Ukraine’s museums fall short of 2M items due to war

A decade into the start of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014, the total losses of the national museum fund amounted to 2 million items.

That’s according to Mariana Tomyn, chief of the Cultural Heritage Department at the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine, who spoke in an interview with Ukrinform.

"Since 2014, nearly 1.1 million items from the museum fund have been lost, and now from 2022 to 2024, it was another 700,000. In total, up to 2 million objects are gone," she said.

Tomyn says Russia stole almost 35,000 museum items from eight museums across five regions of Ukraine that were under temporary occupation.

"We note that part of the collections of Ukrainian museums that were under Russian occupation are gone for good. These include almost 35,000 items that have been stolen from eight museums in five regions of Ukraine that are now deoccupied, and almost 5,000 more have been destroyed, lost, or damaged," the official added.

At the same time, Tomyn recalled that nearly 250,000 valuables were safely evacuated. The evacuation process is, in fact, underway.

"We need to keep in mind that we still have 10 million items in Ukraine’s museum fund so we should work together to protect them," she emphasized.

As reported, the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy plans to launch a government program to create underground exhibition centers where collections evacuated from Ukrainian museums would be stored.