By Galina Korol | 2025-04-22

KYIV -- The façade is cracking, literally.

After years of dismissing warnings, Russian occupation authorities in Crimea have quietly confirmed what Ukrainian researchers have been decrying: the peninsula's cultural heritage is in freefall.

According to Crimea's Russian-installed Ministry of Culture, 44% of the peninsula's 2,409 registered heritage sites -- 1,070 in total -- will require preservation within five years.

Russia's state-run TASS reported the findings on April 2 but offered no explanation for how almost half the sites reached this state after 11 years of occupation -- or what, if anything, authorities plan to do about it.

"This just goes to show that Russia, as the occupying country, is not fulfilling its obligations under international law to preserve heritage in occupied territory," Denys Yashnyi, director of the monitoring group of the Crimean Institute for Strategic Studies, told Kontur.

The sharing of these data is not a sign of genuine concern but a pretext for another round of looting the federal budget, said Yashnyi.

"This isn't coming from a desire to preserve. It's coming from a desire to make money," he said.

"Russia is a vertically structured state, an autocracy, in practice. So when we talk about these heritage sites ... [i]t's about the interests of financial-industrial groups and the owners of major firms."

Russia's idea of 'restoration'

Billions of rubles previously passed through "restoration projects," and some of the money disappeared without a trace, along with authentic historical façades.

"Almost everything that underwent a so-called restoration was ruined," Evelina Kravchenko, senior researcher at the Institute of Archeology of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, told Kontur.

The fundamental problem with the Russian approach to cultural heritage in Crimea is a total ignorance of restoration and conservation principles.

"Moscow treats Crimea not even as a dacha [weekend cottage] but as a colony," Kravchenko said. "It doesn't appreciate what exists there, has little concern for the consequences of its actions and puts greater focus on political and ideological expediency."

The occupying authorities have been "improving" heritage sites -- a process that amounts to destruction and tramples on the very principles of cultural preservation, she said.

The so-called restorers are ordinary construction firms tied to the occupation regime, with no real experience in restoration, said Kravchenko. Their method is simple: "They just rip it out, scrape to the foundations, dismantle it, throw it away and put up something new."

Changing contractors does not change the outcome.

"The millions and billions just get redirected to a different firm, and the damage continues," Kravchenko said.

Khan's Palace and Tauric Chersonese

The most egregious case is the Khan's Palace in Bakhchysarai -- the former summer residence of the Crimean khans.

A national monument in Ukraine and on UNESCO's tentative list, the site has suffered catastrophic damage since restoration began in 2017, researchers say.

"Basically it has been destroyed. It's hard to say for sure without seeing the site, but based on photos, it looks like some of the buildings are unsalvageable," Kravchenko said.

Similar patterns of destruction are unfolding from Simferopol to Sevastopol.

In Tauric Chersonese, a UNESCO World Heritage site, Kravchenko said restoration has become a political vanity project.

Under the Kremlin's so-called "New Chersonese" initiative, workers are reshaping the site to suit "the taste of a KGB man," she said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"This is a personal project of Putin's," Kravchenko said. "I think he makes the decisions himself. They bring him options, and he chooses."

As occupiers destroy landmarks, they are aggressively exploiting Crimea's archeological heritage, researchers note.

"It's hard to call this excavation. It's digging, digging up artifacts," Kravchenko said.

Architectural, archeological 'purge'

Yashnyi of the Crimean Institute for Strategic Studies called the scale of the "architectural purge" colossal, fueled by a lack of oversight and of transparency.

"When the occupation of Crimea and Sevastopol began [in 2014], there were more than 1.3 million objects in Ukraine's museum collections," Yashnyi said.

"Since 2014, the scale of illegal excavations has been enormous. And if we're talking about the finds made at the Chersonese Necropolis during the large-scale excavations from 2020 to 2023, the Russians claim 3.5 million finds -- most likely just field descriptions."

Daryna Pidhorna, a senior lawyer at the Regional Center for Human Rights, cited even more staggering figures.

"In Crimea alone from 2014 to 2024, Russia conducted more than 1,500 archeological excavations," she said during a March 24 panel titled "The Destruction of Cultural Heritage: How to Hold Russia Accountable?"

Russians have removed "millions of archeological items ... from sites across the Crimean Peninsula," she added.

"Specifically, within the construction of the propaganda complex known as 'New Chersonese,' [Russians] extracted 6,495,877 items -- of them, 351,780 were of museum value and have been stolen," Pidhorna said. "[They] destroyed the rest."

Propaganda, promoting theft

On March 24, Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR) revealed on Telegram the identities of 14 Russian museum workers accused of spreading propaganda and facilitating the theft of Ukrainian cultural property in occupied territory.

Occupiers illegally removed 164 archeological artifacts from excavations at the ancient cities of Nymphaion and Panticapaeum in Crimea, HUR confirmed.

Yashnyi shared two additional documented cases with Kontur: a length of 16th-century ceramic plumbing found in Staryi Krym in 2016 later appeared in an exhibition at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and occupiers smuggled out a collection of coins found during illegal excavations.

"We don't know what museum they were taken to because they were supposedly taken to an institute in Novosibirsk for analysis of materials," Yashnyi said. "After that, the trail ... went cold."

Legally speaking, Russia has no permission to transfer artifacts beyond the borders of occupied territory, said Kravchenko.

Even before the occupation, Crimea's parliament had explicitly banned the removal of any cultural or archeological artifacts from the Autonomous Republic.

Now "everything is being transferred without supervision -- no one is monitoring this at all," she said.