Ukraine Accuses Russia of Systematic Cultural Destruction in Ongoing War

KUALA LUMPUR, 30 SEPTEMBER 2026 —

Russia has significantly increased its strikes on Ukraine since summer. Many attacks have hit targets with no military value. Since June, Russian missiles and drones have set fire to a one-thousand-year-old cathedral in Kyiv, destroyed a children’s book warehouse in Kharkiv, and severely damaged Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences. Russia is increasingly targeting cultural sites that lay at the heart of Ukrainian society.

Locals scrambled to save what they could of the museum’s twenty-five-thousand-piece collection. Hours later, missiles pummeled the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, one of the country’s most sacred Eastern Orthodox sites. The one-thousand-year-old monastery, which protects a network of catacombs where several saints are buried, was ablaze in a matter of seconds. Russia characterized these incidents as precision strikes against military targets, despite there reportedly being no publicly known Ukrainian military activity nearby at the time.

The strikes came a few weeks after a spate of attacks that hit museums, theaters, and cultural centers across Kyiv, rendering sizable swaths of artifacts “irrevocably lost,” Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said in its report on the situation. Those attacks have continued unabated.

A Russian ballistic missile destroyed Kyiv’s Pochaina book market in August, drones set fire to a Kharkiv warehouse holding eight million books that same month, and a strike badly damaged Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences in September. These downed cultural institutions are not collateral damage in strikes meant for battalions, Ukrainians and outside experts said. They’re the targets. “This war is not about conquering territories.

It’s about destroying a nation,” said Małgorzata Ławrowska-von Thadden , the founder of OBMIN, a Poland-based organization created to allow Ukrainian museums to access aid, exchange ideas on preservation (“obmin” is Ukrainian for “exchange”), and promote cultural heritage.

“Without a culture, you can’t have a nation.” Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, at least 1,949 heritage monuments and 2,576 cultural infrastructure sites have been damaged or destroyed, according to official data from Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture.

By the end of September 2026, the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) had confirmed damage to 560 of those sites, while independent monitoring from Ukrainian civil society has tallied at least 5,500 sites using satellite and open-source intelligence, said Lina Doroshenko, the Ukrainian representative on the UNESCO World Heritage Committee and expert at the Kyiv-based Regional Center for Human Rights. This war is not about conquering territories. It’s about destroying a nation.

Without a culture, you can’t have a nation. Work is underway in Ukraine to harmonize these datasets, but getting precise numbers, particularly from areas occupied by Russia or facing near-daily attacks, is a challenge. “The real scale of destruction is therefore undoubtedly much greater than any currently available statistics can show,” Doroshenko said. Lost in the wreckage of the razed buildings are critical pieces of history.

In a strike on the Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum, this came in the form of twenty-five scorched paintings by Maria Prymachenko, a self-taught folk artist celebrated internationally as a symbol of Ukrainian culture.

“To understand the magnitude of that devastation, one must imagine what it would mean… for Americans to see paintings from Hopper, Pollock, or Warhol set ablaze or for the French to have bombs obliterate the oeuvre of Matisse, Monet or Renoir,” then-Ukraine Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin wrote in the aftermath. Millions more pieces of art have been looted in the chaos, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has “ legalized ” in occupied areas.

Several archives , including the Rare Book Library , which housed sixty thousand precious manuscripts, have been destroyed by Russian missiles. Many contained not just annals of Ukrainian history, but primary documents of global events, such as the world wars. There are myriad stories of tangible, physical destruction across Ukraine. But it goes deeper than the physical devastation of bombed museums, theaters, and libraries.

Experts say Russia is attempting to disrupt the social fabric through Russifying systems. In the territory it has seized, Russia has been implementing a “systematic policy” of cultural seizure to occupy Ukraine’s narratives in addition to its land, Doroshenko said. “Ukrainian history [has been] gradually replaced by Russian imperial and Soviet narratives designed to create the illusion that these territories have always been historically Russian,” she told CFR.

Outside access to occupied areas is extremely limited, so information comes from verified local sources, satellite imagery, or open-source intelligence. “The scale of altered, dismantled, and newly erected monuments across occupied territories is so extensive that a comprehensive listing is no longer possible,” the Kyiv Post reported in November 2025.

In Mariupol, for example, a walk down the streets reveals scores of name changes —what was once the “Avenue of Peace” is now “Lenin Avenue.” Blocks away, the Mariupol Drama Theater, which was destroyed in the third week of the war, reopened in December 2025 with a Soviet-era performance. Museums have been reregistered under Russian legislation, and their collections incorporated into state ownership.

The social takeover goes further than the seizure or destruction of cultural assets. The few remaining schools in areas occupied by Russia have had their curricula Russified. There have also been the well-documented, systematic kidnapping and reeducation of Ukrainian children who have been sent to Russia, prompting the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Putin. Ukrainian media has been replaced with Russian counterparts.