By Olha Chepil | 2025-03-05

KYIV -- Russia continues to seize not only Ukraine's lands but also destroy its cultural heritage, overhauling Ukrainian museums and creating propaganda centers to glorify its "special military operation" (SMO), say analysts.

"We are receiving information that so-called 'SMO museums' are being organized not only as part of a given exhibition, but also as separate institutions and in schools," said Yaroslava Savchenko, a Kyiv-based lawyer and cultural specialist from Ukraine's Foundation for the Support of Fundamental Research.

"For now, we can only guess how many there," Savchenko told Kontur.

One of the first "SMO museums" appeared in Horlivka in occupied territory in Donetsk province.

Later a similar museum appeared in Dniprorudne, Zaporizhzhia province, on the site of the local Industrial College.

"It's Dniprorudne. It's Berdyansk. It's Skadovsk. It's Henichesk... These museums act as propaganda for those who may be ready to join the army," Yevhen Shatilov, a historian and researcher at the National Military History Museum of Ukraine, told Kontur.

"It is [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's personal order to build these museums," Shatilov added.

According to analysts, the Kremlin is using these museums as propaganda centers, especially for children.

Teachers often take the city's college students and schoolchildren to the museums, which are often located at the sites of former Ukrainian schools.

"These are measures aimed at changing the national self-conception of children. Influencing the consciousness of schoolchildren is absolutely a Soviet method. Without a doubt, their goal is to spread propaganda, which itself contradicts the very purpose of museums' existence," Savchenko told Kontur.

The "SMO museums" display military badges, uniforms and banners, as well as photographs of fallen Russian soldiers on stands.

Even more of these museums are expected to open in Russian-occupied territory, since they are now multiplying throughout Russia, say analysts.

"One or more of these museums are opening in a large place in almost every Russian province. The count is in the thousands," said Shatilov.

Honoring a Soviet executioner

The Russians are not only opening new museums in occupied territory but overhauling existing Ukrainian museums in a way that ignores the nation's history and traditions.

According to Petro Andriushchenko, director of the Center for the Study of the Occupation, the Kremlin is reviving Soviet ideology in Mariupol despite the difficult humanitarian situation in the city.

Russia opened its own museum in the building that used to house the Ukrainian one.

"There was a museum of Ukrainian National Life... the real everyday history of Mariupol was there. It had everything: Greeks, Jews, Ukrainians and a port exhibit, you know, a room about merchants. In other words, real life was presented there," Andriushchenko told Kontur.

Until 2022, the ethnographic collection contained more than 5,000 items, but Russian authorities hauled the most valuable ones out of town. They then used the building to host a museum honoring the Soviet politician Andrei Zhdanov (1896-1948).

Zhdanov was involved in the persecution of writers and composers and one of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's closest associates and henchmen in repression, said Andriushchenko.

"Zhdanov is the man who starved all these people to death in besieged Leningrad. He's an executioner," said Andriushchenko, referring to Zhdanov's tenure as Communist Party chief of Nazi-blockaded Leningrad during World War II.

"He did not allow warehouses with food to be opened. And now a museum for him is opening in Mariupol. It's just so surreal that it's hard to wrap your head around it."

After occupying the city, the Russians took away all of its unique Ukrainian museum collections, he added.

"The art museums have been robbed by the Russians. The museum of local folkways was robbed. It had one-of-a-kind collections," said Andriushchenko.

"We had original Kuindzhis and Aivazovskys in the Kuindzhi house-museum," he said, referring to two 19th-century painters. "The Russians hauled away all this to Russia."

'Pure theft'

All Ukrainian museums in occupied territory have already formally integrated into the Russian museum system.

Thirty-six Ukrainian museums in territory occupied after 2022 are registered in the State Catalog of the Russian Museum Fund. Anyone can look them up on the agency's website, said Aleksey Kopytko, a coordinator for InfoResist.

The Russians also record the exhibition items they have hauled away to Russia.

"The Russians have a centralized database of museum holdings, and they are recording what gets transferred there. The total includes items from looted Ukrainian museums. Russian museum employees are not refusing the stolen items. They add them to their collection records," said Shatilov.

The Kremlin is applying a broad range of measures to Ukrainian museums, analysts say.

For example, on the instructions of the Russian Ministry of Culture, leading museums owned by the Russian government have become "sponsors" of Ukrainian museums in the occupied areas of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson province.

In addition to facilitating the inclusion of Ukrainian museum treasures in the Russian catalog, they help disseminate Russian narratives.

"Russian museum 'curators' are being assigned to the Ukrainian museums under occupation. They are specifically supposed to monitor the ideas spreading in occupied territory," said Savchenko.

"Of course, this is remarkable, but it ... demonstrates that the occupation authorities do not trust the museum employees who remained in occupied territory."

More than one million Ukrainian museum items are now in territory under Russian occupation. This figure, which the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture announced in the spring of 2024, is over 12% of Ukraine's museum holdings.

At present, Ukraine lacks a defined mechanism for recovering stolen valuables from Russia or from occupied territory.

"Now it is worthwhile not only to record these instances [of museum looting] but also to involve international organizations such as the International Council of Museums," said Savchenko.

"Russia must be held accountable in the future."