Inside Ukraine's cultural crisis: A Japanese writer's account

TOKYO - Lviv, a city in western Ukraine about 70 kilometers from the Polish border, is known as Ukraine's cultural capital and has long been a crossroads of Central and Eastern European and Russian cultures.

After a roughly six-hour drive from Warsaw, I smelled a faint scent of lavender upon arriving in Lviv in June. Colorful flowers were blooming across the early-summer city, while people chatted on restaurant terraces, creating a scene that hardly seemed wartime.