It was late at night on 7 May 2022 when a Russian missile hit a museum that was once home to Ukraine’s 18th-Century poet and philosopher Hryhory Skovoroda. "The roof was completely blown off, the walls are burnt and only Skovoroda's statue survived. It's a miracle that it did," says Nastya Ishchenko, deputy director of the museum in the Kharkiv region of north-eastern Ukraine.
It is one of 432 cultural sites damaged in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, according to the UN’s cultural organisation Unesco. The destruction of so much of their culture has not just pushed Ukrainians farther away from the Russian-dominated cultural space they shared for decades under Soviet rule. It has also awakened a hunger for their own culture, described by one daily newspaper as a “Ukrainian cultural boom”.
In total, 139 religious sites have been hit, 214 buildings of historical or artistic interest, 31 museums, 32 monuments, 15 libraries and one archive. The management at the Hryhoriy Skovoroda Museum knew it might come under attack and most of its valuable artefacts had been evacuated to a safer location. There was no other potential target near the museum, so Ukrainians believe it was bombed simply because of his cultural importance.
Ukraine’s museums in areas occupied by Russia have faced a very different problem. The full extent of plunder by Russian troops came to light in the final days of the occupation of the southern city of Kherson. Ent.