Ukraine’s Cultural Heritage Faces Damage Beyond Official Estimate

Ukraine was hit by a wave of Russian strikes on Sunday night that killed nine people and damaged several cultural sites in what has been described as a deliberately targeted attack on the country’s history and identity. They include Kyiv’s 11th-century Dormition Cathedral, which is part of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, a group of monastic buildings declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Kremlin denies targeting the cultural site. However, Ukraine’s deputy culture minister, Tetiana Filevskaia, tells The Art Journal that Russia’s drones were “obviously targeting Ukrainian culture”.

A fire ripped through the cathedral’s roof, leaving a huge hole. The blaze has now been extinguished after fire crews worked through the night. Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said the assault injured 23 people and left more than 140,000 of the city’s residents without electricity.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, described the attack as ‘one of the biggest Russian crimes against Christian culture today’. He claimed that Moscow launched 70 missiles and more than 600 drones during Sunday night. 

Kyiv’s Mystetskyi Arsenal National Art and Culture Museum Complex was also hit. Its director, Olesia Ostrovska-Luta, told The Art Journal that no artworks were damaged. “It’s hard to argue that Russia isn’t deliberately targeting Ukrainian culture,” she says.

The city of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine was targeted along with Kyiv on Sunday. The Kharkiv Art Museum’s roof was set ablaze and several artworks damaged when it was hit by a drone. Rescue workers, city officials, journalists, volunteers and residents reportedly scrambled to evacuate as many artworks as possible, despite the threat of a second wave of attacks. Ihor Klimenko, the head of Ukraine’s ministry of internal affairs, wrote on Telegram that five firefighters were killed by a second drone while they were trying to contain the blaze. At least five people, including a five-month-old baby, were reportedly injured.

Yuriy Larin, a journalist based in the Kharkhiv region, helped rescue some of the artworks. “A couple [of artworks] were quite literally smoldering in my hands,” he tells The Art Journal. “I couldn’t film properly. I stood in a chain so that from the room where the paintings were kept and where the roof had already collapsed, [the paintings] would be carried out or passed on.”

The Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Film Studios in Kyiv, which holds the country’s largest and oldest costume collection, was hit for a second time this month on Sunday night. Inside were more than 100,000 costumes and almost 3 million individual items of clothing. The institution’s director, Andriy Dochyk, told a TV news crew that its costume workshop took a direct hit from a missile and there was ‘nothing left to save’. ‘The missile destroyed the entire building and a fire broke out,’ he said.

Konstanin Akinsha, a Ukrainian American curator, wrote on Substack: “The irony is bitter. Both the Kharkiv Art Museum and Dormition Cathedral were destroyed during the Second World War. Today, they are once again under attack. The Russian Federation claims to be the successor state of the Soviet Union. Judging by its treatment of cultural heritage, it increasingly appears determined to inherit the legacy of the Third Reich as well.”

Filevskaia echoes his sentiment. “It shows that Russia is fighting against Ukrainian identity and Ukrainian culture,” she told The Art Journal during a phone call on Monday. “This is not simply a fight for territory. It is not just about military targets. Russia is destroying everything that makes Ukraine Ukraine.”

Sunday night’s strike “suggests a degree of desperation from Russia”, she continued. “They are trying to target whatever they can, and the damage to civilian and cultural sites has been terrible. When they cannot achieve their objectives on the battlefield, they try to inflict damage elsewhere.”

Asked what Ukraine needs to do to protect its cultural heritage sites from Russian bombardments, Filevskaia says her country “needs more weapons and more air defence systems”.

“Russia is producing far more weapons than we are, and we need the means to stop them…. We also need the ability to strike back because Russia understands force, and force is the only thing that can stop them.”

Filevskaia tells The Art Journal that since the start of Russia’s invasion, the cost of damage to Ukraine’s cultural heritage stands at more than $4 billion. 

However, Daryna Pidhorna, a legal analyst at the Raphael Lempkin Society, a Ukrainian NGO that strives to prevent cultural genocide, tells The Art Journal that the cost is much higher. “Ukraine’s analysts have only gauged the material cost of the damage to the country’s cultural sites, and they have not included sites hit in the occupied territories,” she says. “The moral damage caused to the populations who live near these sites… means the costs are much higher.”

Last year, a group of arts professionals called on the International Council of Museums (ICOM), a non-governmental organisation that sets industry standards for participating museums, to blacklist Russia for violating its code of ethics. In an open letter published in Le Monde, the group said it intended to take ICOM to court in France, where the NGO is headquartered, if it failed to eject Russia. Christian Castagna, advocacy manager for non-profit For Ukraine, Their Freedom, and Ours! wrote: ‘Because ICOM is an NGO subject to French legislation, if it does not follow what is written in its statutes, its members can demand that ICOM’s executive board respects its statutes and dismisses Russia for violating its code of ethics.’

On Monday, UNESCO publicly condemned Russia’s strike on Ukrainian cultural sites. As of 10 June, it has recorded 536 cultural sites in Ukraine that have been verified as damaged. They include 154 religious sites, 280 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest, 41 museums, 33 monuments, 22 libraries, 5 archaeological sites, and one archive.

Despite ICOM publicly expressing concern in May that ‘the recent escalation of Russian attacks [had] significantly intensified the dangers posed to civilian populations across Kyiv and other regions of Ukraine’, it has not yet banned Russia. 

Pidhorna tells The Art Journal that ICOM doesn’t have the procedures in place to eject its members. “Like UNESCO, ICOM can only suspend members for breaking its code of ethics,” she says. “The international society still wrongly believes that culture cannot impact the war in Ukraine.”

Vasilij Pankratov, ICOM Russia’s president, was asked to comment on Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian cultural sites. “I don’t think you understand the Russian language very well,” he replies. “In our language, ‘attack’ means a swift and decisive action intended to cause harm, damage, etc. I know nothing about Russia taking such actions against Ukrainian cultural sites. However, I do know about Ukraine taking such actions against Russian sites.”

Ukraine has targeted Russian naval and energy infrastructure sites over the last couple of weeks. On 6 June, Russia's defence ministry said it had downed a total of 376 Ukrainian drones in locations along the border, including Bryansk, Belgorod, Kursk and locations in Crimea and the Sea of Azov.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on X, ‘[On June 6], our drones covered a distance of about 1,000 kilometres to the St. Petersburg region, to the enemy navy’s arsenals and a base in Kronstadt’.

ICOM Russia released a public statement on 10 June, accusing Ukraine of targeting the Panorama Museum of the Defense of Sevastopol in Crimea. ‘The fire that erupted from the explosion almost completely destroyed… a monumental painting that recreated the work of Franz Roubaud, an outstanding battle painter of the late 19th and early 20th century,’ it read. 

ICOM Russia says the original painting was severely damaged ‘under similar circumstances in 1942 by an aerial bomb when a German fascist Wehrmacht attacked Crimea’.