Ukraine's artists and museums scramble to protect its cultural heritage

Artists, curators and museum directors across Ukraine are moving quickly but carefully to shield the country’s art in the face of Russia’s invasion, according to The Washington Post.

It took workers a full week to empty the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv, near Ukraine’s border with Poland.

“There is an egomaniac in Moscow who doesn’t care about killing children, let alone destroying art,” museum director Ihor Kozhan told the Post. “If our history and heritage are to survive, all art must go underground.”

In Odessa, the Fine Arts Museum there has also installed razor wire around its perimeter.

“Trust me, it looks really wild to me, too,” said Kirill Lipatov, the museum’s director of science. He declined to reveal whether its most valuable works had been evacuated outside the city.

Ukraine’s art community faces mounting pressure to move their works out of harms way as Russia forces began targeting civilian areas for bombardment. Cities in the east like Lviv and Odessa have had more time to prepare, but others on the front lines of the war have not been as lucky.

The windows of Kharkiv’s main art museum have been blown out by shelling, subjecting the 25,000 artworks inside to Ukraine’s harsh winter for weeks, reports the Post. The city’s opera and ballet theaters have also been damaged.

Smaller artists have organized collectives to coordinate shared spaces to protect their art.

Museums across the capital of Kyiv have been bombed or boarded up with their works still inside, as the civilians who would move them have likely fled the city.

“A lot of our artists are questioning their role — like, shouldn’t I pick up a gun? Does art as a weapon act too slowly?” said Anna Potyomkina, 25, a curator who is part of a collective organized around an underground cafe. “But creating art when Russia is bombing museums and studios is a big and necessary part of the resistance.”

Those interviewed emphasized that saving art was secondary only to saving lives because Ukrainian’s pride in their culture serves as inspiration for its resistance to Russia’s invasion.

“With each invasion, some loss of culture is inevitable,” said Taras Voznyak, director of the Lviv National Art Gallery, told the Post. “Putin knows that without art, without our history, Ukraine will have a weaker identity. That is the whole point of his war — to erase us and assimilate us into his population of cryptofascist zombies.”