When certain icons and paintings produced in Ukraine appear in Russian museums under a different name, it means that the enemy is trying to destroy the foundation on which the Ukrainian nation stands.
For more than 10 years, Russia has been looting and appropriating Ukrainian cultural heritage in the temporarily occupied Crimea and the temporarily occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
This was announced by Prosecutor General of Ukraine Andriy Kostin during the international conference ‘Protection of Cultural Heritage and Counteraction to Cultural Erasure in Armed Conflict: New Challenges and Ukraine’s Experience’, Suspilne Krym reports.
The international conference is dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the 25th anniversary of the Second Protocol of 1999 to the Hague Convention of 1954.
‘For centuries, Russian imperialism has been trying to destroy Ukrainian culture and erase Ukrainian identity. With the outbreak of the war against Ukraine in 2014, these attempts have become apparent to the whole world. For more than 10 years, Russia has been looting and appropriating Ukrainian cultural heritage in the occupied territories of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions, even before the full-scale invasion,’ said Andriy Kostin.
The Prosecutor General noted that the world has witnessed the seizure of UNESCO World Heritage sites in Crimea, looting of museums in Kherson and Mariupol. Andriy Kostin stressed that Russia is carrying out Russification in the occupied territories, banning Ukrainian education and destroying Ukrainian history textbooks.
In his turn, Roman Romanov, co-organiser of the conference, Director of the Human Rights and Justice Programme at the International Renaissance Foundation, said that he had started working on the protection of cultural heritage in 2014, after the occupation of Crimea. ‘This is a huge disaster, what is happening now. But on the other hand, it is a trouble that unites us,’ Romanov said.
Referring to Chersonese, he noted that ‘there are great reasons to think about how we treated the cultural heritage. And I don’t think we’ve had a chance to think about it. But when the threat is as large as it is now, we have no other choice.’
Anastasia Bondar, Deputy Minister of Culture and Information Policy, said that 453,541 museum objects have been evacuated. According to her, as of 2014, there were 12 million museum objects in Ukraine that belonged to the state part of the museum fund, and 1.7 million of these objects, as well as 90 museums, are now in the temporarily occupied territories.
Bondar added that about 35,000 museum objects are wanted, and this number will increase as it takes time to collect evidence.
‘When certain icons, certain paintings that were produced on the territory of Ukraine appear in Russian museums under a different name, it means that the enemy is trying to destroy the foundation on which the Ukrainian nation stands. And it is doing it all very methodically,’ said Yuriy Bilousov, Head of the Department for Combating Crimes Committed in the Context of Armed Conflict, Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine.
According to the Office of the Prosecutor General, since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2003, 314 cultural infrastructure sites have been damaged, 314 completely destroyed. Due to Russian aggression, 1080 cultural heritage sites in Ukraine have been destroyed or damaged. Of these, 121 are monuments of national importance, 879 are of local importance, and 80 are newly discovered. Ukrainian prosecutors have opened 70 criminal proceedings.
The head of the UNESCO Office in Ukraine, Chiara Dezzi Bardeschi, recalled that the amount of damage caused by Russia to Ukraine’s cultural heritage is approaching $9 billion.
Source: Detector Media
