Ukrainian museum workers and cultural activists have petitioned the country’s culture ministry to evacuate museum collections from regions bordering Russia and near the frontline, as tensions further escalate following the Trump administration's demands that Kyiv accede to Moscow.
“As of today, less than 10% of the state museum fund of Ukraine has been evacuated, but more than three million objects remain in endangered areas,” states an open letter addressed to Mykola Tochytskyi, the minister of culture and strategic communications. It was published on 28 February on the Facebook page of the Coalition of Cultural Actors.
The letter, which has 150 signatories so far, according to a subsequent post this week, highlights the Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv and Odesa regions as being especially at risk due to “the enemy's offensive, massive bombardment, and the prospect of a cessation of hostilities with the definition of a demarcation zone that is currently unclear”, and “could lead to the loss of Ukraine's cultural heritage”.
The ministry, it says, failed to take the necessary precautions and prepare a comprehensive evacuation plan to address Russia’s first invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, and the full-scale invasion in 2022.
US policy shift
Since taking office on 20 January, US President Donald Trump has effectively allied with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and cut off all aid.
At the White House on 28 February, Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for showing insufficient gratitude to the US for previous support and Trump called off a minerals deal with Ukraine after Zelensky demanded security guarantees against Russian aggression.” Zelensky has since described the meeting as “regrettable”, and talks resumed in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. Russian and US officials met in the Middle Eastern country last month to discuss Ukraine on Russia’s terms.
The culture ministry, in its immediate response posted on its website on 28 February, wrote that “540,942 museum items from the state part of the Museum Fund of Ukraine have been evacuated” from 59 cultural institutions in those regions, and that local authorities and institutions are responsible for the rest, with assistance and co-ordination from central authorities when necessary. The ministry said it could not reveal more detailed information due to martial law.
Olha Sahaidak, the head of the Coalition of Cultural Actors, told The Art Newspaper in an email that “the ministry does not have the capacity and resources to organise evacuation centrally”, which is “why the coalition insists on the ministry's openness regarding the real situation, the involvement of other authorities, businesses, and volunteers in this process”.
Shortage of data
Although specialists who are members of the coalition have prepared evacuation proposals, the shortage of open data prevents them from drawing up a step-by-step plan. “Therefore, we insist on the creation of an interagency working group with the involvement of museum professionals.” She said that an appeal is needed from the culture ministry or National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine to engage business to contribute to the effort.
In a Facebook post, Oleksandra Kovalchuk, the deputy director for development at the Odesa Fine Arts Museum and one of the open letter’s signatories, contrasted Ukraine’s lack of action to Poland, Sweden and Norway, which “have launched a state programme to prepare for the possible evacuation of cultural property in the event of war”.
Last month, Trump enabled the dismantling of USAID, the US government’s foreign aid agency, by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
“I don't know about the US providing targeted assistance to protect museums, but USAID has supported some NGOs that have been working with museums,” Sahaidak says. “The World Monuments Fund and Smithsonian were involved in programmes to save cultural heritage; they focused on immovable cultural heritage, digitisation, and conservation.” This week the World Monuments Fund announced a serious shortfall following the shutdown of US State Department funding.
Sahaidak notes that, in August 2024, a number of US museums offered solidarity with Ukraine when she and colleagues spent three weeks in the US, under the State Department's International Visitor Leadership Program, visiting New York, Orlando, Boulder, Detroit and Washington, DC.
"We met with museum workers and cultural institutions (more than 70 organisations). From everyone I heard words of support and a sincere understanding that the US should help Ukraine defend democracy and our independence from the aggressive Russian regime. Have they also changed their minds? Are cultural figures from the US ready to support us?”
In a further blow to Ukraine’s security and cultural heritage preservation, the US government last week “temporarily” restricted Ukraine’s access to commercial satellite imagery that had helped researchers track damage inflicted by Russia’s attacks.
In 2024, The Conflict Observatory, a consortium of non-government independent research partners including the Cultural Resilience Informatics and Analysis Lab at the University of Virginia, used Maxar imagery to determine that Russian forces have desecrated multiple ancient Ukrainian burial mounds in Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia in south-eastern Ukraine.
After Trump took office, The Conflict Observatory, which had received State Department funds, went dark, and now Ukraine has been cut off from Maxar.
