A few minutes before 6:30pm on Sunday, June 14, a Russian Shahed missile hit the Kharkiv Art Museum museum. The kamikaze drone is 3.5 meters long with a wingspan of 2.5 meters. This one tore through the roof of the museum, causing a massive fire and extensive damage, and injured six people, including a baby.
Pieces of the missile were still lodged in the trees outside the museum when I walked through what was left of it with Iryna Sidelva, who runs its education department. The roof was open to the sky. On the front steps, staff were carrying canvases down one at a time and loading them into a lorry, past the shattered windows. The building has stood on this street since 1912.
The bombing was the first of a co-ordinated attack on Ukrainian cultural sites that night. Hours later, missiles hit the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the medieval monastery in Ukraine’s capital that is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the Organ and Chamber Music Hall in Dnipro.
Three weeks earlier, on the night of May 23-24, missiles targeted the National Art Museum of Ukraine, the Kyiv Opera, and the National Philharmonic.
On the night of June 14, locals rushed to rescue the art from the burning building. They did this knowing about the threat of a double tap strike - the Russian tactic where the same site is deliberately targeted the second time to kill first responders or neighbors who come to help. That same night, in another part of Kharkiv, six firefighters were killed in a double tap strike after rushing to rescue people in a separate attack.
Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second-biggest city, located in the north east of the country, about 25 miles from the Russian border. I’ve reported from Kharkiv dozens of times since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. It’s a front-line city, frequently bombed, and used to the long grind of the war.
But attacks on places like the art museum hit differently.
“It’s the city's main and most important institution dedicated to classical art,” said Maria Borysova, a figurative artist from Kharkiv. “Located in the heart of Kharkiv, close to the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, it has long been a place of inspiration for artists, students, and art lovers.”
“We had both Ukrainian and classical Russian art,” Iryna Sidelva told me as she showed me around the ruins. “Some of it had already been removed to protect it from the shelling but there was a lot still there. It took an hour and a half to put the fire out.”
I also walked around the bombed building with Rimma Nes, a traditional and digital artist from Kharkiv.
“This attack was a deeply personal hit for me,” she said. “My artistic identity was shaped within its walls. Myself and my teachers — all of us — grew up on the heritage preserved by this museum.”
She is certain the drone was aimed at Ukraine's largest collection of works by Ilya Repin, whose family name in Ukrainian is Ripin.
“For a long time, Russians built their international image by selling Ripin to the world as a ‘pillar of Russian realism.’ This was because he left his native Kharkiv region to study in the imperial capital, and only because in colonial Ukraine, the tsar banned the opening of academies — all resources were simply pumped into the center,” she said.
“Ripin grew up on Ukrainian folklore at a time when the very word ‘Ukraine’ was banned from official documents and forcibly replaced with ‘Little Russia,’” she said. “Yet, even while navigating strict imperial censorship, the artist referred to himself as a ‘native of Little Russia’ throughout his entire life."
Of the estimated 5,000 Soviet-era graphic works at the museum, around 1,000 were damaged.
"The museum's collection is one of the most significant in Ukraine,” said artist Maria Borysova. “It spans from the 14th to the 21st century and includes works by Western European masters such as Albrecht Dürer and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, classics of Ukrainian art including Ripin and Serhii Vasylkivsky, as well as contemporary artists, among them my own teachers, Viktor Hontorov and Yevhen Bykov.”
Rimma Borodatova noted how “the museum’s collection held masterpieces of world art, works by Taras Shevchenko (who laid the foundation of our identity), and portraits by Volodymyr Borovykovsky — a Cossack from Ukrainian Myrhorod, whom the Russian empire also claimed as ‘its own.’”
She believes that the museum was bombed to destroy a specific painting by Ripin, the second version of his famous “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks.”
"The first version, kept in St. Petersburg, is the ceremonial, sanitized one,” she said. Ours — the Kharkiv version — Ripin painted in collaboration with our legendary historian, Dmytro Yavornytsky. And it is the authentic one. It depicts the forbidden symbols of Ukrainian sovereignty. It radiates the true Cossack temperament — daring, proud, and free. … it shatters the Russian narrative of Cossacks as ‘loyal servants of the tsar,’ or lawless bandits devoid of political culture. It demolished their myths, exposing the deep roots of Ukrainian republicanism.”
The Ukrainian Institute, a public body, has estimated that since the Russian invasion of February 2022 1,913 cultural heritage sites and 2,573 cultural infrastructure facilities have been deliberately damaged or destroyed across Ukraine.
“Museums, libraries, archives, places of worship, theatres, universities, and cultural centres have repeatedly come under attack,” it reported, “Ukrainian culture is not collateral damage in this war. It is one of Russia’s targets.”
Ripin’s second version of the Zaporozhian Cossacks has survived, despite repeated attacks on Ukrainian classical art. Architects surveying the museum say the building can be restored, and repairs have begun, though nobody expects a full restoration until the end of the war. A new initiative is under way to preserve its art works and others in new underground facilities.
