One of Ukraine’s leading academies of art and design sustained serious damage from a Russian missile strike on Kyiv on Monday, in the latest blow to Ukrainian cultural heritage following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
Ukraine’s ministry of culture and information policy said in a statement that “as a result of falling fragments of a missile launched by the Russian Federation, the central part of the building at the Kyiv State Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts and Design named after Mykhailo Boichuk was destroyed.” It added that “the premises of the departments and the auditorium of the institution suffered significant damage.”
Students, teachers and graduates of the academy posted dramatic images of toppled, crushed and miraculously spared sculptures, mosaics, paintings and icons on social media.
Helen Osadcha, the head of the academy, said in a Facebook post that the strike took place at 10:30am, when classes were in session. She said that a teacher’s life was spared thanks to an air-raid siren going off—leading her to move away from a window just before the explosion. All of the works in an exhibition-competition called Woman in the Flames of War, which was being held in the academy’s congress hall, were destroyed, wrote Osadcha.
“The enemy is trying to destroy Ukraine as a nation, erase our identity, destroy cultural monuments... [it] tries to rewrite our history and appropriate the spiritual and cultural assets of Ukraine,” she wrote.
“We were saved by a miracle [in] that we managed to fall to the floor in time, wrote another teacher, Myroslav Vayda.
“This was my institute!!!,” wrote Elena Fateeva, an alumnus who runs a Kyiv-based international design studio. “Russia cannot talk about art when it destroys theatres, museums and institutions with rockets. Today, Russia destroyed one of Ukraine's art universities. Boichuk Academy is an educational institution with a long history of training the best artists, designers and craftsmen.”
Another graduate, Mykola Kovalenko, posted a defiant graphic work emphasising the power of art at times of conflict. The poster depicts a missile with the Russian white, blue and red flag piercing a pencil featuring the yellow and blue of the Ukrainian flag. In the top corner are the words “Ukraine Will Win”.
Boichuk, whom the academy is named after, was a seminal artist of Ukrainian Modernism. He was executed in 1937, when Ukrainian cultural figures were targeted during Stalin’s Great Terror. Since the Russian invasion two years ago, Boichuk's works have been given increasing attention in Europe and the US.
Earlier this month Unesco posted an updated list featuring 346 damaged or destroyed cultural sites across Ukraine since 24 February 2022, when the full-scale invasion began.
