Odesa under further missile attacks

Final Friday, the historic residence of Ukraine’s treasured poet and thinker Hryhorii Skovoroda was destroyed by a Russian artillery strike, together with a museum of his work.

Skovoroda’s residence was in a tiny village not removed from Kharkiv — nowhere close to any apparent army targets reminiscent of a railway or ammunition depot. The assault seems to have been a deliberate act of cultural vandalism, and never the primary because the Russian invasion started in February.

Skovoroda was a number one determine in Ukraine’s cultural renaissance within the 18th century; this yr is the three hundredth anniversary of his beginning.

In a video handle on Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the assault in opposition to the house of a person “who taught individuals what a real Christian angle to life is and the way an individual can know himself.”

“It appears it is a horrible hazard for contemporary Russia: museums, the Christian angle to life and other people’s self-knowledge,” Zelensky mentioned.

Zelensky reprised the theme when marking Victory Day, quoting Skovoroda’s phrases in one other public message on Monday: “There’s nothing extra harmful than an insidious enemy however there’s nothing extra toxic than a feigned good friend.”

Skovoroda’s legacy has turn out to be symbolic of what Zelensky and different Ukrainians name the wrestle between two world views — these of particular person freedoms and democracy in opposition to a brand new authoritarianism pushed by prejudice.

Whereas many volunteers and staff inside Ukraine’s cultural sector rushed to guard establishments and monuments all through the nation through the onset of the battle, church buildings, museums, statues and artwork collections have suffered harm.

Zelensky mentioned in his Saturday handle that Russian forces have destroyed almost 200 heritage websites because the starting of the invasion.

Whether or not most of those have been intentionally focused is open to debate however given Vladimir Putin’s dismissive view of Ukrainian tradition it could hardly be stunning.

There have actually been acts of cultural hooliganism in areas occupied by the Russians. A statue of one other distinguished Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, within the city of Borodianka outdoors Kyiv, was shot at a number of instances and badly broken. The city was occupied by Russian and Chechen troops for weeks.

Shevchenko’s poem “The Dream, ” which satirized Russia’s oppression of Ukraine, was thought to be subversive and led him to be banished from Ukraine by Tsar Nicholas I in 1847, “underneath the strictest surveillance, with out the freedom to jot down or paint,” as Nicholas demanded.

Shevchenko is extensively thought to be the founding father of the fashionable written Ukrainian language. His outlook would have been at odds with Vladimir Putin’s view — as he put it in Februar — that “trendy Ukraine was fully created by Russia or, to be extra exact, by Bolshevik, communist Russia.”

Not removed from Borodianka, a museum containing two-dozen works of the late Ukrainian people artist Maria Prymachenko was struck and burned down in March. The extent of harm to her artworks stays unclear with a consultant from the Maria Prymachenko Household Basis alleging that the works have been rescued. Prymachenko’s vivid work have been admired by Pablo Picasso who as soon as referred to as her an “inventive miracle,” after visiting a present of her work in Paris in 1936.

A variety of Ukrainian church buildings have been destroyed, too — a lot of them nowhere close to any army goal. Simply outdoors Kyiv an 18th century picket church in Lukyanivka was destroyed — one in every of many properties within the space razed to the bottom as Russian forces withdrew from round Kyiv in April.

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CNN’s Olga Voitovych and Kostan Nechyporenko contributed to this report.