For months Russia and Ukraine have been trading deadly drone strikes, and over the last couple of days Russia launched its most extensive drone campaign yet. A March 24 Russian strike in the historic center of the city of Lviv damaged a 17th-century Bernardine monastery that includes a church devoted to St. Andrew, designed by Italian architects in a Mannerist style.
Founded in the late Middle Ages, the historic center of the city was named a World Heritage Site in 1998; per UNESCO, it was “preserved virtually intact … along with many fine Baroque and later buildings.” The organization added it to its List of World Heritage in Danger in 2023.
While not naming the perpetrator, UNESCO released a statement Wednesday saying it is “deeply alarmed” by the strike, noting that cultural property is protected under the 1954 Hague Convention and the 1972 World Heritage Convention.
Russia’s participation in the upcoming edition of the Venice Biennale has come under major scrutiny, and the latest strike gave Ukrainian minister of foreign affairs Andrii Sybiha occasion to put pressure on the event’s organizers, who are welcoming a Russian pavilion for the first time since the country’s war in Ukraine began. The European Union has even said it could pull funding from the show if the pavilion goes ahead.
“Don’t look away, @la_Biennale,” Sybiha wrote on X. “This is the ugly face of barbaric Russia—destroyed UNESCO World Heritage in the protected center of Lviv. This is the barbarism you wish to normalize at the Biennale. Get real!”
Early on in the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, reports emerged of a sustained campaign of cultural destruction throughout Ukraine. As of May 9, 2022, UNESCO had verified damage to 127 landmarks in Ukraine, including 11 museums, 54 religious buildings, and 15 monuments. Ukrainian officials alleged that Russian troops had looted more than 2,000 artworks from three cultural institutions in the battered port city of Mariupol.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the most recent attack in an address. “Iranian ‘Shahed’ drones, modernized by Russia, are striking a church in Lviv,” he said. “This is an absolute perversion, and only someone like Putin could find this appealing.”
Russia’s strike, with almost 1,000 drones deployed throughout the country, was “one of Moscow’s largest aerial attacks since the beginning of the full-scale invation” in 2022, reports Euro News. The strike started overnight and continued into a rare daytime attack with more than 550 drones hitting central and western parts of the country, the outlet reports, noting that at least three have been killed and dozens injured.
