CNN
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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. 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.
Death-defying evacuations
As the war grinds on, historians and museum workers have begun taking evacuation measures into their own hands.
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.
Sometimes, that means transferring the artwork to other museums in Europe. In 2023, for protection, Vaganova transferred 16 works to the Louvre, which briefly showcased five of them as an exhibit. At the Royal Castle in Warsaw, 37 works from the Khanenko are also on display.
“In the museum, we asked ourselves: What should we do? And who are we as a museum? What is our work during the war? And if we were just a storage facility, we would probably just have to close down,” Vaganova said. “But a museum is always broader than just preserving works.”
Show of support
Still, showcasing an exhibit is different now than before the invasion. Every two weeks, curators select one small item from the collection and show it for one day, before packing it up and moving it back to safety. For a museum housing 25,000 works, presenting just a single item is a downsize. But it also gives the curators a chance to highlight something that may have gone overlooked before the invasion. And the audience has responded.
“You can see how much people miss the collection. You can see how longingly and sometimes tenderly they appreciate that the museum is open, that they can come here,” Vaganova said. “There is a lot of support, warmth and tenderness in this, but also fragility.”
At any point, she explains, the museum can be targeted. Their collections are vulnerable, and the team may not be able to secure everything. Even for a museum of mostly international works, its existence is part of Ukrainian heritage, Vaganova said.
‘I sat on the floor in the empty storage rooms and cried’
Other museum bosses are still on a mission to retrieve tens of thousands of artifacts stolen early on in the full-scale invasion.
A few months before February 24, 2022, founder of the Kherson Art Museum Alina Dotsenko and her team happened to have packed away the site’s entire collection, to prepare for restoration work on the building.
But seven months later, in October 2022, a different kind of invasion occurred. Groups of museum workers from Russian-occupied Crimea found out about the hidden collection and loaded about 10,000 of the museum’s artifacts and works into trucks and drove them away.
Weeks later, after Kherson was liberated by the Ukrainian army, Dotsenko visited the once-full and methodized storage facilities. There were only empty racks left.
“I’m not touchy,” Dotsenko says, recalling the moment from years prior. “But I just slid down the wall, sat on the floor in the empty storage rooms, and just cried.”
Just like that, the Kherson museum’s once robust collection dwindled to just about 3,000 artifacts.
Dotsenko tracked down some of the works thanks to pictures from a journalist showing the same trucks unloading at a museum in Crimea. When Dotsenko and her team claimed theft, the Crimean museum said it was “trying to preserve the collection,” Dotsenko said.
Dotsenko still has the documents detailing the Kherson museum’s stock. Those records have allowed her and her team to uncover exactly what and how much was taken. They’ve hidden the remaining collection and helped open criminal cases for the rest, she said, but there’s little else she can do.
“We are working for this every day,” Dotsenko said. “And I don’t know how it will end.”
Such retrieval attempts aren’t just a way to preserve valuable history. In some ways, the aim is to preserve Ukraine itself.
In 2022, the historic home of Hryhorii Skovoroda — a famous Ukrainian poet and philosopher — was destroyed in a missile strike, along with the museum of his work. The home, located in a tiny village and not nearby any obvious military targets, has been considered an act of cultural vandalism.
Recalling that attack, Chyzhyk said these offenses are of “great symbolic importance.” The goal doesn’t seem to be any particular monument or structure, she said. Instead, the goal is seemingly destroying as many historical and cultural artifacts as possible, even the ones that only matter to small communities. Even if they can’t kill the people, Chyzhyk said, they can kill the very things that make them Ukrainian.
An impossible task
However, fully protecting any of the artwork is impossible, said Vaganova. You can’t just move a museum from the east, which borders Russia, to the west. There aren’t huge storage facilities; no bunkers with doors big enough for thousands of priceless art to be contained. Wherever you store the art, she said, it could still be bombed.
Even if a museum diligently evacuates its work, there can still be damage, added Rozhko. Some of them aren’t packed well or accounted for; there can also be deterioration.
“Often, such evacuation can be even more harmful than being in the occupied territory,” he said.
In short: There’s no correct answer; no handbook dictating the exact right way to preserve an entire country’s cultural history. If you hide the works, like Dotsenko, they can be found and stolen. If you evacuate them, they can be damaged. If you leave them, they could be destroyed.
“There is no right solution to this case at all. It simply does not exist,” said Vaganova. “And this is, of course, the nightmare of every museum director.”