As the Russian invasion of Ukraine presses on into its fourth week, volunteers and cultural workers, a number of whom are also at arms, are rushing to erect makeshift barriers and other forms of protection against what could be a demoralizing strike against heritage sites across the embattled republic.

Brave residents in places like Odesa and other metropolitan areas have been attempting in earnest to shield several important pieces of cultural infrastructure such as the port city’s monument to Duc de Richelieu and the historically significant St. George's Cathedral in Lviv. Meanwhile, a parallel effort is also underway to secure the country’s fine arts holdings, which are also afforded special protection status under international law.

Location of museum heavily damaged by strikes in Okhtyrka, Ukraine: 50.3046154, 34.8928959

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Already there have been a number of major incidents at significant sites, including the bombing of Kyiv’s Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial and a strike late Thursday against a museum in Kharkiv that damaged or destroyed several important works from Russian artists, including those of the realist painter Ilya Repin. The attacks go hand-in-hand with the Russian military’s well-documented targeting of civilian apartment complexes, schools, and maternity wards, leaving some to fear what the Kremlin might resort to in what 19th-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz dubbed “the Fog of War.” 

“After having seen how Russia is destroying residential blocks and infrastructure facilities in our cities, we realized that preventive measures are needed to protect Lviv architectural landmarks,” one cultural worker in the western stronghold told Reuters. 

Support from the Smithsonian Institution and other Western cultural bodies has added to their effort, along with the continued pressure from the UN’s cultural arm UNESCO, which has issued several rebukes of Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin’s prosecution of the war it says is now beginning to resemble a “cultural cleansing.” 

Kyiv’s Mystetskyi Arsenal National Art and Culture Museum Complex director Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta added to UNESCO’s criticism, saying that the sustained attacks on many of the city’s historic structures felt like the point of an operation to destroy any vestiges of an independent and autonomous civilization. 

“It's connected to the fact that Russia is an empire. And the very existence of Ukraine poses a huge problem for a Russian empire, because there is a lot of Ukrainian heritage in the heart of that empire,” she told the CBC. “The existence of Ukraine and its culture poses the question: What is Russia, then? And Putin gives his answer. He says there is no Ukraine. We will just invade it and make it one with Putin's Russia, then this problem is resolved.”