Paradoxes of destiny, the meaning of his name seems to determine something of his present. Ukraine (Україна) means “land on the edge”. It would mean being at the limit of several issues. With a difficult background and even one of the most tremendous nuclear accidents in history, Ukraine is a country where two cultural and linguistic spaces coexist. As has happened with other independent countries of the former Soviet Union, it has gone through complex tutelage, shocks of the history of separation and, above all, political decisions that did not always stem from self-determination.

One of these two spaces is located in the western part of the country, populated by an ethnically and linguistically Ukrainian majority. A kind of classic Ukraine, which includes small areas with Polish and Moldovan ancestry that were assigned to it by Stalin during the successive border changes that took place during the USSR in the Soviet republics. This is the half closest to the customs of the West.

On the other hand, in the southeast are the territories that Moscow ceded to Ukraine when the USSR was still a reality and the Kremlin did not imagine an independent Ukraine. In it there are regions with strong traditions closer to Russia, such as Little Russia that the tsars reconquered from the Ukrainian Cossacks, or the New Russia ceded by Lenin in 1920-22, where the Russian ethnic group makes up approximately half of the population, although there are also many ethnically Ukrainian citizens who have Russian as their mother tongue.

Added to this is a key territory: the Crimean peninsula (assigned to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954), both because of its majority ethnically Russian population (60%) and because of its strategic importance: Crimea and its Sevastopol naval base serve as Russian Black Sea Fleet base.

Death of Culture

The Ukrainian arts organization J. Paul Getty Trust condemned the destruction of cultural heritage in Ukraine and noted in an official statement that Russian forces have “deliberately burned to the ground” the Ivankiv Museum north of Kyiv, which housed valuable Ukrainian folk art. Paralleling the risk to human life and infrastructure is the risk Ukraine faces of having its cultural heritage representing centuries of history from the Byzantine to Baroque periods, as well as UNESCO World Heritage Sites, destroyed.

Thousands of museums across Ukraine store important works of art by Ukrainian and Russian artists, Byzantine artefacts, and paintings by masters such as Giovanni Bellini, Francisco Goya, and Jacques-Louis David, according to a report by the Indian Express.

Founded in 2014, the Museum of Freedom in Kyiv has a collection of about 4,000 objects. Most of these record Ukraine’s pro-democracy movement and are at risk of being destroyed by Russian forces.

A much more important institution from a cultural point of view is the National Museum of Fine Arts in Odessa, founded in 1899. The museum houses more than 10,000 pieces of art, including works by some of the most renowned Russian and Ukrainian artists since the 15th century, including artists Ivan Aivazovskyi, Mikhail Vrubel, Valentyn Sierov, Mykola Reryh, Zinaida Serebriakova, Kostiantyn Somov, and Vasyl Kandynskyi.

The country is also home to seven World Heritage Sites, including the 11th-century Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, and the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, also known as the Kyiv Monastery of the Caves, an Orthodox monastery founded in 1051.

The entire Old Town of Lviv dating back to the 13th century is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The city of Kharkiv, which has come under heavy attack by Russian forces, is also home to a number of museums, cathedrals, and historic neighbourhoods.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry tweeted on February 28 that the Ivankiv Museum of Local and Historical History was set on fire in the Russian assault. He said 25 paintings by celebrated Ukrainian artist Maria Prymachenko were also burned during the raid.

In honour of the artist, who captivated the Spanish master Pablo Picasso with her talent, UNESCO declared 2009 as the year of Prymachenko. “I bow to the artistic miracle of this brilliant Ukrainian,” Picasso had said of his work.

A Russian airstrike in Kyiv last Tuesday brought down some state broadcasting towers as well as Kyiv’s Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial. This is a memorial to the mass execution of more than 33,000 Jews by Nazi forces in 1941 during World War II.

Four museums in Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Sumy and Chernihiv managed to “disassemble and protect their main exhibits. In Vinnytsia, the museum building is now partially used for internally displaced people”, according to the British newspaper The Guardian,

The same report cites Fedir Androshchuk, director of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in Kyiv, who, in said report, indicated: “the museum is located in the middle of an area rich in cultural heritage close to three beautiful churches, but also close to some possible targets the Ukrainian security service and border forces”.

In addition to human lives, the heritage of civilization is also at risk. One more loss that wars inevitably continue to account for.