It is entirely understandable that the barbaric attack on Ukraine launched a year ago by Vladimir Putin has sparked enraged reactions among Ukrainians as they endure Russian missile strikes and await Putin’s much anticipated spring offensive.

Attacking the culture of an enemy nation has a long and ignoble history, and it rarely ends well

But in spurning and destroying Russia’s incomparable musical and literary culture the long-suffering Ukrainians are hitting out at the wrong enemy.

The Times reports that Kyiv Opera House is deleting the music of the Russian composers Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev from a ballet, The Snow Queen, that is currently in rehearsal. The work’s director Serhii Skuz calls Tchaikovsky ‘a symbol of Russian culture and Russian aggression’ and cites that as the reason for cancelling him.

At the same time, books by great Russian authors like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev are being withdrawn from Ukraine’s bookshops and libraries to be pulped and recycled, and a statue of the Russian Empress Catherine the Great in Odessa has been removed and hidden in a museum basement.

This extension of the war on the battlefields to an attack on culture is completely comprehensible in view of the agony that Russian aggression has inflicted on Ukraine over the past 12 months. But it sends the wrong signal to both friend and foe.

Sadly, attacking the culture of an enemy nation has a long and ignoble history, and it rarely ends well. Britain, too, was guilty of such cultural vandalism when the music of German composers was banned in both world wars (although the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony were later broadcast as symbolic of the Allied ‘V for victory’ slogan).

The worst example of cultural warfare was carried out in 1934 on Berlin’s Opernplatz by the Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels who organised a mass bonfire of books by Jews and other writers that the Nazis disapproved of, including Freud, Marx and Thomas Mann. An earlier German author, Heinrich Heine, had correctly prophesied ‘those who burn books will end by burning people’ and so it proved.

The distinguished Jewish conductor Daniel Barenboim bravely rose above cultural warfare in 2001 when he defied the unofficial Israeli ban on the music of the anti-Semitic German composer Richard Wagner – Hitler’s favourite composer – by conducting Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde before an Israeli audience. Though some walked out, most stayed, and Barenboim was warmly applauded for his courage.

However strongly Ukrainians feel under the heat of Russia’s attacks, they need to know that it was one man and not a country who ordered the destructive assault on them last February, and that Vladimir Putin represents the worst, not the best, of Russia culture. They should not stoop to his level.