Daughters of Donbas bring powerful testimony and music to St Andrews

The University of St Andrews will welcome the Toronto‑based Ukrainian musical ensemble Daughters of Donbas on Friday 30 January, as part of their UK tour Songs of Stolen Children.

Hosted by the Centre for Art and Politics (CAP), with the support of the Alex Danchev Fund and in partnership with the Centre for Global (Post)Socialisms (GloPost), the programme will offer a rare opportunity to hear directly from artists whose lives and work have been shaped by the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Songs of Stolen Children is a musical performance and a human‑rights project, confronting the abduction of an estimated 20,000 Ukrainian children from occupied regions of eastern Ukraine and their forced relocation to Russia.

The event will open with remarks from the Principal, Professor Dame Sally Mapstone, and the conversation will be hosted by Dr Jeffrey Stevenson Murer, Director of CAP and Deputy Head of the School of International Relations, with contributions from Victoria Donovan, Professor of Ukrainian Studies in the School of Modern Languages, who will offer context from her recent book Life in Spite of Everything.

The project is led by Marichka, a Ukrainian‑Canadian singer and Amnesty International Prize winner. She collaborates with Grammy‑nominated producer and award‑winning journalist Dan Rosenberg, who will moderate the St Andrews discussion.

Central to the St Andrews event is Liza, a 19‑year‑old singer who was abducted from Mariupol when the city fell and later escaped captivity. Liza will share her story, read from the diary she kept while detained, and reflect on what she witnessed in occupied territories. She and Marichka will discuss how they transform personal and collective trauma into music that refuses to let these stories disappear.

Alongside testimony and discussion, the ensemble will perform selections from Songs of Stolen Children, illustrating how art can become a vessel for memory, resistance, and survival. The event forms part of the Centre for Art and Politics’ ongoing series exploring the war in Ukraine through creative media – music, poetry, painting, and other forms that communicate the lived experience of conflict in ways traditional analysis cannot. The series began in October 2022, shortly after the full‑scale invasion.

The event takes place in School III on Friday 30 January from 3-5pm. Booking is not required. Full event details, as well as photographs and a link to Liza’s diary, can be found on the CAP events page.

For those who cannot make the St Andrews date, there are events at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections on January 28 and in Edinburgh on January 29 Liza and Marichka were interviewed by the BBC – you can listen on iPlayer, with the story starting at 32:50.