Ukrainian culture workers continue to assess damage from Russia’s massive missile and drone strike over the weekend, one of the largest since the February 2022 full-scale invasion.
In a Facebook post on 24 May, Ukraine’s culture ministry listed the cultural institutions that were hit in Kyiv, the capital. Among them were the National Art Museum of Ukraine, the Yaroslav Mudryi National Library of Ukraine, the Kyiv Opera Theatre, and the National Chornobyl Museum. Social media posts by the institutions showed shards of glass, blown out doors, damaged facades, and in the case of the National Chornobyl Museum, which suffered the worst damage, piles of rubble.
President Volodymyr Zelensky reported in a post on X on Sunday that approximately 100 people had been injured and four killed across Ukraine, with 30 residential buildings damaged or destroyed in Kyiv along in the overnight barrage. He visited the National Chornobyl Museum in a tour of sites hit by the strike. Ukraine’s military reported that Russia had used 600 drones and 90 missiles in the attack, including the hypersonic, nuclear-capable Oreshnik. Russia said the barrage was retaliation for a Ukrainian strike against a college in Starobilsk, in the Luhansk region illegally occupied by Russia; Ukraine says it hit a drone unit.
Ukraine’s culture minister, Tetyana Berezhna, wrote in a Facebook post following the attack: “Russia systematically beats on culture and spaces that form Ukrainian identity. They are trying to destroy our memory. But Ukrainian culture stood before and stands now. As of today, Russia has already destroyed or damaged 1,783 cultural heritage monuments and 2,540 objects of cultural infrastructure in Ukraine. This is another proof that the Russian war is also directed against Ukrainian culture and our identity.”
In its Facebook update on Tuesday 26 May, the National Chornobyl Museum wrote: “It’s been the third day since enemy shelling pervaded our museum. But while rockets destroy walls, human hands and hearts bring back to life what they wanted to destroy. These days are about a fierce fight for every crumb of our memory.”
The National Chornobyl Museum says that around 40% of the exhibits from its exhibition hall have been destroyed Courtesy the National Chornobyl Museum
The art historian Oksana Semenik, whose father is from the Chornobyl zone, is devoted to documenting through art the impact of the 1986 disaster at the nuclear plant there that was covered up by Soviet authorities. She has written a book about Maria Prymachenko, an artist from the region who documented the disaster through folk motifs before her death in 1997.
Semenik is the curator of an exhibition titled Chernobyl. Shelter that opened in April at Ukrainian House in central Kyiv to mark the 40th anniversary of the disaster and includes ten portraits from the collection of the National Chornobyl Museum of disaster liquidators by the artist Oleg Veklenko, himself a liquidator.
Ukrainian House was also damaged in the weekend attack and closed for two days, although fortunately with no casualties or damage to the exhibition, Semenik tells The Art Newspaper. She describes the significance of the National Chornobyl Museum, which had been modernised and reopened to the public with a new permanent exhibition in time for the anniversary, both in chronicling the nuclear disaster and the history of the Chornobyl region and Prypiat. The town was evacuated and abandoned in April 1986.
“Many artefacts are personal items of people who died or had to move from their houses, and that’s why they are unreplaceable. They also had a collection of Ukrainian art connected to the catastrophe. At least we know that Maria Prymachenko’s artwork survived,” she tells The Art Newspaper. “The room with the saved cultural heritage from the Polissia region was completely destroyed. Now it is hard to say how much has been lost forever. It was the only museum dedicated to the Chornobyl catastrophe, and many people involved in the liquidation or otherwise connected to Chornobyl donated artefacts to the museum. For me, it’s both painful for the researcher and for the person for whom Chornobyl is personal history.”
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, has vowed further strikes against “decision-making centres” in Kyiv and warned that foreign diplomats should evacuate, the official Tass news agency reported.
In an interview with Ukraine’s Pershyi TV Channel, Olha Sahaida, the head of the Coalition of Cultural Actors, said: “The decision-making centres are in every apartment, in every institution. And the destruction of cultural institutions is definitely a war against our identity.”
