As all eyes turn to Kulturmødet this week, we are taking the opportunity to issue a statement commenting on the organisation’s international outlook, which brings together the experiences and expressions of Danish and international artists and cultural professionals from several countries.

Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we are all engaged in the process of understanding the developing impact of the prolonged war whose consequences are spreading throughout Europe, affecting all our lives, expressions, identities, democracies, economies and social politics to different degrees.

Kulturmødet is an excellent platform for this in-depth understanding and exchange, as well as a place to support culture that is critically under threat from attack and suppression.

IMBALANCE OF REPRESENTATION

The curatorial choices at Kulturmødet Mors 2026 vividly illustrate how European cultural platforms inadvertently prioritize the aggressor state's narrative. By explicitly elevating Yulia Navalnaya as the main international speaker, the festival has granted a prominent Russian political figure a prime platform to shape the geopolitical discourse.

As a result of Kulturmødet’s program framing, Russian voices are spotlighted, being represented by a highly mediatized personality delivering a keynote speech, while the Ukrainian voices are only present on the margins. This creates a discursive disadvantage for the Ukrainians and is for them a form of epistemological violence.

Compounding this structural imbalance is a lack of institutional transparency: Ukrainian invitees and their Danish partners were never notified about Yulia Navalnaya’s keynote participation. This omission effectively stripped the Ukrainians of their agency and right to informed consent, denying them the opportunity to critically assess the festival's overarching political framing or make an independent, informed decision regarding their participation.

It raises urgent ethical questions about duty of care, and whether the festival even considered the profound psychological and reputational impact of surprising Ukrainian artists with the dominating presence of a Russian political figure? If this dynamic were taken into account, the failure to communicate it in advance constitutes a blatant breach of professional trust and a disregard for Ukrainian agency.

Yulia Navalnya’s opposition to Putin’s regime is an expression of a vision for a different Russia, not a vision of an independent Ukraine. She speaks for specific Russian interests, not for the democracy that was the vision behind Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity. Giving her a platform at Kulturmødet, while sidelining Ukrainian voices, frames the existential reality of Ukrainians as a mere thematic backdrop for a diffuse Russian ‘pro-democracy’ narrative, that is not even clearly anti-war, and ultimately reproduces the exact colonial power dynamics the festival claims to oppose.

Here are a few concrete lines of criticism based on Yulia Navalnaya’s participation in Kulturmødet Mors:

• Creeping normalization as a political agenda: Navalnaya is a political figure whose agenda opposes the accountability of Russian society and the international isolation of the Russian Federation. She explicitly positions herself as the representative of the "other Russia," stating in her speech documented by the Platform of a Future Russia from the Baltic Sea Parliamentary Conference that her primary goal is to "return a voice to millions of Russians." Such a political framing inherently prioritizes the future and rehabilitation of Russian society over the Ukrainian demand for collective accountability and justice.

Navalnaya’s political activity feeds into a disturbing broader trend of Western cultural and diplomatic normalization with the aggressor state—such as the controversial return of a Russian pavilion to the Venice Biennale highlighted by the Ukrainian World Congress, or the increasing admission of Russian athletes to major international competitions. There is presently no justification for this "thaw" in relations while the destruction of Ukraine only escalates, a grim reality underscored by UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission data confirming 2025 was the deadliest year for Ukrainian civilians since 2022. 

• Blurring lines of accountability and sovereignty: Navalnaya’s rhetoric consistently blurs the lines of Russian accountability and territorial sovereignty. In a November 2024 interview with TV Rain (Dozhd), she expressed opposition to Western arms supplies for Ukraine and rejected the idea that Russians should pay reparations, arguing that only Putin and his inner circle are responsible. This avoidance of collective accountability was echoed during Navalnya’s speech at the SuomiAreena festival in Finland in June 2025, where she referred to the status of Crimea as a "complicated issue," stating that while it de jure belongs to Ukraine, it de facto belongs to Russia because "millions of people now have Russian passports." This framing—which drew immediate condemnation from the UNITED24 platform for validating the Kremlin's weaponization of forced passportization—directly mirrors her late husband Alexei Navalny’s controversial 2014 remarks comparing Crimea to a "sausage sandwich" that cannot simply be handed back.

• Unchecked imperialism: Yulia Navalnaya, described in Kulturmødet’s press release as “one of the world's most prominent voices for democracy and human rights”, is known to have promoted an imperialist, monoethnic idea of Russia, heavily criticized by Russia’s multiple indigenous communities. In 2024, Navalnaya was quoted as saying that the opposition would "find the decolonizers who want to artificially break up the big country, contrary to the common background and cultural context of its population." This provoked strong backlash from people in Russia's republics, with thousands of likes on comments accusing her of erasing centuries of colonization. Commentators from Dagestan, Buryatia, and Siberia pointed out that the "common background" she invoked was, from their perspective, a history of occupation, not shared culture — and several noted the grim irony of a woman whose husband was killed by the state now threatening to "find" dissidents who want self-determination.

• The "anti-Putin" fallacy: It is a worrying trend for European institutions to assume that being "anti-Putin" automatically aligns a Russian political figure with core European democratic values. Much of the Russian opposition still harbors deep-seated imperialist and chauvinistic mindsets. Giving them unconditional platforms without critical vetting poses a direct ideological and security threat to Europe itself.

MOVING FORWARD

To build a truly inclusive and respectful platform, we encourage Kulturmødet's leadership to address these structural imbalances. Meaningful dialogue requires transparent communication, equal footing, and genuine representation—rather than structural imbalances that inadvertently marginalize certain voices.

Moving forward, we hope to see a commitment to reviewing how such programming is established. Implementing clear protocols for informed consent would ensure that cultural professionals from Ukraine—as well as from other nations and communities historically marginalized or currently threatened by Russian imperialism—can present their work as independent creators, rather than finding themselves placed in the shadow of external political agendas.

Furthermore, we invite European cultural platforms to recognize that the critical voices of Ukrainian scholars, historians, artists, curators, and researchers are not merely expressions of grievance but vital sources of regional expertise. Engaging with professionals who possess a deep, lived, and academic understanding of Russian imperial mechanisms is a unique opportunity for European institutions.  

Learning from this expertise will not only broaden the festival's institutional horizons but also equip it to navigate complex geopolitical narratives with nuance, helping to avoid the familiar facades of imperial soft power.