Trophy Brigades comeback


An June 4, the Russian war against Ukraine reached its hundred days. The events since February 24 provide us with enough facts to understand what happened and what may happen to the architectural monuments and museum treasures of Ukraine in the future. Unfortunately, such observations do not give grounds for too much optimism. The destruction of architectural landmarks by Russian bombardments has attracted international attention. If such barbaric acts as the shelling of the neo-Gothic building of the Vasil Tarnovsky Museum in Chernihiv on March 11 or the historic Jewish cemetery in the town of Hlukhiv on May 8 seemed like sporadic acts, then the methodical bombing of the center of Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, a premeditated crime. The Russians don’t care about human lives, much less architectural monuments, relying on the tactic of indiscriminate bombing of city centers they practiced in Aleppo, Syria, in 2016.

Some of the Russian attacks sparked debate over whether the occupiers intentionally want to destroy Ukrainian museums and monuments and whether such a policy could be interpreted as “cultural genocide”. This suspicion was corroborated by the attack on the museum of Hrihoriy Skovoroda, a seventeenth-century Ukrainian philosopher, in the Kharkiv region. On May 6, a Russian missile was aimed at the old mansion, which is located in a park and has no strategic importance. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy commented on the attack by saying that “not even terrorists would think of pointing a missile at the museum”. However, despite much circumstantial evidence, there is no clear evidence that the Russians have made the destruction of Ukrainian monuments a policy objective.



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