Unesco has expressed “serious concern” about recent Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities “that have caused damage to civilian infrastructures, including heritage sites” in Odesa, Lviv, and Kyiv, according to a statement on X on 27 January. Russia’s attacks through the winter in double-digit freezing temperatures have targeted Ukraine’s power grid and other infrastructure, further complicating the work of museums and other cultural sites. On 24 February it will be four years since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The United Nation’s cultural organisation said it is “working closely with Ukrainian authorities, in particular the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, to assess the situation and assist in the next urgent steps to safeguard Ukraine’s cultural heritage amid the ongoing war.”
The Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra (Kyiv Monastery of the Caves), a national preserve and World Heritage Site, was hit on 24 January, the first military attack to damage it since the Second World War, Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture reported.
The culture minister Tetyana Berezhna said in a statement posted on the ministry’s Facebook page that “1,640 cultural heritage sites and 2,446 cultural infrastructure facilities have been destroyed” since Russia launched its invasion. “The damage to the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra is an attack by the Russian Federation on world heritage, a crime against humanity.”
The ministry reported that the entrance building of the caves complex, where monks' relics lay, and an adjacent church suffered damage to the doors, window frames and exterior plaster.
The Ukrainian Black Sea port city of Odesa, considered of great strategic and symbolic importance by the Russian president Vladimir Putin, has been under ongoing attacks. The city’s historic centre was added to Unesco’s list of endangered World Heritage sites in 2023. In an overnight drone attack on 28 January, the Holy Dormition Monastery was severely damaged, the third time it has been hit by Russia during the war.
Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta, the director general of the Mystetskyi Arsenal National Art and Culture Museum Complex in Kyiv—located in a historic building near the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra—described the difficulties of working under constant threat of attack and blackout. The explosion at the Lavra blew out some smaller windows at the Mystetskyi Arsenal and it was “rather shocking that it could happen right in the Unesco-protected area,” she told The Art Newspaper. “We have to be ready that the heating might be off at any moment, especially at night and right after air attacks,” she wrote from a meeting room in the museum that had some heating, unlike her office, she said. The uncertainty since Russia began its winter assault on civilian infrastructure has placed a huge burden on technical staff and curators in charge of collections. “They have to take shifts to check on the temperature when electricity is unavailable, day and night,” Ostrovska-Liuta says.
Mystetskyi Arsenal is showing an exhibition until 8 February about Vasyl Stus, a dissident Ukrainian poet who died in a Soviet prison camp in Russia’s Perm region in 1985. It is titled As Long As We’re Here, Everything Will Be Fine, a line from his 1962 letter that “captures the nerve of the day perfectly well,” Ostrovska-Liuta adds.
For museum workers across Ukraine, the pressure is compounded by low pay, through which they persevere. Olha Honchar, the co-founder of the Museum Crisis Center and the director of the Territory of Terror museum in Lviv—which documents both Holocaust and Soviet histories—told The Art Newspaper last month that the average pay after tax for museum workers is $200-$350 per month. Oleksandra Kovalchuk, the deputy director of the Odesa National fine Arts Museum and the co-founder of the Odesa-based non-governmental organisation Museum for Change, described staff carrying on with urgent digitisation projects to save collections even when the grid is down.
Ostrovska-Liuta says the cold has made it clear that Ukraine’s defence and culture sphere are intertwined. “There is not much you can do as an individual art institution,” she says. “Or course you have to have generators, inverters, portable charging stations, etc., be ready for remote work or serious discomfort. But the consensus is that it is very important that the Ukrainian armed forces have enough American-made interceptor missiles to protect civilian infrastructure. The Kyiv heating system was damaged during a period when they were short of those munitions. However counterintuitive it sounds for an art institution to ask for more weapons, this is the reality of it.”
