The Russian attack on Ukraine also threatens Ukrainian cultural heritage, such as churches, museums, libraries and archives. Numerous monuments have already been destroyed or damaged. Also deliberately, because with the cultural heritage you also destroy a people and a nation.
It’s a specter for Ukrainians and Russians alike now that the battle for Kyiv seems to have really begun: a rocket that may or may not be fired, pulverizing the golden domes of the 11th-century Saint Sophia Cathedral or the baroque facades of the venerable Cave Monastery. Ukraine’s cultural heritage, in part sacred to Ukrainians and Russians, has also been in the firing line since the Russian invasion.
The first alarming reports about endangered heritage emerged soon after the invasion amid all the stories about human suffering. Journalists described how volunteers in the cultural city of Lviv reinforced statues and fountains with sandbags and hurriedly removed thousands of works of art from the Andrej Sheptytsky Museum, including an 18th-century iconostasis. “The walls are empty, and it hurts. We couldn’t believe until the last minute that this was going to happen,” museum director Ihor Kozhan told AP news agency.
The precautions are there for a reason, because the first war damage to cultural heritage has already been reported. In Kharkiv, the neoclassical Cathedral of the Dormition, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Slovo House, a pinnacle of early Soviet architecture, were hit by missiles. The Babyn Yar holocaust memorial was also hit in the shelling of a television tower in Kyiv. In Chernihiv the medieval city center was damaged, in Sviatohirsk a 16th-century monastery and in Viavzivka a 19th-century wooden church.
Cultural purification
‘Cultural heritage is extremely vulnerable in any conflict,’ says Rob van der Laarse, professor of heritage studies at the University of Amsterdam / Vrije Universiteit and co-founder of the Center for Ukrainian Cultural Studies. Not only if ‘collateral damage’ acts of war or as a target for looting and looting, but also in the form of targeted destruction of cultural heritage, often in the context of cultural cleansing, such as the bridge of Mostar in Bosnia, the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan or the ruins of Palmyra in Syria.
The more prominent a monument, the more the danger is, according to Van der Laarse. This applies, for example, to UNESCO World Heritage Sites, of which Ukraine has seven. ‘If something is a World Heritage Site or a major tourist attraction, it becomes a target. That is the paradox of heritage protection. Once you put it on a list, it becomes extra vulnerable. One precision bombardment on a site and everything is gone in one fell swoop.’
In that sense, Van der Laarse looks with care at the war in Ukraine, ‘because that is a conflict over heritage, and nothing else’. The monuments of Kyiv, the first Russian capital, are invaluable to both Ukraine and Russia. ‘People share the same culture, claim the same locations and collections. Kyiv resembles Jerusalem in this. That shared heritage offers a certain protection, but it can also be dangerous: if we can’t get it, you can’t have it either.’
Blue shields
Deliberate destruction of Ukrainian culture may have been at play in the destruction of a museum in Ivankiv, in which much of the work of the popular naive painter Maria Primachenko went up in flames. Folk art, see the huge ethnographic collections in Ukrainian museums, plays a major role in nation building in a young country that has only been independent since 1991. “If we lose our culture, we lose our identity,” Lilya Onyshchenko, head of heritage protection in Lviv, told the British newspaper The Guardian†
In the meantime, everything is being done to protect the Ukrainian heritage, internationally coordinated by UNESCO, the cultural agency of the UN. The Dutch Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development has been working on it since November, says Sanne Letschert, head of cultural emergency response. ‘It was already so likely that there would be a Russian invasion that we set up a first aid course for cultural heritage with our Ukrainian network. Given the nature of the conflict, which revolves around culture and identity, we kept in mind that heritage would become the target of violence.’
A large-scale evacuation of art treasures came to an end because museums were poorly prepared. That is why (together with Unesco and other heritage organisations) the focus is now mainly on marking endangered locations with blue shields, an internationally recognized symbol indicating that something is a heritage site that must be protected. ‘Although it remains to be seen whether banners with blue shields on facades and on roofs will help in the heat of battle,’ says Letschert. Endangered sites, such as the 19th-century center of Odessa, are also being monitored, including via satellite imagery.
war crime
The blue shields refer to the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Heritage in Armed Conflict of 1954/2004. According to that international treaty, signed by both Russia and Ukraine, damaging or destroying cultural heritage is a war crime that can be prosecuted, for example through the International Criminal Court. It is bizarre in this regard that Russia is the (rotating) chairman of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee this year.
Letschert emphasizes that efforts should not only focus on spectacular World Heritage Sites, such as Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, but also on smaller churches, museums or libraries. It is precisely those objects, which are much less on the radar but are often of great importance to Ukrainian culture, that are most at risk. The Prince Claus Fund supports them with emergency aid, such as money for protective equipment.
Special care is given to the Ukrainian archives, which capture the darker sides of Soviet history much better than in the heavily censored Russian archives. Fearing an impending ‘archivocidal’, Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online volunteers are now trying to digitize as many archives as possible and secure them on foreign servers. Everything from the realization: cultural heritage is not a luxury, but of vital importance, in times of war and above all, ever, of reconstruction.
Endangered Ukrainian World Heritage 
Kyiv, Saint Sophia Cathedral and Cave Monastery
Kyiv is Ukraine’s most important cultural city, with a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is sacred to Ukrainians and Russians alike: the thousand-year-old Saint Sophia Cathedral with its frescoes and golden domes and the Cave Monastery (Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra), a Medieval-Baroque complex on the Djnepr with subterranean caves full of holy relics and the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God. That is the seat of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate. Other highlights in Kyiv: St. Michael’s Monastery, St. Andrew’s Church, St. Vladimir’s Cathedral, Mariinsky Palace, numerous museums and the old Podil district.
Lviv, historic city center
Lviv (Lwów, Lemberg), one of the most important cultural cities in Eastern Europe, has a historic center full of churches and palaces, Seredmistia, which survived the Second World War virtually unscathed and is now in its entirety on the Unesco World Heritage List. The center, with the Pidzamche district around Vysokyi Zamok Castle and Saint George’s Hill with Saint George’s Cathedral, is a sample of architectural styles, from Gothic and Baroque to Art Nouveau and Modernism. Many monuments refer to the multicultural history of the city, in which, in addition to Ukrainians and Russians, also Germans, Poles, Jews and Armenians played a role.
Eastern Carpathians, wooden churches
In the Eastern Carpathians in Ukraine and Poland there are many wooden rural churches (tserkvas) from the 16th to the 19th century in a characteristic regional architectural style. Sixteen of them are on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The churches, of both Orthodox and Greek Catholic character, are characterized not only by their three-part building plan and sometimes pyramid-shaped domes by decorative multicolored carvings, especially in the iconostasis (icon wall). The churches usually form a gated complex complete with bell tower, graveyard and monumental gate. Thirteen of the sixteen are still in use as a church.
Chernivtsi, religious complex
The western Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi (Czernowitz), like Lviv, was for centuries a melting pot of peoples and cultures, with Jews, Romanians, Germans, Ukrainians and Russians. The old center is still full of great monuments. On Mount Saint Dominic on the Prut is the Residence of the Bukovinian and Dalmatian Metropolitans, built between 1864 and 1882 in Neo-Byzantine style by the Czech architect Josef Hlávka and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as an example of religious tolerance at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Hungarian Dual Monarchy. The enormous complex, with palace, seminary and church, now houses the local university.