Identity in ruins: How Russia is destroying Ukraine’s heritage

Author: Alexandra Ivanova; Translation: Nataliia Shuliakova

For over a decade, Russia has been waging a war to destroy Ukraine’s historical and cultural heritage: ruining buildings, conducting illegal archaeological excavations, appropriating museum artifacts and archives, and using the findings for its own propaganda. Russian authorities are attempting to eliminate as much of Ukrainian identity as possible.

Since the full-scale invasion, 945 cultural heritage sites were destroyed as a result of the war, according to official data alone. UNESCO estimates that the war in Ukraine has led to $3.5 billion in damages to cultural heritage and cultural property. However, these figures are likely incomplete due to the challenges of assessing damage in occupied territories, on the front line, and in mined areas.

Kherson Museum of Local Lore

Robbed by the occupiers

 

One of the oldest museums in Ukraine, the Kherson Museum of Local Lore, was looted by the Russian military. Russian soldiers stole the exhibition as they fled the city, which had been meticulously curated by the museum staff for over a hundred years. Along with the exhibition, they also took the accompanying documents. As a result, identifying the stolen items or proving their connection to the Kherson Museum of Local Lore is now nearly impossible. Among the lost items are rare archaeological relics from the ancient world, weapons, and coins that can be redistributed on the black market and end up in private collections.

 

Ukraine has approximately 2,500 museums, varying in size and the specifics of their collections. All of them face the risk of destruction by Russian missiles, bombs, and shells. Most museums that were occupied, even briefly, were looted.

Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Destroyed by artillery fire

 

The Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Zhytomyr region, built in 1862, was shelled by the Russian military on March 7, 2022. The 160-year-old wooden structure was almost entirely destroyed, with only the bell tower remaining.

 

The church belonged to the UOC (Ukrainian Orhtodox Church) of the Moscow Patriarchate, seen as being favorable to Russia. But even this did not stop the Russian military, which came to “save the Russian world.”

St. Paraskevi’s Church

Damaged by rocket fire

The St. Paraskevi’s Church in Chernihiv was built over 800 years ago. It is a nominee for inclusion in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Nevertheless, on August 19, 2023, the St. Paraskevi’s Church was damaged by a ballistic missile attack.

The attack also destroyed the Chernihiv Music and Drama Theater, located a few meters from the church.

Khartsyzsk group of mounds

Destroyed by Russian earthworks and construction of military fortifications

In the Donetsk region, archaeological sites have been devastated since 2014, both on the contact line and in the occupied territories.

Until 2022, the Khartsyzsk mounds in the southern Donetsk region lay directly on the demarcation line between the occupied and government-controlled territories. According to the latest data, these mounds, along with many others in the Donetsk region, hold the historical record of human life in the area for hundreds of thousands of years. The area was being prepared for military operations, which vanished the archaeological site and its yet unrevealed secrets.

A mound from the Khartsyzsk group in Donetsk Oblast, east of the Kalmius River. The destruction began in 2014, at the beginning of the armed conflict in the east of Ukraine. A wide trench nearly split the site in half, but the precise consequences can only be determined by firsthand examination of the materials on the site.

The Trilobit mound, located two kilometers from Khartsyzsk, became part of the fortifications of the second defense line, constructed by the Russia-backed armed group “DPR” (so-called Donetsk People’s Republic) in 2014-2015. The fate of the archaeological heritage there remains unknown.

 

The most common cause of archaeological site destruction is no longer shelling but the construction of defense structures such as trenches, foxholes, and firing points. Artifacts that have remained in the ground for centuries are currently being destroyed.

A significant portion of the Pryazovia mounds—and with them, a significant part of Ukraine’s history from the Scythian period and the Bronze Age—has been lost due to the invasion.

Satellite image monitoring, conducted by Ukrainian scientists at the Crimean Institute for Strategic Studies, is one of the few ways to document the damage and compile a list of destruction.

Verkhniy Saltiv Museum-Reserve

Destroyed by artillery shelling

 

The Verkhniy Saltiv Museum-Reserve is located about 20 kilometers from the Russian border. This unique site is the namesake of the Saltivska archaeological culture, which was discovered in the area.

 

The Russians occupied the village in the first days of the full-scale invasion, and after retreating in May 2022, they began to shell it heavily. The museum building was hit several times by mortars, leaving it almost completely destroyed. Some of the surviving exhibits were moved to a storage facility in Kharkiv at the end of 2022, while the majority were stolen.

Other museums have also suffered from shelling. On May 7, 2022, a Russian shell struck the roof of the Hryhorii Skovoroda Museum. Hryhorii Skovoroda, a symbol of Ukrainian philosophy, was a theologian, thinker, and poet who influenced his contemporaries and many following generations of Ukrainians. The fire from the shelling engulfed the entire building, leaving only the writer’s pedestal intact.

 

The museum preserved editions of Skovoroda’s works, ethnographic objects, paintings, and graphic works related to him. The collection survived destruction because it was moved earlier.

The Kharkiv region has the highest number of destroyed monuments, with more than 235 sites damaged.

Documentation of Crimes

International law criminalizes the destruction of cultural heritage.

Ukraine has no effective means of protecting and returning its cultural heritage sites. The only available action is recording and documenting the damage for future litigation.

Crimes against cultural heritage violate several international legal norms, including the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the 1972 World Heritage Convention. Furthermore, Russia is violating the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which establishes criminal liability for damage to cultural heritage sites, as well as religious, educational, artistic, and scientific institutions and buildings.