Three Cossacks Who Barely Speak: The Animated Series Cossacks

Three Zaporozhian Cossacks — Hrai (Грай), Oko (Око), and Tur (Тур) — boil kulish, play in football and hockey matches, and defeat pirates to rescue brides. This is Cossacks, an animated series made in Kyiv (the original title of each episode begins “Yak kozaky…,” meaning “How the Cossacks…”).

The Dovzhenko Centre, Ukraine’s largest film archive, has included the series in its own “Top 100 Ukrainian Films,” and introduces its characters as having become “icons of Ukrainian popular culture” (as of September 2026). What follows draws on the Centre’s own account, the period editing logs it has published, and entries in the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine (ESU).

Director Volodymyr Dakhno

According to ESU, the director Volodymyr Dakhno (Володимир Дахно) was born on March 7, 1932, in Zaporizhzhia and died on July 28, 2006, in Kyiv. He graduated from the Kyiv Institute of Civil Engineering in 1955, worked as an architect in Kyiv, then became an animator from 1960 and a director from 1967. The first episode of Cossacks is that 1967 work.

The series’ art director was Eduard Kyrych (Едуард Кирич), and the Centre names Ihor Poklad, Myroslav Skoryk, and Volodymyr Huba as composers. Dakhno received the Shevchenko National Prize in 1988 and the title “People’s Artist of Ukraine” in 1996 (ESU). Besides the series, Dakhno also directed the animated film Eneida (1991), based on Kotliarevsky’s epic poem, which is covered separately in the article on Eneida.

How Many Episodes, and When Did It End?

The Dovzhenko Centre describes the series as having “9 episodes,” with the first made in 1967 and the last completed in 1995. ESU’s entry on Dakhno, however, lists the following 9 works as his director’s credits.

There are at least two discrepancies between the two sources. One is the year of the final episode: the Centre gives 1995, ESU gives 1996 for the hockey episode. The cover of the hockey episode’s editing log (in Ukrainian), as published by the Centre, bears an approval stamp dated 1996. The other discrepancy is how the episodes are counted: the Centre’s own description mentions an episode in which the Cossacks “meet aliens,” but no such title appears in ESU’s list. These two sources alone do not settle which count is correct.

Almost No Dialogue

The Centre writes that the series was made “with almost no dialogue or subtitles” and was recognized at international film festivals on that basis. The story is carried by the characters’ movements and the music. The period editing logs the Centre has published — records that set out the length and content of each scene — show this clearly.

• The log for the “Salt” episode (1975, in Russian, prepared for re-editing into an 8mm version): three men gathered around a pot each taste the borscht in turn, and Hrai spits it out. It opens on the scene of the borscht having no salt, and the description of scenes proceeds through action
• The log for the “Football” episode (dated 1970 by ESU) (in Russian, 8mm version): the attached synopsis explains that the three go off to a football tournament and beat teams of knights, Englishmen, and Frenchmen to bring the cup home, and calls it “a film aimed at children of upper-grade age”
• The log for the “Brides” episode (dated 1973 by ESU) (in Russian): following the opening title, a line of narration is written in, in Russian, reading, “This film is one of a popular series depicting the adventures of three Cossacks, figures of Ukrainian folklore”
• The log for the hockey episode (in Ukrainian): the title is written as “Yak kozaky v khokei hraly,” and the studio’s name is given as “the Ukrainian Animation Film Studio”

That the Soviet-era logs were written in Russian, and that the 1973 episode’s log includes Russian-language narration, shows at least that a version with Russian narration existed at the time. However, what language (and whether any narration at all) was used in each episode’s original release cannot be confirmed from the sources examined for this article alone. Even how the title is transcribed on the logs changes: Russian on the Russian-language logs, Ukrainian on the post-independence log.

The Studio’s Changing Names

The series was made by an animation department inside a Kyiv studio for scientific and educational film. According to ESU, the studio was set up in 1940 as an educational film studio, was renamed “Kyivtekhfilm” from 1944, and “Kyiv Popular Science Film Studio” (Kyivnaukfilm, Київнаукфільм) from 1954. In 1959, an “Artistic Animation Production Unit” was set up within it, and this unit became the “Ukrainian Animation Film Studio” (Ukranimafilm, Укранімафільм) from 1990.

According to the Dovzhenko Centre’s account, the animation unit existed as Kyivnaukfilm’s production unit from 1959 to 1991, then as a state-owned studio from 1991 to 2019, and was merged into the Centre on June 30, 2019, under Order No. 256 of the Ministry of Culture dated March 29, 2019. The Centre inherited the studio’s property and rights, and preserves its works. ESU dates independence as 1990, while the Centre dates it as 1991 — the two accounts sit side by side. What followed the merger, and the 2022 “reorganization” order, is covered in the article on the Dovzhenko Centre.

Whose Country’s Film Is It?

Most of the series was made while Ukraine was a constituent republic of the Soviet Union. The Centre lists two entries side by side in the “country” field of its filmography, “Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Ukraine,” and lists “Kyivnaukfilm, Ukranimafilm” in the studio field. The 1973 episode’s log also bears the “passed” stamp of the Soviet body that inspected film distribution.

How to describe a film from the former Soviet era as belonging to one country or another is addressed in the article “‘Ukrainian film’ can mean five different things,” which sets out a way of thinking about this along four axes: where the studio was located, the language and materials of the work, the institution that now preserves it, and who made it. Looked at along these four axes, Cossacks is a work made at a Kyiv studio, by a director from Zaporizhzhia, with the folkloric Cossacks of Ukraine as its heroes, and now preserved by the Dovzhenko Centre in Kyiv. At the same time, during the Soviet era it was distributed in a version with a Russian-language log and narration. Rather than settling on any single fact to describe the whole, it is possible to set these facts down side by side.

How the country’s system of state support for film now treats animation is covered in the article on Ukraine’s film support law.