It was late at night on 7 May 2022 when a Russian missile hit a museum that was once home to Ukraine\u2019s 18th-Century poet and philosopher Hryhory Skovoroda.<\/p>\n
“The roof was completely blown off, the walls are burnt and only Skovoroda’s statue survived. It’s a miracle that it did,” says Nastya Ishchenko, deputy director of the museum in the Kharkiv region of north-eastern Ukraine.<\/p>\n
It is one of 432 cultural sites damaged in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, according to the UN\u2019s cultural organisation Unesco.<\/p>\n
The destruction of so much of their culture has not just pushed Ukrainians farther away from the Russian-dominated cultural space they shared for decades under Soviet rule.<\/p>\n
It has also awakened a hunger for their own culture, described by one daily newspaper as a \u201cUkrainian cultural boom\u201d.<\/p>\n
In total, 139 religious sites have been hit, 214 buildings of historical or artistic interest, 31 museums, 32 monuments, 15 libraries and one archive.<\/p>\n