“The largest art theft since World War II”: Putin’s army destroys and loots Ukrainian cultural assets

In its 230-year history, the Transfiguration Cathedral in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa has been destroyed twice: In 1936, Soviet dictator Stalin had this and other churches blown up as part of his anti-religious campaign. After Ukraine's independence, the cathedral was rebuilt and consecrated in 2003. Twenty years later, Russian missiles, fired deliberately at the city's historic center, damaged the church again.

The cathedral, built in 1795 on the orders of Tsarina Catherine the Great and consecrated in 1809, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is part of the historic center of the city on the Black Sea.

“The attack on this Orthodox cathedral in Odessa, which had just been renovated and was deliberately targeted by Russian ballistic missiles, is a prominent example of the Kremlin’s attempt to erase Ukrainian identity,” said historian Jan Claas Behrends of the University of Potsdam in an interview with the RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND).

UNESCO has published a list of 485 cultural sites that have been damaged or completely destroyed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The list includes 149 religious sites, 257 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest, 34 museums, 33 monuments, 18 libraries, one archive, and two archaeological sites.

Regions in the immediate vicinity of the front, such as Donetsk and Kharkiv, suffered the greatest damage to their cultural sites. But even Odessa, far from the front, has a total of 57 damaged cultural buildings—more than the much larger and once-contested capital of Kyiv (43).

"This is also a war that Russia is waging against Ukrainian culture, against the Ukrainian language, and indeed against Ukrainian identity," says historian Behrends. And it doesn't just affect such spectacular targets as the aforementioned cathedral, "but is also being implemented on a smaller scale, in occupied Ukrainian villages and towns in the west of the country, where Ukrainian books from looted libraries are being burned and Ukrainian cultural institutions are being destroyed as part of a violent Russification," explains Behrends.

An auction in Moscow on February 18, 2024, caused a stir: The painting "Moonlit Night" by Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 to 1900) was auctioned there. The painting by the artist, who lived his entire life in Crimea, had already been reported as "stolen" by Ukrainian museums in 2014 after the Crimean invasion. This didn't bother the auctioneers, and it passed into new hands for the equivalent of one million dollars.

The painting “Moonlit Night” by the painter Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 to 1900).

Source: Archive

According to Ukrainian experts, after Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula in 2014, the Russians stole at least 12,612 monuments of national and local importance, as well as the property and funds of 773 libraries, 26 museums, and five historical and cultural institutions , containing more than 1.2 million museum objects.

The New York Times even called it the largest art theft since the Wehrmacht's invasion in World War II: In the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, which was temporarily occupied by the Russians from February to November 2022, prosecutors and museum administrators recorded the theft of more than 15,000 works of art and unique artifacts. "They dragged bronze statues from parks, seized books from a scientific library, unearthed the crumbling, 200-year-old bones of Grigory Potemkin , the lover of Tsarina Catherine the Great, and even stole a raccoon from the zoo," the New York Times wrote at the time .

The 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict , one of the most important instruments for the protection of cultural sites, obligates belligerent parties to ensure the preservation of and respect for cultural heritage. Its preamble states that "damage to cultural property belonging to every people harms the cultural heritage of all humanity, since each people makes its contribution to world culture." Furthermore, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines the intentional destruction of cultural property as a war crime under the jurisdiction of international law.

The documentation of the numerous possible war crimes against cultural heritage is extensive, but not complete. Throughout the conflict, the Ukrainian authorities have worked closely with international organizations, including the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), and the International Council of Museums (ICOM), to document damage and collect records for future legal proceedings.

But the war against Ukrainian culture, language, and history is not an invention of the Putin regime. Rather, it stretches far back into Russian history – to the 19th century. "The most prominent example is the so-called Ems Decree," explains Eastern Europe expert Behrends. "In 1876, the Russian Tsar Alexander II, who was staying in Bad Ems at the time, banned the public use of the Ukrainian language throughout the Russian Empire – and even made violations punishable," the historian says. Putin explicitly referred to this chauvinistic verdict in his pseudo-historical essay "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians," with which he laid the ideological groundwork in 2021 for the war of aggression that subsequently began in February 2022.

In the Soviet Union in the 1920s, "there were certain phases of relaxation, but then under Stalin, in the phase of the so-called 'shot renaissance', this reached an absolute low point with hundreds of Ukrainian writers, publicists and artists being executed," says Behrends.

In the late Soviet Union, Ukrainian language and culture were considered to be completely assimilated into Russian culture, "had been reduced to the level of regional folklore in a certain sense, and was viewed by the Russian side, not entirely without arrogance, not as high culture, but as 'peasant customs'," according to Jan Claas Behrends, author of the book "Post-Soviet Lifeworlds" (Metropol, 2021).

This was an image of Ukraine constructed by the Kremlin, which has since become firmly entrenched among many Germans, with their tendency toward simplification. Yet, the two cultures are distinguished by much more than linguistic nuances. "Ukraine has always been a much more multicultural country than Russia, which is especially true of Crimea, which was part of the Ottoman Empire until the end of the 18th century and whose Tatar population enjoyed autonomy," says Behrends.

In contrast, western Ukraine "was influenced by Habsburg and Polish influences for centuries, with Hungarian, Romanian, and Jewish minorities leading to a unique multiculturalism," the historian explains. According to Behrends, this is also an expression of "the diverging developments experienced by Russia and Ukraine, which have thus produced different cultures that, when applied to Central Europe, are reminiscent of the differences between Germany and Switzerland."

This “drifting apart” is being enormously accelerated in the current war.

While there was still a cultural and linguistic closeness between these two peoples well into the 20th century, due to their shared history and cross-border cultural exchange, including via television, Putin's war now acts as an accelerant. "Putin has destroyed all of these ties since 2014, and they won't be restored anytime soon," Behrends is convinced.

Through his campaign of annihilation against Ukrainian culture, the Russian president has involuntarily become the midwife of a new Ukrainian identity, “which will be strongly oriented towards the West and Europe,” said Behrends.