Shovkunenko Regional Art Museum, in Kherson, Captured by Russian Occupiers

“Russian invaders have captured Shovkunenko regional art museum in Kherson,” reported the director of the museum, Alina Dotsenko.

Accompanied by 4 people (FSS representatives in civilian clothes and masked Russian police), “On July 19, at 11:00 a.m., Nataliya Leonidovna, falsely calling herself the “new director”, entered the building of the Shоvkunenko Kherson Regional Art Museum,” said Alina Dotsenko. 

The museum’s so-called new management started work by unpacking exhibits. A little later, the new fake manager replaced the museum’s security with “her own.”

“The Kherson art museum was occupied during repair and restoration work. For five months, the museum’s management team has feared for the museum’s future and hoped that being under repair and having no exhibits in the halls, it would not attract the attention of the enemy and local collaborators,” reported the official director of the museum.

“Though the invaders had shown interest earlier, they did not attempt to take over Ukrainian state property. However, now, artworks captured by the Russian invaders as well as the museum building are under threat,” Alina Dotsenko said.

The Russian occupiers threaten to transfer exhibits from the Kherson Art Museum to Crimea, also occupied by Russia.

In Kharkiv region, on May 7, Russian invaders seriously damaged the Hryhoriy Skovoroda National Literary Memorial Museum. Fortunately, the most valuable exhibits from this museum had been relocated before the attack.

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The museum was in Skovorodynivka village, in the 18th-century estate where Hryhoriy Skovoroda worked in the last years of his life and near which he was buried. Skovoroda was an eighteenth-century Ukrainian poet and philosopher and this year is the 300th anniversary of his birth.

“Now Skovoroda is well-known not only in Ukraine but worldwide. More people are interested in the thinker’s philosophy and will visit the museum after its renovation. You can destroy boards and bricks, but not the idea.

Nobody did more for the popularization of Ukrainian culture than the Russian invaders,” wrote Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, on Twitter.