More than 1,500 monuments, museums, libraries and other infrastructure of Ukraine's historical and cultural heritage may have suffered damage during the Russian invasion, the Conflict Observatory, an entity funded by the US State Department, detailed this week.
In a published report, the organization, which collaborates with researchers from Yale University and the Smithsonian Institution's Cultural Rescue Initiative, identified 1,501 examples of heritage with a high probability of having been damaged between February 24 and August 31, 2022.
Of these, 658 are monuments; 488 are religious sites; 115 are museums; 99 are libraries or archives; 97 are buildings of heritage significance; 11 are archaeological excavations; 9 are cultural centers; and 24 are undetermined sites.
The report refers to "potential damages" because its identification methodology is based on analyzing social media posts or satellite images, not on direct observation on the ground.
The organization noted that cultural heritage is protected by international laws that apply to both Russia and Ukraine.
Since the invasion ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin began, various international groups and organizations, such as UNESCO, have raised the alarm about the damage to heritage that the war is causing.
Last month, the Ministry of Culture and Information of Ukraine announced that it will ask UNESCO to include the city of Odesa on its World Heritage List.
The United Nations agency, for its part, pledged to deploy new measures to protect heritage in the country.
In June, UNESCO reported that more than 150 cultural sites were partially or totally destroyed in the first four months of the war.
Three provinces account for three-quarters of the damage caused since February 24, the date on which the Russian invasion began: the eastern provinces of Donetsk, with 45 places, and Kharkiv, with 40, and the northern province of kyiv, with 26, according to the UN organization.
“These repeated attacks on Ukrainian cultural sites must stop,” UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said in a statement, AFP reported.
“Cultural heritage, in all its forms, should not be the object of attacks under any circumstances,” he added.
In mid-April, Lazare Eloundou Assomo, director of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, had already reported that a hundred sites had been damaged or destroyed, including historical monuments, some of which date back to the 11th and 12th centuries and others of Soviet-era architecture.
Ukraine and Russia, signatories to the 1954 Hague Convention, have an obligation to protect cultural heritage in the event of armed conflict, Azoulay said.
(With information from EFE and AFP)
