25 June 2024

Challenges of preserving heritage: how Russia is destroying culture in Crimea 

Ukraine should implement a sanctions policy against officials of the Russian ministry of culture, museum directors, and archaeologists working in the occupied Crimea. Their scientific articles should not be published, and all foreign expeditions of Russia should be closed. 

Andriy Lutsyk, the representative of the Crimea Platform Expert Network an expert of the Regional Centre for Human Rights, noted that Russian archaeologists are conducting excavations in the occupied territories and publishing articles in international journals, where they say they have found some valuables in Russia and present the monuments stolen from us. 

And these are far from the biggest crimes against Ukrainian cultural heritage committed by the occupiers in Crimea and other TOTs. 

The issue of preserving Ukrainian cultural heritage in the occupied territories and punishing those who steal it was discussed by Crimea Platform experts during the panel discussion “Cultural Strategy in Times of War: Challenges of Heritage Preservation”. 

Evelina Kravchenko, representative of the Crimea Platform Expert Network, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Archeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, said that Russia uses cultural monuments as an ideological weapon. By changing the mental meaning of cultural heritage and broadcasting hostile narratives, it results in the replacement of the monument. It loses its authenticity. This can be seen at heritage sites in Crimea. Negative processes are currently taking place with the only monument of world significance, Tauric Chersonese. 

At the same time, Samuel Andrew Hardy, a researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, noted that even in international markets, there are situations where collectors are careless about Ukrainian cultural heritage and do not demand documents from sellers, even when there is a suspicion that certain cultural monuments have been taken from the occupied territory of Ukraine or stolen from private collections or museums. 

Sviatoslav Poznakhovskyi, Head of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, said that there is no information on how many historical and cultural monuments Russia has taken from the occupied territories. 

“We can only record what the occupier exhibits at international exhibitions and museums,” he said.