A new museum, described by one Russian official as “a symbol of the city’s liberation from neo-Nazis”, has opened in the city of Mariupol. The Ukrainian city has been occupied by Russian forces since 2022, following a months-long siege.
Russian state media has referred to the space, officially known as Pole Bitvy (Battlefield), as an “interactive art facility”. Displays inside glorify the current full-scale invasion and tie its goals to the Soviet Union’s victory in the Second World War.
Speaking at a ribbon-cutting ceremony on 29 November, the Russian senator Vladimir Yakushev said: “Both in the period of the Great Patriotic War and in our day, unfortunately Nazism and neo-Nazism exist on our planet.” His words echo those of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has repeatedly levelled charges of “Nazism” against Ukraine’s leaders.
Yakushev was accompanied by Sergei Ladochkin of the state-sponsored advisory body the Russian Civic Chamber, who headed up the museum project. Ladochkin told Russia’s state-owned Tass news agency that the site of the museum, a former innovation hub, is symbolic because it once housed the offices of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party. According to Tass, the museum was restored with the support of Putin’s ruling United Russia party.
The new museum features more than ten themed areas, including a photo gallery dedicated to the soldiers of Russia’s full-scale invasion and an exhibit dedicated to “the children of Donbas who perished during Ukrainian aggression”. Other displays reportedly include letters from the wives and mothers of those who participated in “the special operation”.
Speaking to the Ukrainian news agency Vchasno, Petro Andryushchenko, who served as an advisor to the mayor of Mariupol prior to the invasion and now heads the Center for the Study of the Occupation, said: “I won’t mention flashbacks, PTSD and the triggering nature of the ‘exhibits’—it’s obvious. But just imagine: they opened an entertainment pavilion on bones, in a city where tens of thousands were killed.”
The estimated death toll due to Russia’s three-month siege of Mariupol from February 2022 until May 2022 ranges from 8,000 to tens of thousands. Ukraine says Russia is now using cultural aggression and appropriation to wipe out Ukrainian identity.
On 1 November Russian occupation authorities announced the completed restoration of the city’s drama theatre, which was attacked by Russian forces in March 2022 while civilians were sheltering inside. Satellite imagery showed that the word “children” had been written on the building before it was bombed.
Earlier this year, a museum dedicated to Andrei Zhdanov, one of Joseph Stalin’s henchmen, opened in Mariupol, where he was born. The Ukrainian government’s Center for Countering Disinformation described this museum as an effort to “mentally detach people in the occupied territories from Ukraine, as well as to spread the myth of the allegedly ‘native Russian’ Mariupol”.
