russia’s own reinterpretation of the image. In 2017, the Russian painter Vasiliy Nesterenko, a favorite of the Kremlin, reimagined the Cossacks in modern Russian uniformsin the work entitled “Letter to the Enemies of Russia”.

The project also carries a more urgent mission for Ukraine: helping it rebuild its cultural heritage destroyed in the nearly three-year war.

Russian bombing of museums and theaters they destroyed countless Ukrainian cultural treasures. Moscow occupation forces also looted institutions such as Kherson Regional Art Museum in southern Ukrainewhich lost almost the entire collection.

To help deal with the loss, Mr. At the end of last year, Lhuisset traveled to Kyiv with a large print of his photograph and presented it to Alina Dotsenko, the director of the museum. “The Kherson Museum is an empty building today,” he said. “To become a museum again, it needs a new collection.”

The photograph was displayed for one day in the Ukrainian House, a large cultural center in Kyiv, next to the empty frames left over from the theft in Kherson. Like most Ukrainian art, it was then stored in a safe and secret location to protect it from Russian attack. It will be transferred to Kherson when the museum reopens, which is practically impossible today because it is less than a kilometer from the front line.

Mr Malyk, a soldier, said he hoped to visit the museum when the war was over to show his children the painting. Like a painting, he said, a photograph captures an important moment in Ukrainian history.

“We hope it will be passed down through the generations,” he said.

Daria Mitiuk contributed reporting.