Russia has damaged over 1,700 cultural sites in Ukraine

Ukraine's Ministry of Culture and Information Policy continues recording damage to cultural sites at the hands of Russian armed forces. 

As of late September, 1,702 sites of cultural infrastructure were damaged in the full-scale war, Rubryka reports.

The Ukrainian cultural buildings suffered the greatest losses and damages in war-torn regions of the east and south — Donetsk, Kherson, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia regions.

The facilities that suffered the most damage were community buildings (49% of all cultural infrastructure), which include 841 community centers, 601 libraries, 131 art education institutions, 99 museums and galleries, and 30 theaters and philharmonics.

17.8% of Ukraine's territorial communities had their cultural infrastructure damaged and destroyed by Russian forces — 262 communities in Donetsk (82%), Sumy (53%), Kharkiv (52%), Chernihiv (46%), Kherson (43%), Luhansk (42%), Mykolaiv (42%), Zaporizhzhia (36%), Kyiv (26%), Dnipropetrovsk (19%), Zhytomyr (12%), Odesa (8 %), Khmelnytskyi (8%), Cherkasy (5%), Lviv (4%), Vinnytsia (3%), Zakarpattia (2%), Poltava (2%) regions and the capital, Kyiv.

The ministry stressed that almost the entire territory of Luhansk and large parts of the territories of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Donetsk regions are still under Russian occupation, which makes it impossible to calculate the exact number of cultural sites damaged during hostilities and occupation.

↓Read:

Capture or destroy: 18 monuments of Ukrainian architecture that Russia destroyed

Ukraine: UNESCO sites of Kyiv and L'viv are inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger

Russia damaged Odesa's 55 cultural heritage sites in July – Ukrainian Heritage Monitoring Lab