In Borodyanka, in the Kiev region, it is a bust of the poet Taras Shevchenko, great voice of the Ukrainian national awakening in the 19th century, which is riddled with bullets. 50 km away, in Ivankiv, paintings by Maria Primatchenko went up in smoke, as did the museum which exhibited the naive, joyful, colorful canvases of this self-taught painter admired by her people as well as by Picasso.
Much further to the east, in the Donetsk region, it is the lavra (1) of the Dormition-of-the-Mother-of-God of Sviatohirsk, a major place of pilgrimage for the Orthodox, which has lost part of its roof.
The enumeration could go on. Since the start of the war, just a year ago, no less than 239 Ukrainian cultural sites have been damaged, according to a UNESCO count dated February 13. Among these, 105 religious buildings and 85 historic buildings, the two categories which pay the heaviest tribute to the conflict. The Donetsk region, at the heart of the fighting, is the most affected, with 66 “victim” sites.
Heritage, target or collateral victim?
To establish such an assessment, Unesco is carrying out the survey. As soon as it receives information concerning damage to a site, it multiplies the sources to verify it – Ukrainian Ministry of Culture, social networks, consultants on site… Then, once the information has been confirmed, its teams request satellite images to the United Nations satellite center (Unosat), which they will compare with old images. The challenge : “Ensure that the damage was indeed caused by the war”summarizes Krista Pikkat, director of culture and emergency situations at Unesco.
Is Ukrainian heritage a deliberate target of Russian forces? “There is in this conflict the will to reduce a competing identity and to impose on the other its cultural agenda, advances Vincent Négri, researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of Politics and specialist in cultural heritage law. Morethe answer cannot be decided, it depends on the site we are talking about. »
heavy penalties
Still, the deliberate destruction of heritage can be expensive. In 2016, the International Criminal Court, which is currently investigating in Ukraine, sentenced jihadist Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi to nine years in prison for leading the destruction of nine of Timbuktu’s mausoleums. Did their inclusion on the World Heritage List play a role?
“The criterion used for the qualification of a war crime is not the universal dimension of the destroyed monument, but what it represents for the peoples concerned, says Vincent Negri. Listing as a World Heritage site can nevertheless act as an aggravating circumstance. »
Be included on the World Heritage List, a shield
She can also play as a shield. Of Ukraine’s seven UNESCO World Heritage sites, none have been affected by the war. Neither Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kiev, nor the historic center of Lviv (in the west of the country), nor the residence of the Metropolitans of Bukovina and Dalmatia (in the south, not far from the Romanian border)… “Presumably it’s thanks to their inclusion on the list”, analyzes Krista Pikkat. Such registration ensures the highest legal protection for the site. It is to ensure its benefit that the center of the city of Odessa was placed on the emergency list last January.
Destruction is not the only threat to Ukrainian heritage. Looting is also a risk. Before withdrawing last November from the city of Kherson (in the south) after eight months of occupation, the Russian forces took “thousands of valuable artifacts and works of art in two museums, a cathedral and the national archives”denounced the NGO Human Rights Watch.
In the process, the International Council of Museums (Icom) published a red list of Ukrainian cultural property at risk. Accessible on the Icom website, this list offers typologies of Ukrainian art objects threatened by trafficking – icons, coins, manuscripts… – and is supposed to alert customs officers and art buyers.