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

That’s according to Mariana Tomyn, chief of the Cultural Heritage Department at the Ministry of Culture and Information Picy 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 ste almost 35,000 museum items from eight museums across five regions of Ukraine that were under temporary occupation.

Read also: Russians destroy and damage 1,987 cultural sites in Ukraine

"We note that part of the clections of Ukrainian museums that were under Russian occupation are gone for good. These include almost 35,000 items that have been sten 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 Picy plans to launch a government program to create underground exhibition centers where clections evacuated from Ukrainian museums would be stored.