The UN’s official cultural body UNESCO has issued a new report documenting damage to an alarming amount of historic sites, monuments, and structures since the beginning of the Russian Federation’s criminal invasion of Ukraine began in late February.

The organization has verified that 139 sites have suffered damage since that time, a combined total of 62 religious sites, 12 museums, 26 historic buildings, 17 cultural buildings, 15 monuments, and 7 libraries, including the Babyn Yar Holocaust remembrance site in Kyiv, which have come under Russian bombs and artillery shells as the conflict shifts from a three-pronged invasion to a more targeted offensive focused in the eastern Donbas region.

Somewhat remarkably, none of the country’s sites listed on the organization’s official log of protected cultural property have been impacted or targeted by Russian shelling, the latter act being considered a serious violation under the standards of international law. 

Russia has bombed Ukraine’s largest wooden church at the Sviatohirsk Lavra monastery, Donetsk Region, Ukraine pic.twitter.com/8vFnekXDoo
— Alfons López Tena (@alfonslopeztena) June 4, 2022

The sites listed in the report’s survey, conducted through the end of May, include historic cathedrals in nearly every metropolitan region, important cultural institutions such as the Kharkiv Art Museum and Skovoroda National Literary Memorial, which was completely destroyed after being struck by a missile May 7th, and another Holocaust remembrance site called Drobytskyi Yar that preserves the memory of a 1941 Nazi atrocity that accounted for the deaths of 16,000 Ukrainian Jews.

A number of important 18th and 19th-century examples of residential architecture were declared damaged as well. The cultural devastation present in the list is but a piece of the larger mosaic of a costly war that has wrought billions of dollars worth of havoc on Ukranian civilian infrastructure, suburban apartment blocks, parks, hospitals, and educational facilities. Recent assessments of the costs of rebuilding the country are accordingly high, with estimates ranging to over one trillion U.S. dollars. 

“Every church burned by Russia in Ukraine, every school blown up, every destroyed memorial proves that Russia has no place in UNESCO. What can we talk about with a barbarian state, with a terrorist state?” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a public statement issued this week on the subject. “We expect a logical and fair response from the UN and UNESCO. This is the UN, and its charter does not provide for unity with terrorists. The isolation of Russia must be complete, it must be responsible for its crimes.”

The full list of sites can be viewed (with some before and after photos) on UNESCO’s website. Also online, ARTnews is keeping a running list of the sites damaged during the conflict.