Gone, Not Forgotten

February 27, 2022 — Ivankiv, Kyiv region

Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum

The museum burned in the invasion’s opening days. It held twenty-five paintings by Maria Prymachenko, the self-taught folk artist whose work Picasso admired. The museum’s guard and his wife, helped by neighbors, went into the burning building and carried fourteen of them out. The building was lost; the rescued paintings have since traveled to exhibitions around the world.

Reported by The Art Newspaper · Euromaidan Press

March 1, 2022 — Kyiv

The TV tower at Babyn Yar

Missiles aimed at Kyiv’s television tower fell on the grounds of Babyn Yar, the ravine where more than 33,000 of Kyiv’s Jews were murdered in two days in September 1941. Five people were killed and buildings on the memorial’s territory were damaged; the monuments themselves survived. A place consecrated to the memory of one atrocity became, that week, evidence in another.

Reported by NPR · The Times of Israel

March 11 & 29, 2022 — Chernihiv

The Tarnovsky building & the Korolenko Library

Chernihiv is a thousand-year-old city, and its youth library occupied one of its best-loved buildings — the 1902 Gothic Revival hall built for the Tarnovsky Museum of Ukrainian Antiquities. Bombardment on March 11 tore off the roof and most of the walls; librarians salvaged books from the ruins. At the month’s end, in the last mass shelling before Russian forces withdrew from the region, the city’s Korolenko regional library — founded 1877 — had its roof pierced and its windows blown out as well.

Reported by The Art Newspaper · Ministry of Culture of Ukraine

March 16, 2022 — Mariupol

Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theatre

Hundreds of civilians were sheltering in the city’s drama theatre when it was bombed. The word ДЕТИ — CHILDREN — had been written on the pavement outside in white letters large enough to be read from the air, and photographed by satellite two days before the strike. An Associated Press investigation concluded close to 600 people died there, the deadliest known single attack on Ukrainian civilians to that point in the war.

Reported by AP / PBS NewsHour · CBS News

May 6, 2022 — Skovorodynivka, Kharkiv region

Hryhorii Skovoroda National Literary Memorial Museum

Hryhorii Skovoroda is Ukraine’s wandering philosopher-poet, and the museum kept his memory in the 18th-century manor where he spent his last years. A missile came through the roof late in the evening — in the year of his 300th birthday — and the fire gutted the building overnight. The caretaker that night, the director’s son, was pulled injured from the rubble. The collection, evacuated in advance, survived; so did the statue of Skovoroda, left standing in the burned-out shell.

“The world tried to catch me, but never could,” reads the epitaph he wrote for himself. It is hard not to hear it in the ruins.

Reported by CNN · Ukrinform

June 4, 2022 — Sviatohirsk, Donetsk region

All Saints Skete, Sviatohirsk Lavra

The Sviatohirsk Lavra is one of the great monasteries of Orthodox Christianity, caves and gilded churches stacked above the Siverskyi Donets river. On June 1, shelling of the monastery killed two monks and a nun. Three days later the All Saints Skete — a vast timber church raised in 2009 on the footprint of its 1912 predecessor, called the largest wooden church in Ukraine — caught fire under shelling and burned to its foundations while the monastery sheltered monks and displaced families.

Reported by Euronews · Ukrainska Pravda

October 31 – November 4, 2022 — Kherson

Oleksii Shovkunenko Regional Art Museum

In the days before retreating across the Dnipro, Russian forces emptied Kherson’s art museum: roughly 10,000 works — most of its collection — packed onto trucks over five days and driven to Crimea, according to a Human Rights Watch investigation. It was part of what has been described as the largest campaign of art looting in Europe since the Second World War. The empty frames stayed on the walls.

Reported by Human Rights Watch · NBC News

January 25, 2023 — Odesa

The historic centre, inscribed as World Heritage in Danger

In a single emergency decision, UNESCO inscribed the historic centre of Odesa on the World Heritage List and, in the same breath, on the List of World Heritage in Danger — while the city was under missile attack. Pushkin wrote here; so did Babel. The listing obliges every signatory of the World Heritage Convention, Russia included, to refrain from deliberately harming the site. It was a bet that naming a thing precious might help keep it standing.

Reported by UNESCO · UN News

June 6, 2023 — Oleshky, Kherson region

The painted house of Polina Rayko

When the Kakhovka dam was destroyed in the early hours of June 6 — Ukraine and Western governments hold the Russian forces controlling it responsible — the flood drowned villages down the Dnipro, and with them one of the region’s most tender museums: the little house in occupied Oleshky that Polina Rayko, beginning at age 69, had covered wall to ceiling with painted angels, birds, and scenes from her own life. When the water receded, roughly a third of the frescoes remained, those nearest the ceiling.

Reported by The Art Newspaper · Babel (Ukraine)

July 23, 2023 — Odesa

Transfiguration Cathedral

The largest church in Odesa took a direct missile hit in a night of strikes on the historic centre — six months after the UNESCO listing meant to protect the district around it. The cathedral had been founded in 1794, demolished by the Soviets in 1936, and rebuilt by the city in the 2000s; the blast destroyed the altar and tore away much of the roof. Rescuers carried the venerated Kasperovska icon of the Mother of God intact from the rubble. One person died in the night’s attack, and about 22 were wounded, two of them inside the cathedral.

Reported by Smithsonian Magazine · NPR

September 15, 2023 — Kyiv & Lviv

Saint Sophia, the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra & the old city of Lviv

At a single session, UNESCO placed Ukraine’s two oldest World Heritage properties — the eleventh-century Saint Sophia Cathedral with the Lavra monastery complex in Kyiv, and the historic centre of Lviv — on the List of World Heritage in Danger, citing the threat of direct attack and of shockwave damage from the bombardment of both cities. Saint Sophia has stood for nearly a thousand years; its mosaics and frescoes are among the greatest surviving art of Kyivan Rus.

Reported by UNESCO · Smithsonian Magazine

November 5, 2023 — Odesa

Odesa National Fine Arts Museum

A missile landed in the street some fifty meters from the museum — the early-19th-century Potocki Palace — on the eve of its 124th birthday, cratering the road, shattering windows, cracking walls, and knocking paintings from them. The museum cancelled its anniversary and published instead the list of exhibitions it could no longer show. Its most valuable works had been carried down to safety long before.

Reported by The Art Newspaper · Al Jazeera

May 23, 2024 — Kharkiv

Factor Druk printing house

Kharkiv prints about eighty percent of Ukraine’s books, and Factor Druk was one of the largest printing plants in Europe — presses for some thirty publishers, about a third of all books printed in the country. Missiles struck the plant mid-shift. Seven printing workers were killed, around twenty were wounded, and more than 50,000 finished books burned with the presses.

Within a year the plant was rebuilt and printing again. The books were reprintable. The seven people were not.

Reported by The Kyiv Independent · Chytomo

October 28, 2024 — Kharkiv

Derzhprom

Derzhprom is the constructivist skyscraper complex of 1928 — the largest civilian Constructivist building in the world, raised when Kharkiv was the capital of Soviet Ukraine, and a candidate for the World Heritage List. A 500-kilogram guided bomb struck it in the evening, wrecking floors, walls, and roof and injuring six people in the surrounding square.

Reported by CNN · Ministry of Culture of Ukraine

January 31, 2025 — Odesa

The historic centre, again

Ballistic missiles struck the middle of the UNESCO-protected old city, damaging some fifteen heritage buildings — among them the Philharmonic — and injuring seven people. It followed a November barrage that had damaged twenty more historic, religious, and educational buildings, some already patched once. The danger listing did not stop the strikes. It only ensured that each one was catalogued.

Reported by The Kyiv Independent · UNESCO

July 18–19, 2026 — Kyiv

The publishers’ warehouses

Kyiv’s book infrastructure was hit twice in thirteen months. In June 2025, the deadliest strike on the capital in nearly a year burned the warehouse of the publisher Ukrainskyi Priorytet — tens of thousands of books across 130 titles. Then, in a single July night in 2026, missiles and drones destroyed the warehouse of the publisher #knygolove, the printing halls of Konvi — where a quarter-million newly printed ninth-grade textbooks were waiting for the school year — and the office of Mison, a small press one day from its first book launch. Around 850,000 books were destroyed or damaged before morning.

Reported by Chytomo · The Kyiv Independent

2022 — ongoing — The occupied territories

The libraries of the occupied east and south

In the occupied territories the destruction is quieter and more deliberate. Occupation authorities have stripped Ukrainian-language history, poetry, and children’s books from library shelves as “extremist”; Ukrainian institutions report that in occupied Donetsk and Luhansk nearly all Ukrainian literature has been removed or destroyed, with some 2.5 million Russian books shipped in to replace it. In June 2026, Reuters reported that Moscow’s state library had locked 18,000 books removed from Ukrainian shelves into a restricted repository. It is the oldest pattern of conquest: erase the record, and the place forgets itself.

Reported by Reuters · East SOS · Holodomor Museum