The Burning Archive: Ukrainian Art in the Time of War
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Kherson conductor Yurii Kerpatenko, 46, was shot through the closed door of his apartment after repeatedly refusing Russian requests to stage a concert at the occupied philharmonic—a performance designed to project the image of cultural life thriving under occupation.
The numbers do not fully absorb. As of this writing, 1,783 cultural heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed in Ukraine since February 24, 2022. Among them, 46 have been completely erased. The Ministry of Culture counts 346 artists and 132 media workers dead. PEN Ukraine had already reached 102 cultural figures killed by the end of 2024, and the count has not stopped. These are not collateral casualties. They are the point.
Russia’s assault on Ukrainian culture follows a script with historical precedent. In Putin’s 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”—widely read as the ideological preface to the invasion—he denies the existence of a sovereign Ukrainian identity. The bombing of museums, the looting of collections, the execution of conductors who refused to perform for occupiers: these are not incidental to the war. They are the war.
Kherson conductor Yurii Kerpatenko, 46, was shot through the closed door of his apartment after repeatedly refusing Russian requests to stage a concert at the occupied philharmonic—a performance designed to project the image of cultural life thriving under occupation.
Film editor Viktor Onysko, known to colleagues as someone who hated war in every fiber, died commanding troops under the call sign “Tarantino.” David Chichkan, one of Ukraine’s most prominent contemporary artists—known for avant-garde work inseparable from anarchist conviction—was killed on the front line in August 2025. Actor Yurii Felipenko, 32, died in June 2025. Actor Maksym Nelipa returned to the front after being wounded and underwent multiple surgeries before dying in action in May 2025.
The Ministry of Culture has called it explicitly: “Just as the Stalinist regime destroyed a generation of Ukrainian artists in the 1920s and early 1930s, today Russia is deliberately exterminating Ukraine’s cultural elite.”
The material losses compound the human ones.
In Odesa, the director of the National Fine Arts Museum leads visitors down into 200-year-old grottoes beneath the Potocki Palace—natural caves that protected works from Nazi bombing in the Second World War and now shield them again. Three-quarters of the museum’s 10,000 pieces have been evacuated to secret locations across Europe and western Ukraine. What remains in the building is as much an argument as a collection.
At the Khanenko Museum in Kyiv—emptied of its works—the director Yuliya Vaganova made a decision that is itself a kind of curatorial statement: she reimagined the empty rooms as a space for contemporary interventions, community events, professional debate. The absence of the collection became visible. A hollow museum is harder to ignore than a full one.
UNESCO estimates direct damage to cultural sites at $4.1 billion. The World Bank projects $10.5 billion will be needed over the next decade to rebuild cultural infrastructure. The Huliaipole Local History Museum—19th century, 18,000 artifacts—no longer exists. The Transfiguration Cathedral in Odesa was struck by missile in July 2023. The Bernardine Monastery Complex in Lviv’s UNESCO-protected historic center was hit as recently as this year.
Russian forces have also looted. Over 1.7 million Ukrainian artifacts from occupied territories are reported to have been removed, some surfacing on the black market.
None of this has silenced what it set out to silence.
In May 2026, the Art Kyiv fair opened under the title This Is Normal. Anna Avetova, the fair’s director, stated the premise plainly: “Holding the event during wartime means not waiting for a better moment, but working with reality as it is.” Painting, sculpture, and conversation in a country where missile strikes, loss, and death have become the ordinary texture of daily life.
PinchukArtCentre’s ongoing Prize show includes twenty shortlisted artists aged 35 or younger. Tamara Turliun’s Shkurynka (Crust) presents giant cocoon-like sculptures with small perforations, surfaces that suggest metamorphosis under pressure. One special recognition in the show honors Veronika Kozhushko, an artist killed in a Russian strike.
Zhanna Kadyrova’s Palianytsia showed river stones shaped and cut to resemble bread—a word Russians struggle to pronounce that became, early in the war, a shibboleth: a way of distinguishing friend from foe. She gave all sales proceeds to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
The Wartime Art Archive, founded in 2022 as a long-term research institution, aggregates works produced from or about the war—much of it circulating initially through social media—preserving what might otherwise vanish. A parallel project, the Museum of Stolen Art, documents looted works digitally so that cultural memory survives even where the object does not.
From December 2025 through March 2026, France hosted “Journey to Ukraine: Culture Strikes Back”—fifty events organized by the Institut Français and the Ukrainian Institute, with Olena Zelenska at the inaugural evening in Paris. The phrase “culture strikes back” is not metaphor. It is operational.
Ukrainian artists in exile—many in Poland, Germany, the Netherlands—continue to work. An artist duo from Kharkiv, Daniil Revkovskiy and Andriy Rachinskiy, left on February 24, 2022 and remain on residency in Lublin, Poland. “It’s so difficult to work in Ukraine right now because of the frequent shelling, air raids, and the constant blackouts,” they have said. Fifteen Ukrainian artists have been working out of a former brothel in Berlin, the first Ukrainian art hub in the German capital. The irony of geography—of making Ukrainian art in Germany, in France, in the United States—is not lost on those doing it. Their gaze stays home.
For men between 18 and 60, there is no leaving. They cannot travel, cannot exhibit internationally unless specially permitted, cannot accept residencies abroad. The handbook Navigating the War as Artists in Ukraine, published in 2025 by Ukraine’s Museum of Contemporary Art, addresses this directly: “One of the profound losses of war is that it pulls these people out of social and professional life. We believe it is crucial to support artists in the military so they can maintain a presence in the professional and public sphere, even if they are absent, unable to travel or to produce new work.”
There is a longer argument running beneath all of this. Art historian and curator Svitlana Biedarieva—author of Ambicoloniality and War: The Ukrainian-Russian Case (2025)—has spent years tracing the decolonial impulse in Ukrainian art: the effort to recover what Soviet and then Russian cultural hegemony systematically suppressed, misattributed, absorbed, or destroyed. The war did not begin this argument. It radicalized it.
The burning of an archive is not just destruction. It is also a claim: that what was in the archive did not exist. Ukraine is answering that claim on every front available.-----
International support has been real but uneven. The EU, through Creative Europe and member-state programs, has provided financial assistance and residency exchanges. USAID contributed until its shutdown in early 2025. The 2024 Ukraine Recovery Conference in Berlin included a panel on cultural heritage but produced no concrete sector-wide agenda. The 2024 Vilnius Call for Action and a February 2025 conference declaration in Uzhhorod restated EU commitment without implementing it. The money disbursed falls short of what has been identified as needed.
Art in wartime Ukraine is not a parallel story. It is the same story.
The conductor who refuses to perform for the occupier, the museum director who turns empty rooms into argument, the sculptor who makes cocoons from wartime grief, the archive that preserves what a missile tried to erase—these are not footnotes to the military campaign. They are the reason the military campaign is being fought.
What is at stake is not paintings or buildings. It is the right to have a past.
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