Numerous violations of Ukrainian legislation and international conventions render impossible any cooperation with any of Russian museums as institutions of culture
Since the beginning of the full scale invasion of Ukraine, more than seven hundred Russian museums have launched exhibitions to glorify the war, which Russia refers to as “special military operation” (SVO). This massive involvement in such events suggests that these are not their own initiatives but have been curated in line with directives from the federal government, aimed at presenting a uniform narrative of the “special military operation”, drawing museums into a campaign to justify the aggression, mobilize the Russian society and indoctrinate the younger generation in the Ukrainian regions currently under Russian occupation.
Russia began its history falsification campaign after its military’s shameful retreat from the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions in the spring of 2022. On the initiative of Russia’s foreign intelligence chief [Sergei] Naryshkin, an inter-museum group was set up to collect exhibits that would glorify the SVO. At that time, Naryshkin had been in lead of the so-called Russian Historical Society for longer than a decade. Previously, as head of Putin’s presidential administration, he led commission “for counteracting attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia’s Interests”. Such a hybridity of “security forces” and historians signifies that Russian government’s cultural and museum policy as such has long been subordinated to the goals pursued by Russian special services. The Russian Historical Society launched two new branches in May 2022 – in occupied cities of Luhansk and Donetsk. As soon as in August 2022, the Russian Ministry of Culture initiated a campaign, billed as “Our Traditions”, in the occupied Ukrainian region of Luhansk. This was the first instance where about two dozen museums got engaged in a campaign to legalize Russian occupation and rewrite the history of the Ukrainian resistance.
To make these efforts more systemic and consistent, Putin, in 2023, issued an executive order to establish “SVO museums” in each of the federal entities. The Russian Historical Society was, of course, the first to create a model project for such a museum.
In these years, Russian authorities held a series of apparently anti-Ukrainian “museum” projects, including the exhibitions “Ordinary Nazism”, “Ordinary NATOcism”, “NATO. Chronicles of Cruelty”. And such a “museum policy” is being implemented after the shocking cruelty of war crimes committed by Russia’s military in Bucha and Borodyanka, and massive air assaults on Mariupol.
That’s to say, the mission of these “SVO museums”, militaristic exhibitions, and the “new” museum policy in general is to mobilize Russian forces to commit more war crimes, presenting them as “heroism”, to silence the obvious failures of the Russian army, and to make Russian society accustomed to the prospect of a lengthy “holy” war.
A lot of evidence suggests that Russia is waging a cognitive war as a supplement to its war aggression. Museums are an effective tool as they enjoy scientific authority and public trust in their expertise in matters of history. This halo of scientificity is exploited to influence not just the internal audience, but also the external one.
Another direction of the Russian government’s imperial policy being served by Russian museums is the plunder of Ukrainian cultural heritage. Since 2023, a federal law has included all the museums in the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk and Kherson regions (within their administrative borders, not just their parts Russia has been able to occupy) into the Russian museums network. For example, Russia has “appropriated” the national reserve Khortytsia even before being able to seize control of our legendary Cossack lands. Overall, Ukraine has lost 77 museums stolen by laws adopted by Russian parliament, the State Duma.
The funds of these museums must be included in State Catalog of the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation by December 31, 2027. Such actions by the aggressor country violate the code of ethics of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), to which the Russian Federation is still a member, and most importantly, the provisions of the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, to which the aggressor state is also a party. The legislation adopted by Russia is criminal in nature, and its implementation constitutes a crime punishable by international law.
To implement this legislation, the Russian Ministry of Culture instructed federal museums to “take patronage” of Ukrainian museums. In practice, the so-called integration into the Russian cultural space involves replacing exhibits, removing all references to Ukraine, banning the Ukrainian language, and glorifying the “feats” of the Russian army.
Thanks to such “patronage” – a cynical reference to “friendship between the two peoples” – 38 Ukrainian museums had shown up in the publicly available part of the Russian catalog as of February 2025, as per data from the Ukrainian National Committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM).
The occupied territories were visited personally by the heads of the State Museum-Reserve “Peterhof”, the Polytechnic Museum, the Russian Ethnographic Museum and dozens of other institutions in Moscow and regional capitals. Such visits often result in the illegal relocation of the most valuable Ukrainian artifacts.
Numerous violations of Ukrainian legislation and international conventions render it impossible to cooperate with any Russian museum as a cultural institution – these institutions have betrayed the mission of culture and turned into a unit of looters.
Complicity in projects of Russian intelligence and other defense and security entities effectively removes Russian museums from the sphere of culture and requires the imposition of sanctions and other types of criminal prosecution, including particularly under international law.
The Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications of Ukraine will initiate further restrictive measures against officials at Russian museums. We will also actively work sharing information among international audiences regarding the real work of these people in order to prevent prominent Ukrainian names and Ukrainian artifacts from being once again presented to the international community as belonging to “great Russian culture”. On February 5, 2025, the President of Ukraine enacted the National Security and Defense Council resolution to sanction 55 individuals and three legal entities of the Russian Federation – inappropriately named “cultural figures”. Then comes the turn of more names of Russian museum workers. Listings of the next up “cultural figures” have already been submitted by the Ministry and are being processed pursuant to legally prescribed procedures.
In addition to the sanctions policy, it is essential to campaign for the demilitarization of Russian museums’ activities and seek their refusal to heroize the “SVO” and, most importantly, the return of Ukrainian museum values to Ukraine. This takes political and international legal decisions, and the global cultural community should raise its voice to safeguard culture and history from military propaganda.
Mykola Tochytsky, Minister of Culture and Strategic Communications of Ukraine
* The Author’s opinions may not be those of Ukrinform’s editorial board
