A culture at the crossroads

The Russian invasion of Ukraine claimed the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians and triggered Europe’s worst humanitarian and refugee crisis since World War II.

He also dealt a blow to Ukrainian culture:

to its museums and monuments, to its great rural universities and libraries, to its historic churches and contemporary mosaics.

Since the February invasion, the New York Times’ Visual Investigations team has been monitoring evidence of cultural destruction across Ukraine.

Through the evaluation of hundreds of photos and videos from social media and Ukrainian government databases, analysis of satellite images and conversations with witnesses, we have independently identified and verified 339 seats throughout the country which suffered considerable damage.

Nearly half are found in the mineral-rich eastern region known as Donbasswhere a war has been going on since 2014.

These documented cases only paint a partial picture of the devastation.

The best known is the Mariupol Drama Theater: a cultural landmark whose destruction is a dire sign of war, where a Russian airstrike killed many refugees inside, including children.

The goal of the invasion was not merely the conquest of territory, but “the gradual destruction of an entire cultural life,” said Alexandra Xanthaki, UN special rapporteur on cultural rights.

“One of the justifications for the war is that Ukrainians don’t have a definite cultural identity,” he said, adding that “no one has the right to identify who we are apart from ourselves.”

How much of the destruction was deliberate?

From the very first days of the assault, Ukrainian politicians and intellectuals have suggested that Russian forces have directly attacked the country’s assets.

In May, following the fire of a museum dedicated to an 18th-century Ukrainian poet on the outskirts of Kharkiv, the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, he claimed that Russia “launched a missile” to destroy its manuscripts and artifacts.

(“Missiles against museums: This is not even something some terrorists would dream of,” Zelenskyy said in one of his late-night speeches.)

The Times found that some of the sites were intentionally attacked by Russian soldiers or pro-Russian separatists.

Others appeared to be collateral damage.

Weight scale

But in all cases, if the the destruction was deliberate Otherwise, the Russian invaders have shown callous disregard for Ukraine’s cultural heritage at best.

Long before the invasion, the Russian president Vladimir Putin He stated that Ukraine had no culture of its own.

It has repeatedly branded Ukrainian nationality a sham, and Russian state media publish propaganda in favor of the total elimination of Ukraine.

“They have their own idea that Ukraine doesn’t exist as a culture,” says Kateryna Iakovlenko, a Ukrainian art historian born in the Donbass region.

“That’s why they want to destroy everything: to show that there’s nothing here. It’s clearly a way of thinking colonial. That’s how empires always work.”

The war in Ukraine is a culture war and the extent of the destruction is becoming increasingly clear.

To understand its magnitude and shock, this investigation focuses on four locations, scattered across eastern Ukraine.

The monastery

The first flurry of attacks against the Cave Monastery of Sviatohirsk, one of the holiest sites of the Orthodox Church, arrived just a couple of weeks after the start of the war.

A church and refectory were damaged in other attacks in early May.

The worst damage occurred on June 4 and 5, when Russian soldiers fought to capture the town of Sviatohirsk, across the river.

A direct hit in one of the monastery’s men’s dormitories killed three people who had taken refuge there.

A large wooden church burned down in the hills above the monastery; when the fire was out, only the foundation and a few iron nails remained.

Russian forces subsequently took control of Sviatohirsk, but the monks who lived there, the nuns and the displaced people who had joined them, did not leave the vast complex, known in Eastern Christianity as the lavra.

The destruction that the Russian invasion unleashed on the Monastery of the Caves was no exception.

The Times has identified 109 churches, monasteries and other religious sites across Ukraine that have been damaged or destroyed since the start of the war.

Many, such as the lavra, are Orthodox places of worship, although several mosques and a synagogue were also damaged.

Last summer’s Russian occupation was notable for its silence, at least when the guns were turned off.

“All the time Sviatohirsk was occupied, as long as there was active hostilities, there were no bells,” said Valeriia Kostiushko, a Sviatohirsk local now displaced in Dnipro.

When the Ukrainian army retook Sviatohirsk in mid-September, the lavra bells rang for the first time in months.

“The neighbors started hugging and crying,” says Kostiushko.

The House of Culture

The Lyman Railroad Workers’ Science and Technology House, a famous Soviet-era arts palace that provided a large stage for visiting artists, folk groups, and community performances at Christmas, was attacked on the night of 30 April.

A cleaner helped evacuate 30 people, some elderly, who were taking refuge in the basement, explained Inna Trush, its manager.

By 4am the building was completely on fire.

The Russians took the city, a strategically vital railway junction, in late May.

When Ukraine recaptured Lyman in early October, the returning inhabitants found theirs cultural centerl reduced to a hollow shell.

The Times has identified at least 37 damaged or destroyed community cultural centers in Ukraine since February 24.

The roof of the House of Culture in Irpin, a suburb of Kiev, was blown up and the auditorium was gutted.

In the northwest, in the Borodianka house of culture, the windows were shattered and the roof collapsed.

Fire engulfed another nearly 100-year-old house of culture in Bakhmut, east of Donetsk, engulfing its roof and walls.

During the Soviet period, every major city and many smaller towns had an arts center like Lyman’s.

Citizens made them run after independence and redirected them towards a democratic Ukraine.

The country has lavish art museums in Lviv, a majestic opera house in Odessa, world-famous nightclubs in Kiev… but further afield, in cities like Lyman, the houses of culture have remained essential institutions for the artistic and cultural heritage.

“If anyone saw a voice, they would sing,” recalls Olena Parhomenko, an employee of the house of culture.

“What else can you do in a small town? Everyone went. And those who didn’t, came as an audience.”

The library The public library of the city of Sievierodonetsk was located right in the center of the city and Yuliia Bilovytska, the head librarian, had feared for its survival since the first days of the Russian assault.

On March 2, he had to take refuge in the hail of bullets.

When he got out, he found that the windows of the library had been smashed and the computers had been ransacked.

She and her colleagues considered moving the remaining equipment to the basement, but the underground space had taken on a more urgent function:

protect residents from bombing.

In late May, Sievierodonetsk saw some of the fiercest fighting of the war.

On May 30, while the battle raged outside, flames spread up her chimneys.

Smoke could be seen coming out of the building through a huge black hole in the roof.

The library kept an archive of periodicals and small-format publications of the first decades of Sievierodonetsk, which librarians consider irreplaceable.

Publications by local authors, many with inscriptions, have also been lost, Bilovytska said.

“The cultural losses are just insane,” said Bilovytska, who now lives near Kiev.

“As long as we are alive, memory exists. But books keep it longer.”

The Times has identified at least 24 damaged or destroyed libraries since February.

Along the road to Kiev, fighting left the libraries of Irpin and the suburbs of Ivankiv in tatters.

In the northern city of Chernihiv, Russian bombs flattened a children’s library in a 19th-century building.

In the small town of Pidhaine, with a population of about 200, a small library was torn apart.

The overturned statue

in Manhusha town on the outskirts of Mariupol, satellite images captured what appeared to be mass graves dug in the fields.

But it was another kind of war operation that got the heavy machinery spinning weeks later: the uprooting of the statue of a Cossack military hero.

Russian and Soviet flags flew on May 7 when a crane lifted the white stone statue of Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, a 17th-century military hero, from its pedestal in front of the city’s administrative headquarters.

The subject was old, but the statue was new.

The city of Manhush opened it in 2017, after the Maidan revolution and in the midst of a war with Russian separatists in the Donbass region.

A month before his retirement, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church proclaimed Konashevych the patron saint of the Ukrainian military.

According to the Times investigation, the monuments appear to have been targeted more deliberately than any other type of cultural venue.

Soldiers and fans alike filmed their retreat or downfall, and in some cases, such as the Manhush statue, the footage was circulated online as official Russian propaganda.

The Times identified at least 48 damaged and destroyed monuments and memorials, including graves, mostly in eastern Ukraine.

They commemorated Cossack commanders, pioneers of Ukrainian culture, Soviet war dead and figures of recent independence movements.

“They are not only dismantling the monument, but also the memory,” said Anna Murlykina, a Mariupol-based journalist who runs a local news site.

“Ukraine has been trying to restore its history for 30 years.

To master these territories, it is necessary to return to the state of Soviet times. You have to erase everything all over again.”

c.2022 The New York Times Society