Curators and local officials keep working to save what they can amid Russia’s deliberate strikes on cultural infrastructure and theft of countless artworks.
I remember walking next to a large crater in the middle of a busy street. Central Kyiv, 10 October 2022. On that day, for the first time since the start of the full-scale invasion, Russian forces launched a massive missile strike on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, as well as one of the largest missile attacks across the country.
A picture that made headlines across the world was that of a crater made by a Russian missile in a children’s playground not far from Kyiv’s top university. Fortunately, there were no children there during the strike. The crater was quickly filled and the area repaired, but locals, myself included, could still see the damage immediately after the attack.
The same missile strike damaged the university, as well as the nearby Khanenko Museum, one of Ukraine’s most important art museums. Established in 1919 by the Khanenko family, renowned for their entrepreneurship and love of the arts, the museum has one of Ukraine’s most valuable collections of national and international art. The blast wave broke windows and damaged the facade.
The artworks themselves had already been moved to a safe place.
“The collections had previously been packed and protected,” says Olha Sahaydak, head of the board of the Coalition of Cultural Activists and coordinator of its advocacy work on Russia’s destruction of Ukrainian cultural heritage.
The Khanenko Museum is an example of something that has become increasingly important during the Russian invasion: a museum can lose its building and still save its collection, but only if it has the opportunity and ability to prepare in advance.
“There were other museums like this, too,” Sahaydak says, noting the Odesa Fine Arts Museum, which not only saved its own collections but helped other local museums move objects to safety.
According to Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture, as of May 2026 Russian attacks had damaged or destroyed 1,783 cultural heritage sites and 2,540 cultural infrastructure facilities across Ukraine. Among them are 141 museums and galleries and 879 libraries, and dozens of theaters, concert halls, and cinemas. Hundreds of cultural workers and artistswere murdered. These numbers do not fully capture the situation in the occupied territories, where Ukrainian authorities cannot inspect museums and other cultural institutions.
These attacks have continued unabated since the outset of the full-scale invasion. On 24 May 2026, a Russian strike on Kyiv damaged a series of major cultural and scientific institutions, including the National Art Museum of Ukraine, the National Philharmonic, the National Library of Ukraine, the Kyiv Opera, and the Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences. The National Chornobyl Museum was mostly destroyed.
Guilty of Cultural Genocide?
Following the attack, Ukraine’s National Commission of Ukraine for UNESCO described Russia’s actions as having “all the signs of cultural genocide,” accusing the country of waging a systematic war against Ukrainian culture, historical memory, and cultural heritage.
The language is significant. “Cultural genocide” is widely used to describe the destruction of a group’s cultural identity, but it is not itself a separate crime defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention.
“Genocide is one of the most serious crimes in international criminal law,” says Daryna Pidhorna, a legal expert and lawyer with the Raphael Lemkin Society Ukraine. Her organization has been collecting evidence of Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s culture since 2014.
While the term “cultural genocide” is not part of the convention, it was considered during its drafting.
“When preparing the convention, states very strongly wanted to have this element included,” Pidhorna says. “It was about the destruction of unique physical monuments – museums, monuments, churches. It was about looting, appropriation, and indoctrination through culture, education, and control of the media. It was also about the systematic persecution of cultural figures through killings and mutilation. All of this is directed against culture in order to change a person’s identity, to reshape them into some other image, to impose another culture,” she continues.
“There are thousands of academic articles about cultural genocide and its elements, but there is a huge problem: the world is living without cultural genocide in the legal sense, even though it happens in the factual sense,” Pidhorna says.
For Ukraine, she argues, the question is not simply whether individual museums have been deliberately attacked, but whether the destruction, appropriation, and suppression of culture form part of a broader pattern.
“We can talk about Russian crimes against Ukrainian culture from 2014, from the beginning of the occupation of Crimea,” Pidhorna says. “From that moment, these crimes have been documented. They are part of Russia’s policy of occupying and controlling those territories and their populations.”
She describes Crimea as a “testing ground” whose methods were later repeated in other occupied territories, and used – through the destruction of monuments and museums – to remove evidence of Ukrainian history. These include any statues linked to the mass murder by starvation during the Soviet-era Holodomor or the deportations of Ukrainian cultural figures and Crimean Tatars during World War I. Museums dedicated to Ukrainian nationalist figures have also been hit. For Pidhorna, this reveals the logic behind the attacks.
“They are targeting the elements of Ukrainian culture that are most threatening to their empire,” she says. “It is about destroying what represents Ukrainian identity.”
Despite these systemic attacks on culture, the launch of the full-scale invasion left Ukraine without a sufficiently clear system for evacuating movable cultural heritage. The consequences were particularly serious in regions that had been under threat for years. Much of the museum infrastructure in the east of the country in 2014 would soon be in occupied territory. By 2025, none of the 13 museums that were under Ukrainian control in the Luhansk region at the beginning of the full-scale invasion remained under government control.
After 2022, the responsibility for evacuation was divided among museum directors, the Ministry of Culture, and regional military administrations. Museum directors were responsible for their collections, but did not necessarily have transport, staff, or even the authority to organize an evacuation. The regional authorities were expected to provide transportation and security. The ministry had to approve lists of objects when collections were moved outside a region.
“It was never clear which of these actors was supposed to make the first decision,” explains Sahaydak, “And while people can be told ‘tomorrow we leave,’ a museum cannot be told that. A museum needs weeks to pack and prepare, especially to compile those lists.”
The result was that some directors acted quickly, using personal contacts to find transportation and institutions able to host evacuated artworks, while others waited for instructions that never came – which made many cultural institutions that much more vulnerable to the Russian attacks targeting culture.
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