On the morning of August 20, a Russian attack struck the Kherson Regional Art Museum in Ukraine , causing a fire in the right wing of the building and in the adjacent service facilities. Fragments of the drone used by the Russians in the attack were found at the scene. Firefighters from Ukraine’s State Emergency Service extinguished the flames, though they operated under particularly difficult conditions and under the threat of further attacks: the fire continued to pose a danger even after the main flames had been extinguished, and rescuers had to intervene directly on the building’s structures, breaking through the floors between levels where hot spots continued to smolder and occasionally reignited, creating the risk of the fire spreading again.
The consequences of the attack were significant. In the right wing of the museum, the furniture and chairs in the rooms were completely destroyed, while part of the hardwood flooring in the hallways was burned. In the hallway of one of the storage rooms, several books were also damaged by the fire. The building’s electrical and heating systems were completely destroyed, and it was left entirely without power. The museum described the incident as an “act of barbarism” (as stated on its social media channels) and a “deliberate attack.”
The Kherson Regional Art Museum is part of Ukraine’s cultural heritage, and the building is marked with the international Blue Shield symbol, which identifies cultural property protected under international law. Ukrainian authorities have called the attack a war crime under the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.
The attack also takes on special significance in light of what happened to the museum’s collection during the Russian occupation of Kherson: in the fall of 2022, Russian occupiers removed hundreds of works from the collection, presenting the operation as an evacuation. Ukrainian authorities, however, view it as a deliberate and planned looting of the city’s cultural heritage. Ukrainian authorities have already identified several of the works that were stolen during the Russian occupation of the city, which began in 2022 during the early stages of the war and ended on November 12 with the Ukrainian army’s liberation of Kherson.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha responded to the attack by recalling this very incident. A few months ago, he explained, the Foreign Ministry had opened an exhibition titled “The Return of Kherson’s Memory” on its premises, where visitors can view reproductions of works from the collection of the Kherson Art Museum. “A Russian drone,” Sybiha stated, “struck the museum building.” Unfortunately, this clearly demonstrates Russia’s approach to Ukrainian culture: Russia steals and passes off as its own whatever it can lay its hands on. In the case of the Kherson Art Museum, this constitutes a double crime and further proof of how systematic Russia’s policy of destruction is. But Moscow has once again miscalculated: you can steal paintings, you can damage a museum, but it is impossible to make Ukrainian culture Russian or to deprive us in this way of our right to our heritage. We will return what has been stolen; we will rebuild what has been destroyed. And we will document these crimes. Ukraine is already doing so, to ensure that the looting and destruction of Ukrainian cultural heritage result in an equally systematic accountability on Russia’s part.”
The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in turn, emphasized that the museum, as a cultural asset marked with the Blue Shield and protected under international law, cannot be considered an unprotected target. According to the ministry, the attack is part of a broader series of actions through which Russia continues to destroy and set fire to Ukrainian cultural heritage sites and attempt to seize them.
The attack on the Kherson Regional Art Museum also adds to the long list of damage inflicted on Ukraine’s cultural heritage during the war. In this case, the museum had already been stripped of a fundamental part of its collections during the occupation of the city, and now the very building that housed and represented that memory has also been struck—an incident that Ukrainian authorities view as part of a systematic policy of appropriation and destruction of the nation’s cultural heritage.
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| Russian Attack on Kherson Damages the Regional Art Museum |
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