Russian invasion affects Ukrainian arte facts

By Our Special Correspondent

During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the possibility of a cyber war has been a constant threat. The consequences of a breach extend far beyond a threat to national security. They extend and threaten cultural and artistic production — galleries, libraries, archives, museums and universities must be protected. The invasion of Ukraine has been a hybrid war fought with traditional kinetic weapons alongside cyber attacks. The prelude to the war included widespread attacks on Ukrainian organizations. While there were early reports about the underwhelming performance of Russia’s fabled cyber capabilities, the brutal reality of war does not easily match the precise planning required to stage a cyber attack. Ukrainian archivists, curators and librarians have been protecting both material and digital archives throughout the war. Monuments, like the statue of Duke de Richelieu in Odesa, were piled high with sandbags. And an international coalition of archivists is taking on the less visible work to protect collections in institutions and libraries. Because digitizing is a key aspect of this preservation work, it is time to consider protecting digital infrastructure alongside economic, industrial and military targets. Putin’s rambling speech, just days before the invasion on February 24, claims Ukraine as “an inalienable part of [Russia’s] own history, culture and spiritual space.” The attempted nullification of Ukrainian culture is both a pretext for invasion as well as a military objective. Ihor Poshyvailo, the general director of the Maidan Museum in Kyiv, called on the global community to combat Putin’s “pseudo history.” This is not Poshyvailo’s first time preserving history. In 2013, he was involved in preserving the history of the 2013 Euromaidan movement — otherwise known as the Revolution of Dignity — that overthrew the pro-Putin Viktor Yanukovych regime. In a tweet marking the first month of Russia’s invasion, Poshyvailo described how history and language are tightly connected to identity: It’s easy to imagine how a museum director might work quietly collecting and preserving the artifacts that trace the history of significant things, people and events. In Ukraine, any material evidence of this democratic revolution is a threat to Putin’s autocratic rule as he remains intent on bending reality to match his limited view of history. When the pretext for war is cultural non-existence, history and language become targets. As a genocidal and colonial project, the erasure of the past is a prerequisite for social control. Cultural conservation in a time of war is a heroic act.