A prominent art and design school in Kiev was heavily damaged by a Russian airstrike on Monday, becoming the latest landmark of Ukrainian culture during the Russian invasion.
The news was shared by the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine, which said in a statement, “As a result of falling fragments of a missile launched by the Russian Federation, the center of the building of the Kyiv State Academy of Decoration and Applied Arts. Art and design named Mykhailo Boichuk was destroyed.”
The ministry added that “the premises of the departments and the institution’s auditorium have suffered significant damage” and that measures to recover the damaged objects will begin “as soon as possible”.
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The school’s namesake, the painter Mykhailo Boichuk, was a key figure in Ukrainian modernism, as well as a renowned educator and restorer. While working for the National Museum in Lviv, he managed to save many precious icons from the 15th and 16th centuries. He was executed in 1937, aged 54, as part of Joseph Stalin’s “Great Purge” campaign to consolidate political power in the Soviet Union, crushing labeled dissidents.
Students, alumni and faculty mourned the school’s destruction on social media, sharing pictures and videos of the nearly 100-year-old school in partial ruins on Facebook. Damaged and damaged sculptures, mosaics and icons are on display, as are emergency workers assessing the property.
The head of the academy, Helen Osadcha, wrote in a Facebook post that the school was struck at 10:30 a.m. while class was in session. According to Osadcha, an air raid siren went off shortly before the explosion, saving the life of a teacher who was standing near a window.
He said that everything was destroyed in the “Woman in the Flames of War” exhibit that was on display in the school’s conference room. “The enemy is trying to destroy Ukraine as a nation, erase our identity, destroy cultural monuments,” he wrote, while Russia is “trying to rewrite our history and seize Ukraine’s spiritual and cultural assets.”
In February, UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural agency, announced that 341 Ukrainian heritage sites had been damaged since Russia’s 2022 invasion, including 26 religious structures, 150 buildings of historical or artistic significance, and 31 museums. The total cost of the destruction of cultural property was set at $2.5 billion.
