From a Wall Street Journal story by Oksana Grytsenko headlined “This Christmas, Many Christians in Ukraine Turn Away From Russia”:

VELYKI DMYTROVYCHI, Ukraine—Anna Datskiv is turning her back on Russia as she makes her kutia, a traditional Ukrainian Christmas dish of sweetened grains, a couple of weeks early this year.

Like many other Ukrainians, she has switched to celebrating Christmas on Dec. 25, as in most of the Western world, rather than Jan. 7, as in Russia. It is part of a broader shift in Ukraine since the war began to move away from cultural traditions that reflect Russia’s centurieslong hegemony over its neighbor.

From an AP story by Hanna Arhirova headlined “A Christmas season without its traditional glow in Ukraine”:

A year ago, Sophia Square in Kyiv was all about the big Christmas tree and thousands of lights spreading over the plaza. These final days of 2022, in the middle of a war that has ravaged the country for 10 months, a more modest tree stands there, its blue and yellow lights barely breaking the gloom of the square that is otherwise dark apart from the headlights of cars.