By Olha Chepil | 2024-04-11

KYIV -- Russia's invasion of Ukraine has damaged more than 1,000 cultural heritage sites, and no one can yet calculate how many archeological monuments and museum treasures Russian troops have carted away.

Since 2014, Russia has actively pursued a predatory policy not only in relation to Ukraine's land but also its cultural heritage.

It has become an inseparable aspect of the Kremlin regime, said Yaroslava Savchenko of Kyiv, a lawyer and cultural specialist at the Foundation for the Support of Basic Research.

This strategy helps forcibly erase displays of Ukrainian identity and expropriate someone else's past along with its artifacts, she said.

"Cultural heritage is the material expression of a people's identity and history. If this is destroyed, it would be difficult to say, according to Russians, that Ukraine is a separate nation, a separate history," said Savchenko, who has worked to protect cultural property during the war.

"What's more, they don't only destroy. They also expropriate. The Russians are trying to make this part of their own history and say that it's all theirs, not ours," she told Kontur.

'They were all stolen, all taken away'

Not a single work of art remains in Mariupol, which has been under Russian control since 2022, said Petro Andriushchenko, advisor to the city's mayor.

Two Mariupol museums have been destroyed. One was the Arkhip Kuindzhi Art Museum, which housed masterpiece paintings.

In all, the museum had approximately 2,000 items on display, the most valuable of which were paintings by Kuindzhi, an artist from Mariupol.

"All the valuables that were in Mariupol -- they were all stolen, all taken away," Andriushchenko told Kontur.

"Seven original masterpieces were kept in Mariupol. And what do the Russians do? They take everything away to Donetsk. And they say, we're taking it for safekeeping," he said. "And then what? We understand where it ends up next. Certainly, for a long time now it hasn't been in Donetsk, but in their Russian museums."

The Russians destroyed 180,000 books and four libraries in Mariupol when they captured the city, Andriushchenko said. In particular, they discarded books by Ukrainian writer Lesya Ukrainka.

Invading forces also destroyed all the stained-glass windows and modern murals on buildings, he said.

"This is contemporary art, created in the last 30 years. Where we identify ourselves, that this is definitely Ukraine," he said. "This is what they are really fighting against. They didn't leave a single mural created during Ukrainian times, neither in Mariupol nor in the other occupied territories. It's a question of identity."

War crimes

In a report filed in March, United Nations (UN) investigators who worked in Ukraine wrote about Russia's seizure of Ukrainian cultural property and archival documents, in particular from the city of Kherson.

They discovered that in the final weeks of Kherson city's occupation in October and November 2022, the Russians transferred cultural objects from the Kherson Art Museum and archival documents from the Kherson provincial archives to occupied Crimea.

The UN report calls this cultural expropriation a "war crime."

"It isn't simply painful to me. They crushed my life. For me, this museum was life," said Alina Dotsenko, director of the Kherson Art Museum.

Dotsenko left Kherson before the museum was ransacked. Another museum employee later told her that on October 31, 2022, Russians arrived in trucks at the museum and hauled off all the most valuable items.

The Russians took more than 10,000 items from the museum, said staff.

Never before had cultural objects been taken from Ukraine on such a scale. Museum employees and the Ukrainian authorities are preparing materials for Interpol to put the stolen items on an international wanted list.

"We had works of global significance in our museum," Dotsenko told Kontur. "No matter what delegation came, everyone was surprised. They said that no museum in Ukraine could have such collections."

"After this looting, my health deteriorated greatly," she said.

Another problem with such plundering is that much cultural property ends up on the black market and in private hands, and finding these items is even more difficult, Savchenko said.

"If we consider what happened with the Kherson Art Museum ... eyewitnesses said ... items were carried away in trucks for three days according to plan, and then in the end, private individuals used private cars to haul away everything that was left," she said.

The looting constitutes a Russian hybrid warfare tactic meant to strip away Ukrainian history, she added.

"Experts say it is the biggest art heist since the Nazis in World War II," the New York Times reported of the looting of Ukraine on January 14, 2023.

How to recover cultural property

In addition, cultural heritage sites are disappearing under Russian attack. Bombs are demolishing museums, libraries, churches, mosques, universities and theaters.

It is difficult to calculate the total damage to Ukrainian cultural heritage, said Savchenko. For example, the World Bank estimated that Russian aggression had caused $2.6 billion in damage to Ukrainian cultural heritage as of February 24, 2023.

"The number of affected cultural heritage sites is getting bigger and bigger," said Savchenko. "Every day there are more shellings, and the number of destroyed monuments increases. Especially in Kharkiv province in recent days."

Russia's full-scale invasion has damaged more than 1,000 cultural heritage sites, Ukraine's Ministry of Culture and Information Policy said April 8.

The most brutal Russian attacks have targeted cultural heritage sites of exceptional importance to humanity, such as the Historic Center of Odesa, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University.

"The destruction of Ukrainian identity is one of the components that the courts may consider a probable crime of genocide," said Savchenko.

Ukraine's main problem is how to recover its cultural property, analysts say.

After the end of the war, Ukraine intends to turn to international institutions with a claim against Russia for the return of all the stolen cultural property.

"Now we are searching for all the items as much as possible and making a list of them," said Savchenko. "And later we will speak of this in international commissions and courts and turn to Interpol and Europol to search for these valuables."