2 days Ago By NEWS WIRE
KYIV - For Ukrainians, more than three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, the war isn’t just being fought in the trenches. It’s in the museums, and in the cultural heritage they seek to preserve. Amid the continuing onslaught, the country’s historical centers — which, one could argue, hold the cultural identity of Ukraine have struggled.
Heritage sites have been damaged; museums have been looted; artifacts have been stolen. And these catastrophes aren’t random — legal experts and historians claim Russia intentionally targets artistic and cultural sites as a way to eradicate Ukrainian identity. “Even if we have an advantage on the battlefield, but they destroy all our museums, burn all our books, will we be able to remain Ukrainian?” asked Halyna Chyzhyk, a legal expert working to protect Ukraine’s remaining cultural sites.
“What will we have left?” Politically, Ukraine has also seen its largest ally, the US, see-saw from backing its cause to diplomatically aligning with Russia, as US President Donald Trump attempts to rush a peace deal. Michael Jordan’s, Kobe Bryant’s first-ever NBA jerseys to sell for $10m apiece Meanwhile, Russia has continued its offensive, launching its largest drone attack of the last three years on the eve of the war’s anniversary. Still, Ukrainian art historians and museum directors are doing everything they can to retrieve stolen works and protect what remains.
As of January, UNESCO has verified damage to 476 cultural properties — ranging from cathedrals to museums, monuments and libraries. The Ukrainian Heritage Monitoring Lab puts the toll higher, telling CNN that in its 128 expeditions it has “reliably documented more than 1,200 damaged cultural heritage sites and cultural infrastructure” across the country. As Chyzhyk, and countless cultural industry experts have said, many sites have been directly targeted and destroyed by Russian forces, not just collateral damage.
As the war grinds on, historians and museum workers have begun taking evacuation measures into their own hands. Hollywood actor Hackman died of natural causes, a week after wife Historian Leonid Marushchak, co-founder of NGO Museum Open for Renovation, has evacuated almost 2 million artifacts — paintings, sculptures and so on — as Russian forces continue to target and desolate museums around the country. Among the evacuated exhibits was a stone sculpture of a lion, which may be up to 1,000 years old.
It was stored at a museum in Bakhmut, a town captured by Russians after heavy fighting that lasted for more than six months. “I couldn’t sleep because of this lion,” Marushchak said. “When the city was almost destroyed and even museum walls were falling down, we went there to get that lion out.
” For many historians and museums, documenting the destruction is a significant part of the restoration process. Crimes have to be recorded while there are still traces of them, said Vasyl Rozhko, founder of the Ukrainian Heritage Monitoring Lab. As an example, he used a church built in the 1860s in the northern village of Vyazivka, which sustained some damage in the attacks in 2022 and collapsed less than a year later.
The team made a 3D model of the church, and later a laser scan. But while deciding how exactly to save the structure, the church collapsed. The only thing left was that 3D model, Rozhko said.
“Some objects can stand (after damage) but some cannot,” he added. “And if we don’t document and record them, we won’t even know what to save.” For others, preservation looks a little different.
At the Khanenko Museum in Kyiv, one of the biggest art museums in the country, director Yulia Vaganova and her team have determined that the only way to save the collection — comprised primarily of art from other Western European countries, not Ukraine — is to show it. 2 dead, nearly 230 sickened in US measles outbreak Tags: hunt ukraine stolen artworks.
