russia destroys Ukrainian cultural heritage at a rate not seen since 1945 – study

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The full-scale russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 has destroyed and damaged extensive built cultural heritage, including churches, museums and monuments. Given the ongoing conflict, it is not yet possible to assess the damage to the cultural heritage along the frontlines of the Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. The study results have been published in the journal Antiquity.

Since the de-occupation of the Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Chernihiv and Mykolaiv regions in June 2022, however, a preliminary understanding of the scale and nature of destruction in some areas has developed. Field survey research demonstrates extensive damage to several important sites, including major damage to the Makariv hillfort, Bilohorodka, the Vyshgorod hillfort in Kyiv region, significant destruction to the tenth to twelfth-century Shestovytsia and Boldyni Hora Barrows in the Chernihiv region, and extensive damage to churches and historic buildings from the eleventh–twelfth centuries in strategic landscape locations.

While the international community and archaeologists are aware that some damage of built heritage sites has taken place in Ukraine, they are largely unaware of the extensive scale of destruction in northern, eastern and southern Ukraine. The combination of modern weapons and the widespread use of First World War types of trench systems is destroying buried cultural heritage at an alarming rate. 

This article has been developed by the Archaeological Landscapes Monitoring Group, which includes representatives of the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the Ukrainian State Institute for Cultural Heritage, Faculty of History of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, the National Museum of the History of Ukraine, and faculty members from the University of Notre Dame, USA.

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